New Media refer to the use of computer for distribution and exhibition rather than production. Accordingly, text distributed on computers (website, electronic books are considered to be new media whereas texts distributed on papers are not. Similarly, photographs put on a CD-Rom required a computer to be viewed are considered new media.
Today we are in the middle of the new media revolution, shift of all culture to the computer-mediated forms of production, distribution and communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage and distribution. It affects all types of media, texts, still images, moving images, sound and spatial constructions etc. thus, new media is
analogue media converted into digital representation. In
contrast to analogue media, which is continuous, digital
encoded media is discrete. Moreover, all media (texts, still images, visual and audio time data, shapes 3-D spaces, share the same digital code. This allows different media types to be displayed using one machine, a computer which acts as a multimedia display device.
New media allow for random access. In contrast to film or video tape, which store
data sequentially, computer devices make it possible to access any data element equally fast. For instance, once a film is digitalized and loaded in the computer’s memory, any frame can be accessed with equal ease. Digitalized involved numerical
representation turns media into computer data, thus making it programmable. And this indeed radically changes the nature of the media.
However, digitalization inevitably involves loss of information. In contrast to analogue representation, a digitally encoded representation contains a
fixed amount of information. For instance a digital
image consist a finite number of pixels and has precisely limited spatial and tonal resolution and contain fixed amount of information. If one tries to enlarge the image, it lost resolution. But in contrast to analogue media where each successive copy of an image losses quality, digitally encoded media can be copied endlessly without degradation provided the size of the picture remain fixing.
Moreover, new media is interactive. In contrast to old media where the order of presentation is fixed the user can now interact with a media object. In the process of interaction the user can choose which elements to display or which path to follow, thus generating a unique work. Thus, one may the use and become the co-author of the work.
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