Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology
Over at Journalism 2.0, Mark Briggs poses a question that has been bugging me for weeks – what do we call this new form of journalism and media?
As Mark points out:
The news industry calls it “new media” or “interactive media,” but that’s just differentiating it from legacy forms of publishing. Pretty much everything online is “interactive” and it’s not really “new” anymore.
Much as I don’t like the term, “new media”, it is a shorthand way to refer to a whole raft of trends, from online journalism to participatory media.
It is a bit like trying to define news – every journalist knows what you mean by it, but often struggles to come up with a good definition.
I teach a journalism course in a new first-year undergraduate concentration at the University of British Columbia called New Media and Society.
But my fellow instructors in English and Sociology who also teach in this stream have been debating is whether we should even use the term “new media”.
In class, I tell the students it’s a generic term for digital communication made possible through the use of computer technology, which is almost so general to be meaningless.
The word “new” is also a loaded term, as it has connotations of social progress through technology.
The problem with new media is that it a generational definition. New media is “new” to my generation and beyond. The Internet didn’t exist when I went to university 20 years ago. We barely had computers.
But to the 18-year-olds in my class, new media is not new. To them, it is just media.
The term “new media” reflects the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants. To the immigrants, this is a new land, full of strange and confusing wonders.
To the natives, it is simply the world they know.
Perhaps when the newsrooms are full of digital natives, we will no longer need to use the term “new media”.
This blog is run by Professor Alfred Hermida, an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator.
8 Responses to Why new media is a generational term
Doug Lacombe
February 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
The term “new media” has always struck me as backwards, akin to “horseless carriage”, meaningful, as you suggest, only to older generations.
It’s why I avoided the title “New Media Manager” back in 95 when I first published TheStarPhoenix.com to the web and opted instead for “Electronic Media Manager”.
Semantics? Maybe, but I always felt we had to look ahead and not in the rear view to drive to the new publishing destination.
Cheers,
Doug Lacombe, MBA
Martin Belam
February 13th, 2009 at 12:32 am
Perhaps people could follow the example of the BBC, who renamed their “New Media” department as “Future Media & Technology”. After all, when you are no longer new, where else is there to go but the future?
Lauren Rabaino
February 13th, 2009 at 2:24 am
My university’s journalism department plans to create a “new media” concentration (in addition to print, broadcast and PR) and that phrase bugs me immensely as a 19-year-old. I agree entirely that it’s a generational term. I suggested the department call it “multimedia,” but even that’s not good enough. I like Martin’s suggestion of “future” media. I’d never heard that one.
Martin Stabe
February 13th, 2009 at 2:29 am
When I started a job covering this space in January 2006, we had a debate about what my job title should be.
Despite this very point coming up, we stuck with the very unsatisfactory “new media” (and sometimes drew flak for it).
The problem was that all the other possible modifiers for “media” – “digital”, “online”, “electronic”, “interactive”, “future”, “innovation” were all either too broad or too narrow to correctly describe a space referring to “digital communication made possible through the use of computer technology”.
“New media” is a very silly term, especially in 2009. The problem in explaining this succinctly may be that Internet as a medium doesn’t come loaded with implications about the form of the content or the working practices of the producers in the same way that “print”, “broadcast” or “telephone” do. “New media” shares characteristics of all “old” media depending on the the way it is used.
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Vin Crosbie
February 16th, 2009 at 9:29 am
No. Some people teach multimedia Mass Media and call that New Media. Some teach Mass Media shoveled online or into new devices and call that New Media. All of this ‘convergence’ stuff is simply new Mass Media.
However, when you teach things that cannot possibly be done in Mass Media — whether in Mass Media’s traditional vehicles, shoveled online, or with a veneer of multimedia added –then you’re teaching the New Media. Things like mass individualization of content(Facebook, etc.), semantic and Web 3 apps (Everyblock.com, etc.), many-to-many network reporting (Twitter, etc.), and other entirely new forms of communication media.
There is a New Media, but most journalism and communications school are merely teaching Mass Media shoveled onlline or multimedia Mass Media.
http://tinyurl.com/clouf6
Tim Holmes
February 18th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
“But to the 18-year-olds in my class, new media is not new. To them, it is just media.
“The term “new media” reflects the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants. To the immigrants, this is a new land, full of strange and confusing wonders.
To the natives, it is simply the world they know.”
I agree with you in principle but the fact is, many of our students find what we teach them about “new media” is new to them too. They may text and Facebook and MySpace and even Tweet (though that is not so likely) but they rarely see how to link these things into broader journalistic practice. We still have to overcome some strong initial resistance to blogging, never mind anything else. And not all young people are comfortable using technology, either.
The other thing is that “New Media” is always *new*. If it wasn’t, Martin Stabe would still be covering the same stuff he was covering in 2006 and Vin Crosbie would not be able to refer to Facebook, Everyblock and Twitter.
It only becomes meaningless when it fossilises.