Writing at Journalism 2.0 in early 2009, Mark Briggs asked what the new form of journalism and media should actually be called. “The news industry calls it ‘new media’ or ‘interactive media,’” he observed, “but that’s just differentiating it from legacy forms of publishing. Pretty much everything online is ‘interactive’ and it’s not really ‘new’ anymore.”
The term survived because it was useful shorthand for a raft of trends, from online journalism to participatory media — a bit like news itself, which every journalist can recognise and few can define. It was also institutionally embedded: the University of British Columbia had a new first-year undergraduate concentration called New Media and Society, whose instructors in English and Sociology were debating whether the phrase should be used at all.
Two objections stood out. As a definition it is close to empty: a generic label for digital communication made possible by computer technology covers almost everything. And “new” is loaded, carrying connotations of social progress through technology.
The sharper point was generational. New media was only new relative to the people naming it — the internet did not exist when the instructors went to university twenty years earlier, and computers barely did. To the eighteen-year-olds in the class it was not new; it was simply media. The phrase marked the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants: to the immigrants a strange new land, to the natives simply the world. The prediction attached was that once newsrooms filled with natives, the term would stop being needed.