BY JOHN CAFRENE
The use
of the term “new media” is of
course relative. When McLuhan analyzed television
and automation these were the new
media of his time. At any given point
in time there will always be new
media or perhaps more accurately newer
media. The term “new media” as it
is used today refers to a class of
media that are digital and interactive
and hence differ from the electric mass
media that McLuhan (1964) addressed in UM.
What’s new
about today’s “new media” is that
they are digital, they are linked and
cross linked with each other and the
information they mediate is very easily
processed, stored, transformed, retrieved, linked
and perhaps most radical of all easily
searched for and accessed. This is
why I believe that McLuhan’s stunning
analysis of the new media of his
day, namely electric mass media, and their
total transformation of education, work and
society deserves and requires an updating.
To better
understand the ground in which today’s
media interact we will investigate the
transition from the non-digital electric
media to the interactive digital media.
Although McLuhan included computing and
automation in his analysis of media,
which are certainly digital media they were
at the time of the publication of
UM isolated figures operating in the ground
of electric mass media. Also the
computer in McLuhan’s day was not as
interactive as today’s because one had
to submit a job, which included both
the program and the data as part
of a batch with other jobs and wait
many hours for one’s output. The
slightest error in one’s input, such
as a missing comma, would result in
another delay. With the emergence of the
microcomputer, the Internet, email, the
World Wide Web and cell phones a new
communication and information ground emerged
that was truly interactive and which changed the figure of each and
every medium. The emergence of the “new
media” ground presents us with two
motivations to re-analyze the media that
McLuhan studied in UM. First of all,
the old media became the content of
the “new media” and hence to
understand the “new media” we must
understand the old media in the new
ground. The content of the “new media”
will be the old media such as speech
writing.
A second
reason to reexamine old media is that
the ground has changed from electric mass
media to that of the interactive
digital media and therefore the effects and
impacts of the old media have
changed. Radio, television and the movies
are not the same in 2007 that
they were in 1964 when UM first hit
the presses. They have undergone some
technical improvements like large flat screens
for TV and Dolby sound and computer
animation for the movies, but that is
not the real story of their changed
impact. The real story is that the
ground has changed underneath these media
and their place in our culture and their effect on
society have changed. Understanding the interaction
of a medium with other media has
always been an important part of the
approach McLuhan pioneered, which is at the
heart of media ecology. Understanding these
interactions becomes even more critical with
the “new media” because of convergence
and the fact that the links between
media are even stronger with digitization.
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