What is New Media? So what is “old media”? I think you wouldn’t disagree “old media” delivers information in mediums like print, radio, TV and so on, which you may notice a common characteristic among them – they are not interactive. You must have experiences with many interactive mediums like Internet, Mobile, Web2.0, Social Media and so on, I think they shaped the New Media I referred to and it is also keep evolving.
Characteristics of New Media
You may easily search in Google and end up finding it in Wikipedia what New Media is, but in my views, it has 3 major characteristics which make it so different from the “old media”.
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We are the editors.
Editor plays important role in mass media and our society, not only because they pick what you may get a chance to know about, but they also have both impacts and constraints in commercial, moral and political perspectives. The role shifted, we have a greater right to select what we want to know about with less external constraints now.
Unlike mass media, we are the editors in New Media. Today, we need not scan newspapers or magazines for articles that interested us, but we subscribe e-newsletter, RSS or SMS for anything we care about. We need no DJ to picks songs for us in radio, but we create our own playlists and subscribe podcasts in iPod. We need not miss any TV programmes, but we always get a chance to find anything you are interested in on YouTube.
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Not Audiences, but Participants.
New Media enables inter-communication in larger scale, faster pace and a more accessible manner (i.e. it facilitates scalable collaborations without boundaries). From the day i started this blog, I am no more an audience but a blogger – a producer in New Media. If you’ve shared legendary “Bus Uncle” video clip with others, you were a distributor in New Media too.
Imagine, without internet & digital devices to facilitate the participants, i don’t believe “Edison Chen Photo Scandal” would be distributed so quickly and massively around the globe. Basically, our role has changed, we are no more passive as audiences, but being active to be participants in New Media. We all, participants, shape the New Media indeed.
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It’s just life.
Everything is being digitalized now, it will further extend the coverage of New Media (i.e. it is evolving to every part of our lives). Internet is just the first part of the new media, “old media” has also been digitalized and being transformed to part of the new media like NOW TV’s Video-on-demand services, TVB’s MyTV, Commercial Radio’s Hong Kong Toolbar and so on. It is not only a technological shift for “old media”, but it is the process of media convergence for publishers and broadcasters to deliver their information in multiple mediums – multimedia.
Besides media convergence, our lives changed so much because of other forms of digitalization. The age of iPhone has brought New Media along with us any where at any time. Facebook has also facilitated our real-life social networking and unleash the power of social media – a kind of New Media. To be honest, a very fundamental change in my concept of learning between old times and today: We need not memorize what we’re supposed to know, the information is always just a few keystrokes away from Google :p
New Media and its Power
New Media empowers individual human-being, and I think it’s just awesome. This is the major reason I started New Media Power blog, as I would like to write up my thoughts about how new media affect us here. I will also share the latest news about new media and digital marketing too. So in this very first post in New Media Power, I invite you to bookmark it, subscribe its RSS, share it with friends… do whatever you can think of in New Media to stay connected with me.
I hope you’ll enjoy this blog :p
