Response 1-AustinH
For me, New Media is an endlessly confusing topic. It seems like every core class that I – that we’ve all had asks us to define it, and without fail they all provide a new definition that kind of aligns with the previous one in some ways and dismisses it in others. So far none of this has really helped to succinctly answer the repetitive question from family and friends of “So like, what is new media anyway?” Majority of the time I respond with “That’s a good question,” just to buy me a second to clarify in my own mind what I’m going to respond with. But it’s safe to say that people generally aren’t going to grasp let alone sit through Vin Crosbie’s vehicular definition or any other lengthy recitation of a different article suggesting a different answer.
So instead I usually default to the concrete reality which is much easier to grasp. “It’s stuff like digital photography, video production, audio production, coding, game design, interface design, circuitry, prototyping, and general design regarding all those things”. Something like that, without delving into the semantics or the philosophy behind it all.
Ironically however, the most exciting thing about all of those aspects of new media for me is the capacity they have to tell a story.
In a lot of regards, new media is concerned with efficiency. It can be a very pragmatic matter; by one definition, new media is the answer to old unsolved problems. It’s the tools of a new age that we use to address these problems or enhance and develop better solutions to older ones. In other ways, new media is concerned with art. It’s the cutting-edge methods we can use to create new forms of expression or provoke innovative thought in itself like never before.
In the regard I’m most fascinated with, new media is the potential to tell a story better than ever before, and remake the stories of old into something better. In this sense, in my mind, the printing press was arguably the first new media technology. Then the camera, then the telegraph, then the radio, then film, then video games, and now perhaps virtual reality. All of these vehicles of storytelling have continued to pile on to one another, growing from and within themselves. And that’s where I want to work: at the top of this digital pile. The power of a story can be measured directly by its power to engross the average reader/listener/player/user within its own reality. I want to create new kinds of immersive experiences that illicit all the same emotions on the same level as one would feel if that story was their reality. To me, there is no greater art than this; if only for a time, to get someone to substitute another life for their own.
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It seems like for you, “new media is the potential to tell a story better than ever before, and remake the stories of old into something better”
Sounds like a pretty good definition to me.
Now–what stories do we really need to tell now? Which ones will help us live on the earth and with all the other beings here in a healthy way?
Media is full of stories that limit and constrain our views–propaganda. How do our stories break the propaganda trances in which we live?