io
hartman

The relationship between old and new media is one that has been pondered over for decades. As our technology becomes more and more advanced and supersedes the original intent of being only tools for us in life, our dependence on it also changes. This translates to how we interact with the media created using this new technology. As technology has gotten smarter, our need for it to assist us with simple tasks has also increased. We can see this exemplified in research methods. College students today likely rely on digital media and digitized books and literature more than ever before. The stacks of our own library at CU, Norlin, are likely dustier today than they were 20 years ago. 

More importantly, however, when addressing media art, as opposed to just media, we can look at the works of many artists that we’ve learned about in this class. My personal interests lie within classic filmmaking, which we’ve touched on a bit less in subject matter, but, we can still use the film industry of an example of how fast our technology has progressed. Film wasn’t even an existing medium until 1890. Color wasn’t introduced until 1909. Sound accompanying film wasn’t created until 1927. This isn’t even to mention animation and other niche types of filmmaking. In this class, we’ve discussed experimental art and creative technology greatly. All of this goes to show that there is a vast history of years of different types of media emerging from the woodwork.

Today we are surrounded by media. In earlier years, people were surrounded by artists’ paintings and writings, with no mention or idea of what digital works were. When I think of “new media,” I remember our lecture discussing Lev Manovich, who defines new media as generally being defined by its numerical representation of 1’s and 0’s and by its variability. One of the main points of new media is that it allows for infinite iterations of the original work. I also think of the idea of transcoding in relation to new media and how it describes this process that we partake in as media consumers where we impact new media technologies and are in turn also impacted by it. There is no way for us to be immune to it. 

In comparison, “old media” is something that was more tied to its production demands than today’s world of “new media” is. In today’s world, we have access to learn anything we want, that is when sitting in privileged positions. We can take Skillshare classes and Masterclasses with those who are experienced in our desired craft and can take those skills to create something new. We don’t have to conceptualize the science of how to make the first-ever camera work. The crafts of media today have the ability to be more honed than ever before, and also more expansive. This goes with the same idea of variability mentioned previously, and also is a great example of our “burgeoning media ecosystem.” We have the internet today, a place where we can pool all of our knowledge and resources in a vast yet compact space to share globally.