New media is the “amalgamation of traditional media such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet.” (Wikipedia)

New media studies is a transdisciplinary field of scholarly inquiry. According to Barbell & Gunther Tress and Gary Fry, transdiscplinary studies are:

projects that both integrate academic researchers from different unrelated disciplines and non-academic participants, such as land managers and the public, to research a common goal and create new
knowledge and theory. Transdisciplinarity combines interdisciplinarity with a participatory approach.

Eight propositions of what new media is can be found in the 2002 book “New Media Reader” (edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort). Source: Wikipedia.

1. New Media versus cyberculture
2. New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software
4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software
5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology
6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies
7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia
8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing

Lev Manovic’s “New Media from Borges to HTML” gives a review of these eight concepts.

Henry Jenkins’ “Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape” looks past the tools and focuses more on the context of new media.

Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons “Introduction: ‘Mode 2’ Revisited: The New Production of Knowledge”.

Transliteracy is:

The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.

Source: Transliteracy Research Group, Wikipedia

Assignment 2: Choose 3 texts (blog posts, journal articles, book chapters, YouTube videos etc…) that deal with this week’s key ideas of participatory literacy, smart mobs, community/collective action.

We summarized our texts and completed a blog post open to the rest of the class for discussion.

Here are my three blog posts found on the course blog:

Ebbsfleet United
Nordiques Nation
Homebrew Video Games

Assignment 3: Remix culture is fundamentally at odds with older media institution and practises. Investigate a case study which illuminates these tensions.

I used the OilersNation photoshop contest as a case study to highlight three areas of tension: copyright issues, message control and audience vs community. The final paper can be found on the course blog and here on this blog.

Course blog: http://newmedianarrativesonline.blogspot.com

Course blog for the 2012 students: http://nmnonline.blogspot.ca