NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGY, MEDIA TECHNOLOGY OF SOCIETY

New media is a broad term that emerged in the later part of the 20th century to encompass 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. New media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. What distinguishes New media from traditional media is not the digitizing of media content into bits, but the dynamic life of the "new media" content and its interactive relationship with the media consumer. This dynamic life, moves, breathes and flows with pulsing excitement in real time. Another important promise of New Media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content.

According to new media technology standards, certain commonalities exist between all types of modern mediums. Geographic distance is compromised due to the fact that the technology can be utilized in nearly every market around the world. The level and speed of communication is increased because of the ability of the new media arena to utilize the Internet. Additionally, the interactive level of information exchange allows users to adapt to new methodologies while supplying their own input. Also, previously isolated forms of communication, such as video and telephony, can be merged together using new media technology

NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN MASS COMMUNICATION:

Thirty years ago, sociologist Charles Wright defined mass communication by these three characteristics:

 It is directed toward relatively large, heterogeneous, and anonymous audiences;

 Messages are transmitted publicly, often timed to reach most audience members si-multaneously, and are transient in character;

 The communicator tends to be, or to operate within, a complex organization that may involve great expense. 

This definition summed up a lot of what we knew about the mass media of the time—pri¬marily newspapers, magazines, radio, television, motion pictures, phonograph records, and books. Changes in communication technology are coming so quickly now that we frequently hear talk of a "communication revolution." 

 Cable Television

 Home Computers

 Video Cassette Recorders

 Satellite Transmission

 Electronic Delivery of information

 CD ROMs

 HDTV

Cable Television: It provides alternatives to the three commercial television networks and the public broadcasting network available on a subscription basis. From cable, audiences are getting more special¬ized programming, with channels that are all news (Cable News Network), all sports (ESFN), all weather (The Weather Channel), all music (MTV, VH-1), all Spanish lan-guage (SIN), and all black-oriented (BET). Recent feature movies, shown without com¬mercials, are available for an additional fee from services such as HBO and Showtime. Cable's share of the television audience at any given time has grown from essentially zero in 1980 to 18 percent in 1989 (Holloway, 1989). In addition, another 18 percent is typi¬cally watching independent stations. In the last decade, television has changed from a me¬dium with essentially four choices for the viewer to a medium in many places with 50 or more choices. In addition, many cable systems are making public access or community access channels available as a part of their regular programming. Public access channels offer the opportunity for members of the public, usually with a minimum of training, to create their own television programs or messages and have them scheduled and transmitted (Engelrnan, 1990). This is a revolutionary change in television that many people have not recognized, much less taken advantage of.

Home Computers: have made the power and utility of the electronic computer available in a unit that the average person can afford to buy and can take home and set up on the dining room table. These home computers offer many functions, including word process¬ing, education, financial analysis (with spreadsheet programs), and entertainment. The computer is also a creative tool that can do many of the things that traditional creative media such as the typewriter, pen and pencil, a sketch pad, and musical instruments can do—plus a lot more. The computer has been called the "first meta-medium" (Kay, 1984) because it can be used to simulate dynamically the details of any other medium. Hooked up to a modem, a home computer can also provide access to videotex services, information banks and data services, and bulletin boards dealing with all kinds of topics now widely known as the Internet.

Videocassette recorders (VCRs): It allow the recording and playing back of television im¬ages and programs. They can be used to tape programs or movies and play them back at another time (time shifting) or to play rented or purchased cassettes. A great variety of material, some of it not avail¬able through other means, can be obtained on videocassettes, including feature movies, X-rated and NC-17-rated films, exercise workout routines, and other self-help programs. 

Satellite Transmission: Electronic signals is being used a number of ways. Cable televi¬sion networks use satellites to send their signals to the cable systems distributing their programs. Home satellite antennas purchased so allow individual users to pick up these signals. Some pay cable services, such as HBO, "scramble" their satellite signals to prevent them from being picked up for free. Several newspapers that publish nationally, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times, are also using satellites to send the contents of each day's newspaper electronically to printing plants around the country. The International Herald-Tribune is doing the same thing to publish daily around the world.

Electronic delivery of the news: It is a system by which the user, at home, selects the news he or she is interested in and then sees it displayed on a television screen or home computer screen. Videotex is a form of electronic delivery of the news in which the individual uses a home computer or a special terminal to connect, usually via a telephone line, to a central computer. The user then requests news stories, advertisements, or other information that is sent over the telephone line and displayed on the computer or terminal screen. Teletext is a similar system that uses the television set and cable. In teletext, the user does not really interact with the information system, but is able to choose from a large number of "pages" that can be displayed on the home screen. Videotex and teletext might not be widely adopted as quickly as cable television and VCRs, however. 

Hypermedia: Combining publishing, television, audio, and computers with common ac¬cess through a computer terminal, is also characterized by many links and access points, so that the user can move around easily in a multimedia information environment. A hypermedia encyclopedia, for instance, would allow the user to look up Mozart and then make choices among reading about his background, looking at some of his musical scores, and actually hearing a Mozart symphony. The user might click on "buttons" on the com¬puter screen that would lead to additional "articles" on classical style, the sonata form, child prodigies, Salzburg, or life in 18th-century Germany. HyperCard, a program avail¬able for the Macintosh computer, illustrates some of the features of a somewhat limited form of hypermedia.

The CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory): It is a device for storing large quan-tities of information on a compact disk of the same type now used for musical recordings. This new technology, which stores information optically, is so efficient that an entire en¬cyclopedia can be stored on one disk. In addition, the CD-ROM can store many types of information, including text, audible sound, and moving visual images much like motion pictures. The CD-ROM meshes nicely with hypermedia. The CD-ROM needs some kind of interface to allow users access to its vast amounts of information. Programs like HyperCard can serve this purpose very well.

High Definition Television (HDTV): HDTV is a new system of television under development in which the visual screen will be capable of much greater resolution—in fact, the visual image will supposedly have the same clarity and sharpness as a 35 millimeter slide (Levy, 1989). The benefits of HDTV will go far beyond just a sharper and clearer picture, how¬ever. The nature of television programming will probably change. The low resolution tele¬vision that we are used to limited the amount of detail that could be put on the screen, and this affected program content. The standard television image was effective in showing sev¬eral people in the frame at one time, but not much more. This led to the development of certain kinds of programs, such as the situation comedy. HDTV will allow more pan¬oramic and expansive scenes in television programming, and will probably change televi¬sion in ways we can't imagine HDTV will also allow multiple images, or "windowing," on the television set. This would mean a viewer could literally watch six programs at once, or monitor a football game through a small window in the upper right corner of the screen while watching a movie on the rest of the screen

IMPACT 

The new technologies are introducing many changes to mass communication, and commu-nication theories must be developed or revised to keep up with the changes.

Specialized Program: One of the ways the new technology is affecting mass communication in general is by giving the user more control over the communication process. Cable television channels and videotapes give the audience member access to specialized programs and material, far beyond what is available on the three commercial television networks and public televi¬sion. 

News Stories: Videotex and teletext offer the user a wide selection of news stories or other informa¬tion. CompuServe, a computer information service that can be accessed through home computers, has 550,000 subscribers (Couzens, 1989). 

Special Topics: One CompuServe service called "IQuest" gives users access to more than 700 data bases, each of them filled with informa¬tion on a particular subject (Gerber, 1986). CompuServe also offers a large number of "special interest groups" (SIGs) or forums dealing with specialized topics. These special interest groups allow people who are interested in the same topic—science fiction, poetry writing, an arcane computer programming language such as FORTH—to communicate with one another. This is a big change from the way communication through media has largely taken place in the past. In a SIG on CompuServe, messages are not being chosen for the audience by someone else and imposed on them, but are being shared by people who are more or less equal but have a common interest in a topic.

Control over Mass Communication: VCRs are also giving the user more control over mass communication. Once a program has been videotaped from a commercial network broadcast, it becomes possible to skip the commercials by pushing the fast-forward button on the remote control of the VCR. This procedure, called "zapping," has become a major concern in the advertising industry.

Ideal Type: One of the effects of the new technology, then, is a shift away from the "ideal type" of a centralized broadcasting or publishing organization sending out the same content to large and stable audiences (McQuail & Windahl, 1981, p. 8). In a sense, this heightened selectiv-ity due to the new technology could create a kind of balance that has been lacking in mass communication, with the audience and the message producers being more equal in power. The decentralization of communication due to the new technology can be seen taking place in the U.S. Government Printing Office, which plans over the next 10 years to shift to much heavier dissemination of information by individual agencies and through electronic mail, on-line data bases, floppy disks, magnetic tapes, and CD-ROMs (U.S. Congress, 1988).

The trend toward greater control and activity on the part of the user means communica¬tion theorists are going to have to shift to models and theories that recognize the interactiv¬ity of the new media (Rogers & Chaffee, 1983). One consequence is that we probably should have theories that give less emphasis to the effects of mass communication and more emphasis to the ways audience members are using mass communication. This shift might give increased importance to the uses and gratifications, approach to the study of mass communication.

The coming of cable television and, to a lesser extent, VCRs also means mass communication theorists should change the way they think about the audience, particularly the au¬dience of television. It is no longer possible to think of television as a uniform or mono¬lithic system, transmitting essentially the same message to everyone. This realization has consequences for a number of theories of mass communication that assume to some extent a uniform television message, or a uniform media message (Webster, 1989). These theories include Gerbner's cultivation theory and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence, as well as, to a lesser extent, the agenda-setting function. Essentially, it ap¬pears that the fragmented or segmented audience that is characteristic of the new media probably leads to a lessening of the impact of the mass media suggested by cultivation theory, the spiral of silence, and the agenda-setting function.