Death of Print: The decline of print and traditional medias? is a a research project by Matthew Carlin a BA Multimedia Student at Nottingham Trent University, UK. The research is looking into the apparent decline of traditional media as reported by some media organisations, and will evaluate whether traditional media is still a viable format in the 21st century.
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Firstly, “digital media” and “new media” are often used as interchangeable terms for the same thing, this is “media that uses computers” (Lister, 2003) whilst this is an adequate term to describe new media, we must realise that there are also different kinds of “new media” “New Media: A critical introduction” (Lister, 2003) describes new media in the following ways:
• New textual experiences
• New ways of representing the world
• New relationships between subjects (Users & Consumers) and media technologies
• New Experiences of the Relationship between embodiment, identity and community
• New conceptions of the biological body’s relationship to technological media
• New patterns of organisation and Production
Using this description as a basis we can see that digital media such as the internet can be described in these ways. The internet provides a new way of representing the world through numerous websites with massively varied content; it also helps to provide new textual experiences, through the many interactive possibilities of the World Wide Web. So using the internet as an example we can see Listers idea fits.
Lister describes how Digital media can also be divided and described in the following ways:
• Computer-mediated communication: email, chat rooms, MUDs MOOs, avatar based communication forms (i.e. secondlife.com), voice image transmissions, the web and mobile telephony.
• New ways of distributing and consuming media texts characterised by interactivity and hypertext formats – the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, DVD and the various platforms for computer games.
• Virtual reality: from simulated environments to fully immersive representational spaces.
• A whole range of transformations and dislocations of established media (in, for example, photography, animation, television, film an cinema.)
Another characteristic of digital media, Lister argues is that “analogue media tends to be fixed, whilst digital media tends to be in a constant state of flux.” This is because traditional media tends to be analogue existing as a fixed physical object (i.e. a vinyl record) whilst digital media exists as a string of binary numbers. Traditional media is also considered to be fixed as if we wanted to edit traditional or “analogue” media we would have to go through a physical process to change it, for example if we wanted to alter film stock we would have to go through a process of getting a new set of prints and chemically altering them whilst if the film is in a digital medium we can precisely select certain pixels to change.
On the other hand, Lunenfield in “The Digital Dialectic” (Lunenfield 2000) argues that “digital is more than simply a technical term to describe systems and media dependent on electronic computation, just as the analog, which preceded it, describes more than a proportional system of representation.”
Lunenfield also argues that one of the aesthetics of digital media is described as “Unfinish” (Lunenfield 2000) in a similar way Lister defines new media as “in a constant state of flux”
Another way that Lister describes some of the characteristic of digital media, in particular the practice of digitisation is that “released from only existing in the material realm of physics, chemistry and engineering and shift into a symbolic computational realm.” He also argues that the consequences of this are:
• Media texts are ‘dematerialised’ in the sense that they are separated from their physical form as photographic print book, roll of film etc;
• Data can be compressed into very small spaces;
• It can be accessed at very high speeds and in non linear ways;
• It can be manipulated far more easily than analogue forms.
This idea can be argued to be becoming ever truer as technology like CPU’s, hard drives and memory get ever faster or bigger and cheaper. Enabling users to enable users to do what Lister describes faster and more efficiently.
From this short description it is fair to say that with these characteristics, digital media has some advantages over the traditional medias. It could be argued also that this is one of the reasons why digital media is growing increasingly popular in a society that is driven towards making things easier, quicker and cheaper.
The history of digital media is a somewhat recent one but what should not be forgotten is that traditional media has played some part in the success of digital media.
If we look at the major medias of the 19th and 20th centuries, Television and print, whilst they were an analogue process, they were more importantly technologies of mass production. Digital Media in one sense is very much like traditional media in the way that is a mass production technology; one of digital medias properties is the fact that it is stored as a mathematical formula enabling it to be copied much easier than traditional media. But one could argue that digital media is a more personalised mass technology, than say broadcast media like television. This can be seen in websites like youtube.com and also the launch of so called interactive media players by the channel 4 and the BBC. These sites and media players enable users to choose what they would like to see rather than what the television network thinks they would like to see.
Lister argues as well that with the development of broadcast media, and the fact that an analogue physical object is electronically converted into a series of waves “that digital media technologies do not represent a complete break with traditional analogue media”. This is an interesting idea; broadcast media isn’t considered digital even though the waves have to be electronically converted.
Lister also argues that the computer “viewed as a medium itself, can be all other medias” (Lister 2003) This can be argued to be true especially with the recent launch of website’s like youtube.com and flickr.com. These sites have both gave the user the ability to do something that traditional media already does, Youtube allows to watch video online and flickr.com allows you to store and share your photos on the internet. The report feels that the internet has been one of the biggest indicators in this; recent digital technologies like web 2.0 have enabled the computer and the internet to truly replicate the traditional medias.
This idea that “the computer, viewed as a medium itself can be all other media” is an example of the theory put forward by Jay David Bolter of “Remediation” This theory is the way that one medium absorbs and transforms another medium. This as we speak is one of key characteristics of digital media; in recent years it has had the ability to “remediate” other media such as television via sites such as youtube.com and flickr.com
Another characteristic that defines some forms of digital or “new media” is how a user navigates the media. There are essentially two modes of navigation, there is “Hypertextual Navigation” (Lister 2003) and “Immersive Navigation” (Lister 2003) In hypertextual navigation, a “a user must use the computer apparatus and software to make reading choices in a database” (Lister 2003) though as Lister points out “the term ‘database’ in a general rather than specifically technical sense” this means that it could be any form of stored information e.g. the world wide web or the hard drive on a computer. The other form of navigation is “Immersive navigation” (Lister 2003), this Lister argues is navigating “a representation of space” or a 3d world rather than navigating data or information. Though Lister does argue that you could see immersive navigation as “similar to hypertextual navigation but with additional qualities” Hypertextual navigation is one quality that distinguishes digital and new media from the traditional medias. In the traditional medias, a viewer or reader is effectively forced to navigate in a way that is dictated by the producer of that particular medium. For example, if a viewer is watching a Television channel they are forced to watch what the broadcaster screens at set times, one after the other. Whilst in hypertextual navigation a user is effectively allowed to control where they want to go, unrestricted by the broadcaster (or similar producer of traditional media content). A 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush, he proposes the idea that “The human mind operates by association. With on item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in association with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (Vannevar 1945) It is often thought that this idea helped with the technology and implementation of hypertext and hypertextual navigation. This idea can also be seen in the tagging systems present on sites like youtube.com and flickr.com
Another key characteristic of many digital media is “registrational interactivity” (Lister 2003) or the ability for the user of the medium to interact with it by “writing back” (Lister 2003) Registrational interactivity can be something as simple as a user sending there contact information to a website to something like a web forum or one could even argue to participating in a web 2.0 site i.e. youtube.com, flickr.com, or myspace.com. Lister uses the definition “any media text which solicits users’ views, feedback, or stories in any kind of recordable form” which the websites mentioned describe perfectly.
As we can see, even though digital or “new media” comes in many different forms, from the world wide web, to interactive CD Rom’s or even interactive ad campaigns like the work done for yell.com by Media agency AKQA. (AKQA 2005) It still has some underlying principles that define it, for many people it is something that is produced by a computer or that has to be accessed via some sort of computer. This seems a reasonable description of digital media, but one should be in mind maybe it could define something that is electronically converted, depending on your point of view. It is worth pointing out here that that the term digital media is probably better suited than the term “new media”. There is essentially nothing “new” about “new media” A lot of new media is simply “remediation” (Bolter ) of existing medias .So it would be fair to dis-courage the use of this term.
To conclude, other key characteristics of digital media are:
• Hypertextual and immersive navigation properties
• That digital media is in a “constant state of flux” rather than being fixed.
• Registrational interactivity
• That it is a mass production technology but one that is personalised.
In conclusion, digital media has many properties many of which are universally acknowledged by everyone and others that are only subscribed to by some, but as can be seen there are common properties that are shared by all forms of digital media. Now that we have seen what digital media is or can be it is worth asking the question, does digital media now play a part in everyday life?