Evolution of Media: Old to New

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the evolution of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media throughout the years, since the beginning to the present era. This work has been divided into three parts; the first part consists of the magazine and website ‘Timeout London’, the second part is consisted of the website and application ‘YouTube’ and the last one is consisted of the streaming channel ‘Netflix’. In each of the examples, I applied the theoretic view of different authors which have been discussed in the Introduction to Digital Media’s sessions.

Time Out London

I have chosen as first example of my critical commentary essay, the website “Time out London”. It is an international media and entertainment guide that allows people to know the best places in the city, such as restaurants, markets, parks, neighborhood, museums, hotels and so on. Moreover, it informs about the most important events which could be currently taking place in London, and, it also enables people to discover and explore the new urban cultures which began all around London. Time out London is a digital platform and also a print magazine.

McLuhan conceived four media cultures: “Primitive oral/aural culture”, “The culture of literacy”, “Print culture” and “Electronic culture” , the media object chosen is an example of the transition from “print culture” to “electronic culture” as Time out started as a self-published magazine in 1968. Over the years its creator launched the digital version of the magazine. Nowadays, the magazine comes in both printed and digital versions. According to Marshall McLuhan (1962:81) the print culture was the real villain of the piece, since this process encourages to lose the tactile and auditory relations with the world as the visual sense could become dominant. However, it is necessary to look at the example. Time Out, as it is a guide, therefore, it is a book that gives people the most important information about a particular subject. In this way, the argument of McLuhan is not completely convincing, as on the one hand, the author could rightly conclude that the print culture encourages lose the tactile and auditory relation with the world, nevertheless, on the other hand, a book, for instance a guide as Time Out, allows people to know new places to visit. Also, it gives helpful information about the events which are taking place in the city, concerts, museums etc. In this manner, one can assume that the print culture has also a positive side, since books, in general, contain useful information, poetry, stories which enable people to connect with the world in different ways. According to Duffy (as cited in Lister, 2009:82) the electronic culture is ‘paradise regained’ since, we regain the conditions of an oral cultural in acoustic space, we also regress to a culture markedby qualities of simultaneity. As Duffy indicates, the electronic version of Time out has several advantages in comparison with the print version. Since the website enables people to buy tickets online for different events, it is possible through the search engines to find the best information about particular places, events, hotels etc. Moreover, the digital version of Time Out allows people to share information with more people by copying and sending the link of the Website.

The view of Socrates, regarding the written word, was that, it posed serious risks to society (as cited in Wolf, 2008: 71) He also judged written words which are considered to be inferior to spoken words. Nonetheless, the judgement made by Socrates is difficult to support, as written communication, does not represent a danger for society, in fact it offers advantages for the community, such as effective communication, precise information, referential uses, clear understanding and highly helpful data among others. It is clear that the magazine Time Out is an example of all the positive qualities of the written communication, since it contains a good and helpful knowledge of London such as areas, tradition, events and culture. Moreover, Time Out is able to be hand updated through information about entertainment, art, offers, things to do, restaurants and theatre.

In addition, Socrates concluded that written language was not a "recipe'' for memory, but a potential agent of its destruction (as cited in Wolf, 2008: 74-75). Less convincing is the wide generalisation that written communication is a potential factor the destruction of memory. On one hand it is right that when written communication did not exist, people had to memorize things as poems, stories, facts, recipes etc and it boosted human memory. However, written language makes people to read the information and as it is well known, reading has highly positive effects on the human brain, for example reading enables mental stimulation. Apart from this, those people who take to reading could accumulate knowledge and information which could prove to be very useful for them. Reading improves memory since when a person reads a book, he has to memorise various characters, their backgrounds, history and so forth.

YouTube

As a second example, I have chosen the website YouTube, I can access to it by using a smart phone, computer, iPad, tablets, game consoles and television sets. The interface in the mentioned website is a screen and depending on the device used, the interface will be that of a touch screen, mouse, keyboards, as well as there is a YouTube’s official VR channel which requires headset or cardboard to use it. The aim of Digital Media today is to make digital technology "transparent”. In this context, a transparent interface would be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, instead, the user stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 31). With this in mind, it is clear that the interface of YouTube is not very transparent, since we need to use a keyboard or mouse to access the online content. However, I observed a more intuitive characteristic of YouTube application as it allows me to rewind or fast forward by double touching the screen, also the application will be offering me a recommendation algorithm by sweeping left a video. These features made the mobile version highly intuitive. According to David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999: 34), a heterogeneous space is offered by Hypermediacy, in which representation is envisaged as "windowed" one rather as a window on to the world. Similarly, I noticed that the YouTube VR channel represents more of the aspects of Hypermediacy, since the Virtual Reality channel creates three-dimensional virtual environment, which allows me to interact with it and to probe it, thus making the experience a very realistic and pleasant one. The principle of remediation is the presentation of one medium in another (Bolter, 1999: ). For instance, YouTube offers several online lectures, tutorials and courses. In this manner the content of educational institutes is pouring into an electronic device. In addition, the factor of transparent immediacy does not apply to this aspect, since it is not possible in online tutorials to ask questions directly to the teacher, therefore, the experience of teaching and learning through online videos become less interactive and personal.

The term Hypertext describes a text which presents links to other texts which are beyond itself (Lister, 2009: 44). To give an illustration of it, we can look at the example of online tutorials, most of them presents hyperlinks which will direct us to other websites In this manner we will obtain a large amount of further teaching stuff such as slides, articles, online books, discussion boards, statistics, external websites and also email addresses to contact someone to ask questions. Therefore, the student is able to link several sources in different formats, also, through discussion forums students are able to interact online with other students. Thus, they can clear doubts and share further information. Additionally, hypertext is the electronic version of footnotes used in printed books for several years (Bolter, 2001: 34). Nonetheless, there is a vast difference between footnote and hypertext. The next web page linked can contain more links which will bring readers to other pages. On the other hand, hypertext has some disadvantages, for example a person who opens a file might not have access to Internet at that time. Moreover, a hypertext may work properly at the moment that it was added to the online content, but when someone tries to utilize it to gain access to the targeted domain, the link may be broken. Apart from this, it could be annoying for some people to have to click on a link if the internet connection is very slow.

In order to find a solution for the problem of large volume of knowledge that specialists have to manage, Vannevar Bush has created the concept of a machine, the Memex. This machine could sort out information depending upon the association of it with other content rather than sorting and retrieval of the same through an alphabetical and numerical system (as cited in Lister,2009: 26-27). In this manner, data association is of a more intuitive type of information handling rather than the utilisation of alphabetical methods. We can observe that YouTube uses the principle of association, for instance, if someone is looking for a song but the person does not happen to remember the name, they can write up few words of the song that they remember in YouTube’s Search Engine, in this way YouTube will show the searches associated with those words and it will probably find the wanted song.

Netflix

Nowadays, the audience for new media have the power to interact with and change the images and texts which they put in. There is a necessity for the user to participate in the media content to make the experience more significant and meaningful (Lister, 2009: 22). To give an illustration of this, we can consider the online platform Netflix, which enables people to watch a broad selection of movies, TV series, TV shows, documentaries and reality shows. The advantage of Netflix is that customers can enjoy the online content without having to see any commercial. This platform allows customers to intervene in the way that they can choose which content they want to watch by exploring Netflix’s interface.

Netflix is characterized by a mix of interactions, therefore, by exploring the streaming channel, we will experiment with an ‘immersive’ interactivity. It means that through Netflix’s interface, we will move to a complete interaction since it allows us to experience the visual and aural senses by watching the content of it. Furthermore, as a Netflix’s user, we undergo a ‘registrational interactivity’ so as to register to the streaming platform so that we can add text. Thus we send contact details and other information to the platform, such as names, surnames, credit card numbers, phone numbers, etc. It is clear that in new media today there are various virtual environments, spaces, worlds, realities and identities. The ‘Virtual Reality’ is performed in surroundings made by digital graphics, in which the ‘user’ is able to have some interaction (Lister, 2009: 35) Furthermore, Virtual reality is changing human experience of the environment. Technology is seeking to make such environments appear real to the users, in this manner it will bring them to a real time interactivity (National Research Council, 1995). As in the case of Netflix, even though it does not contain any Virtual Reality program in its package, it is still possible to watch Netflix’s content in VR by using headsets, such as ‘Oculus Rift’ and through downloading its computer program. In this manner, watching a film is not as it used to be few years ago, in fact nowadays technology allows us to enjoy an immersive experience even from home. According to Martin Lister (2009: 36), there are two types of virtual reality, one produced by technology immersion and digital graphics and a second one, in which through online communications we create an imagined space. They increase our experience of ‘embodiment’, it means being conscious of our bodies. A good illustration of ‘embodiment’ experience is when we watch a horror film, in which most of the images look very real and frightening. In this way it unchains a reaction in our bodies, such as increment of the heart rate, tense muscles, heavy sweating and increased blood pressure among others. According to Jeffrey Zacks (2015), the reason of why we feel the images we watch on a movie in the identical way as real-life events is because our brain is very primitive, thus we process the film material as our ancestors in the distance 50,000 years ago.

In conclusion, I observed through the examples, the enormous difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. Old media, as radio, print and Television, are becoming less popular than they used to be years ago, since nowadays, New media such as blogs, application, social platforms, websites are more consumed. Therefore, new media has changed the way the media content is delivered, as several companies use new media to find what people want. Also, technology allows individuals to access Internet almost everywhere and at any time, thus it changed the way the News is delivered compared to old media. It means that News has to be always updated and sometimes it represents an issue as some information could be not accurate. Moreover, new media has brought a new manner of interaction with media, as today we have more interactions than before.

Overall, this essay gives a clear illustration that some of the author’s arguments are identical to some extent, throughout the years. It seems that when a new culture begins, it is hard for the society to accept it, as it could represent a menace for the current culture. An example of this could be determined as the written communication. However, in general, all the cultures have advantages and disadvantages for the society that is why the most important thing is to find a particular state of equilibrium between culture and community.

References

Bolter, J. David (1999). Chapter 1: Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation in Remediation: understanding new media. Cambridge, Mass. Publisher: MIT Press.

Bolter, J. David (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. (2nd edn.) Mahwah, United States. Publisher: Routledge.

Lister, Martin (2009). New media: a critical introduction. (2nd edn.)London. Publisher: Routledge.

Lister, Martin (2013). The photographic image in digital culture. (2nd edn.) London. Publisher: Routledge.

The national academic press (1995). Virtual reality, scientific and technological challenges. First edition. Washington, D.C. publisher: The national academic of sciences.

Wolf, Maryanne (2008). The birth of an alphabet and Socrates’ Protestsin Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. Thriplow. Publisher: Icon.