New media is any content created with consideration to be received by an Internet audience which consist of social media, YouTube, news, movie streaming, blogs, company websites, and way more.
In my opinion new media is new because it isn’t the same as traditional media where people have to be somewhere in person to receive the information. For example, newspapers are the most traditional form of media. Radio stations are more innovative because you can have them in your car and get satellite radio but they’re also not as popular as they used to be.
Most people use the auxiliary cords and plug their phones into online stations like Spotify and Pandora or play their own music. Then we have TV which isn’t what it used to be. A lot of people I know don’t even pay for cable anymore. They have an Internet bill and watch all their shows online now. Social media and wide spread Internet access and capabilities is the thing that separates new media from being definitely old.
People don’t read or let alone spend the money to buy ‘For Dummies’ books anymore. If someone needs to figure out how to do something they can google it without a problem and most people now-a-days won’t hesitate to do so. It’s become popular to just YouTube and Google everything, so popular that I just used both of those website names as verbs. They have become action words because that’s a majority of what we do. Just like using ‘Instragramming, Facebooking, tweeting, snapchatting, etc.’ all as verbs to describe what we’re doing on social media.
A valuable takeaway to remember from learning about the age of new media is relative to having a branded e-dentity (electronic identity), how the medium used to create content works (internet), and how our interactions in digital spaces affects our lives in real spaces.
