I thought I posted this but I obviously didn’t…so I’m putting the two pieces together and combined them into an entire post about the New New Media book by Paul Levinson.
It’s almost as if reading a history book. Levinson’s New New Media came out in 2009, covering the developments and new phenomena in the media/communication field. It must be a fantastical experience to read the book, I dare say, back when it first got published. Now, looking back, all that the author predicted and explained make much sense to us, the generation that has immersed themselves deep into the new new media, different from the traditional new media, as Levinson explained, we are no longer using media merely to get information and communicate with a global community but also to expand our territories and explore new zones that has been created by the internet. In the new new media sense, consumers and audiences of information are also contributors.
The first chapter caught my attention because I’ve been quite involved in the theatre blogger community who regularly would have “tweet-up” and special nights. Levinson coined the phrase "citizen journalist" (p. 17) to describe the nature of bloggers. IN the beginning, my high school aged cynical self thought bloggers are merely a group of people who have too much time on their hands and are too full of themselves to be able to hold their unworthy thoughts to a minimum level. However, after reading this book, as well as experiencing the communications with fellow bloggers, and further more, writing blogs myself for TheatreMania.com, has turned my opinion around. For example in theatre bloggers community: bloggers are volunteer commentators. They write out of passion and personal beliefs, unsponsored by producers or press. As a result, their writings are truthful and reflect average theatregoers. Amongst the community, the bloggers’ voices are actually more credible sometimes than big time critics from NYTimes because of their lack of agenda. A log of blogs enjoys large followership depending on their content and the quality of their commentaries. They also receive a great deal of respect from organized press and theatre professionals because they learned the impact of citizen commenters.
Of course, from blogging we automatically think of the recently emerged Tumblr and Pinterest, which are a lot like blogging but with faster pace and much more visualization. My belief is that the nature of those commendations is similar in the ways they influence social trends and even politics.
After Blogging, Levinson focused on YouTube, which raised an interesting and serious problem ignited by new new media which had exponentially faster pace than old media: the issue of copyright. YouTube has a great deal of influence among young people (especially those with smartphones and are willing to do video commentaries on pretty much anything at all). YouTube now also involved a large amount of advertising because of how much views they got every day.
There are tutorials of doing mostly anything on YouTube, and whatever song you can think of, there are millions of videos and covers on that site as well. It’s a multimedia crowd-sourced archive.
…which is quite similar to what Levinson introduced next: Wikipedia. I’m always holding doubts over whatever I read on Wikipedia because all of the entries are written by the crowd. Of course, the faith stands that most of the contributors for each of the entries are passionate about said subject, and will stay responsible for their “publication”. For me, I believe the trend of readers contributing to most of the contents on the internet is making the internet a better and more responsible place because most people are concerned about what they put out there in the universe of the unknown.
The next focus is on Digg. I’ve never heard of it before reading it in Levinson’s book. However, upon getting familiar with its function, I recognized a lot of the more recent sites including Reddit. And IWasteTooMuchTime.com. It’s interesting how the content of the site is evolving according to popularity and the amount of support it got. Similar style of regulating site content is applied by a lot of different industries. The news stories, or any other contents in a certain website, now enters a vicious circle of: if a story is popular, it gets promoted more and more, yet if a story got dropped to the bottom, no one would actually see it. We might lose a lot of gems in doing so, but it’s the reality.
Social Networking came next, a more dynamic evolution of how people communicate with each other; make connections, contributing to the content simultaneously. The fall of myspace might had been the fact that it lacks the dynamics Facebook processes, as well as Facebook’s constent changing.
“You are alive, right to the moment that you stop changing. “ that’s one of my favourite quotes, and I think it applies to the evolution of social media. People are complaining about the new formats and regulations of Facebook, but I fully embrace it and consider it one of the most important and positive invention of this century: as long as people don’t get enslaved by social media, it can do much good to our society as it has done me.
Twitter had became my passion in the last few years. I discovered uncharted water in the ocean of internet and made new friendship as well as solidified old ones through twitter. Twitter, with its limited content and spontaneity, you can read much about a certain person’s characteristics based on what they tweet, and discover their passion by looking at what they favourite and what they retweeted. The author Paul Levinson is definitely a twitter fiend, as his information sometimes would flood my feed. Levinson calls twitter "the epitome of immediacy" (p. 134), and I agree with him completely.
One time I went into an argument with a fellow tweeter who’s been complaining about how social media like twitter has caused us to lose personal, physical contacts. Through knowing like minded people on twitter, I was able to discover people who I wouldn’t be able to strike a conversation with on the street. The safety and personal space provided by Internet gives us courage to talk to strangers and discover amazing friendship. If we talk about personal contacts, well, I’ve became good friends and go on brunch dates with a couple of friends…we met initially through twitter. Of course, that wasn’t the initial use of twitter by journalists and organizations. Twitter is a faster version of blogs from which industrial professionals discover new trends and what people’s reactions were towards a product, or an event. I don’t believe there’s only one single minded function in anything, and that certainly include twitter. The mere existence of it proves the evolution of communication has brought us to a stage of “bending space and time”
Levinson also talked about Second Life, an Internet phenomenon that I personally believe made no sense because that was merely a hi-tech, more visually appealing version of make believe. We as a species has been doing that all through history. The creation of it feeds in the need for people to escape, but it has to little practical function to carry on.
New New Media also expanded its horizon from visual to audio, for instance, podcast. IN the end, all the senses will be activated in a larger, universal scale, the recent rise of google hangout, different types of video chats are mashing together all our senses to flatten the world and make people’s distances smaller.
There are unquestionably dark side of anything, new new media includes. We talked about trolling, bots, spams, etc in class. I believe those downsides of new new media are just reflecting the reality: there are always antisocial forces existing in the world; but they don’t cancel out the greater good we can do with new new media. Education of online etiquette and mannerism should become a greater part of elementary education nowadays because of the wide usage of digital media. A society consists its builder, its regulators, and its breakers: as virtual as it is, new new media creates a rather similar world with the one we used to know, and I’m optimistic about it becoming a great one: it’s young, it’s amendable, it’s full of potential; and the most amazing fact is that WE all created it ourselves.
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