Week 1 - Task 2 - a

New media is hard to define, especially when we have been brought up in era when technology has been constantly evolving and developing faster than ever before.

For example, the speech given by Goebbels in 1933 suggests that he views radio as relatively new media whereas to me I would class radio as an 'old' medium. But this may be just because I have always grown up with television, and not only television but colour television and VCR, our generation has even seen the development of DVD.

I think we could make comparisons like that:

OLD MEDIA..........NEW MEDIA
Black&white................ TV Colour TV
Cassette tapes............. CD's and later MP3's
Video cassettes........... DVD
Video recorders.......... Sky Plus
Telephone sets............ Wireless phones and mobiles
Handwritten letters... Emails

But a lot of these are just developments in each other, so is new media jus improved old media?? Or is it something completely different??

For example, what's the 'old' equivelant of something like MSN Messenger....is it a phone call? a letter? or just a face to face visit?

Lister suggests that sometimes the term new media is used to describe technologies that don't even exist yet and just something that will be formed in the future.
In which case new media is impossible to define becuase we have no idea what will be possible in the future and it's impossible for us to imagine or comprehend as if we could, it would exist by now. Like, when our parents were young they would have never been able to imagine or comprehend a telephone with colour digital screens that fit in r pocket and can write and send text. Let alone, a device that hold hundreds of megabites of music, videos and photos, whereas to us most young people own a ipod or some form of MP3 player.

I think attitudes with this type of thing have also chnaged drastically. I would imagine that say in the 40's or 50's it wouldn't be very common for a child or young folk to even be frequend users of a telephone and now children as young as like 5 have mobiles!!! I also can't ever imagine people in this era using the telephone while at the dinner table or with family, whereas today it's more socially acceptable to take a call when in company (depending on the company or the formality of the situation) and with text messages and email features on phones it's easy to communicate with people not present without completely ignoring everyone who is in your company.

I don't believe that Goebbel's opinion of radio is completely true today, while it is still true that radio is an effective way to communicate to the masses, I do believe that television and especially the internet have overtaken it.