Centre for Material Digital Culture
A DECADE after the first Internet boom and the parallel explosion of the connected fields of new media studies, techno-cultural studies, cyber-cultural studies, new medium studies, there is still much discussion of innovation, but there is also an understanding that the first moment of the new has passed. New media has a history, as well as present and future - and of course, it always did. Today, the dynamic of continuity and transformation intrinsic to the relationship between technology and culture can be drawn differently. Innovation continues. Technologists declare web 2.0; the stress shifts from the screen-world to the penetration of the real-world environment by pervasive and intimate forms of new media. New forms of new media continue to arrive; content develops and original modes of use, forms of association, ways of writing or thinking together, spring up. Continuity reasserts itself. Processes of remediation transform old media, but not beyond all recognition. Much remains of 'good old television' in the world of digital TV, the aesthetics of radio persist as it is delivered to us over the net or as a pod-cast, and the conventions and economy of the traditional cinematic apparatus translate into the world of DVD and digital screening in forms we recognize and find familiar. Even the truly innovative media forms, those springing up out of digital technology, now have substantial development histories, their own traditions, and increasingly their own conventions. These last are expressed in code, articulated in the physical architecture of new media networks, found in the dispositions or habitus of users, evident in the consolidation of various genres, and evident also in the contested but provisionally secured cultural capitals circulating around various new media formations.
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