New media
Third Edition
Chapter one
The first chapter gives us a thorough, comprehensive background regarding New Media. Terry Flew unpack this chapter by dwelling on the difference between ‘old’ and ‘new” epitomizing with new vehicles, mobile phones that have been manufactured and developed with new devices. Flew contends that what is regarded as ‘old’ can be refurbished again and become new again. What he means is that technology becomes more and more mercurial in its transformation and development.
New media has become pervasive across the globe as it we interact on frequent basis using internet and/or new media per se. Flew construed the term New Media as the combination of three Cs namely: Computing and Information technology (IT), communication networks, digitized media and information content, and lastly, convergence. With that being said, I can confidently assert that New Media can be thought as digital media since it consist of media content which combine and integrate data, text, sound, and images completely varied.
Chapter two
The second chapter vastly concentrates on broader socio-cultural impacts of new media and why it is justified to be referred as New Media. This chapter unpacks key concepts that act as organizing principles of arguments about the specifics of new media. Such concepts include collective intelligence, convergence, creative industries, cyberspace, digital capitalism, digital copyright, digital divide, globalization, hype and etc. They are twenty in overall and help us have a better understanding of the nature of New Media and how it functions.
Africa is one of the continents which are still acquainting itself with internet and new media, so there are some of things we are still learning. For example, collective intelligence – it is through new media or digital media that we are able to communicate with people from remote places in spite of the distances.
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