Having proposed a list of the key diffirences between new and old media, I now would like to address other potential candidates, which I have ommitted.The following are some of the popularly held notions about the difference between new and old media which this section will subject to scrutiny:
1. New media is analog media converted to a digital representation. In contrast to analog media which is continuos, digitally encoded media is discrete.
2. All digital media (text, still images, visual or audio time data, shapes, 3D spaces) share the same the same digital code. This allows diffirent media types to be displayed using one machine, i.e., a computer, which acts as a multimedia display device.
3. New media allows for random access. In contrast to film or videotape which store data sequentially, computer storage devices make possible to access any data element equally fast.
4. Digitization involves inevitable loss of information. In contrast to an analog representation, a digitally encoded representation contains a fixed amount of information.
5. In contrast to analog media where each successive copy loses quality, digitally encoded media can be copied endlessly without degradation.
6. New media is interactive. In contrast to traditional media where the order of presentation was fixed, the user can now interact with a media object. In the process of interaction the user can choose which elements to display or which paths to follow, thus generating a unique work. Thus the user becomes the co-author of the work.
Cinema as New Media
If we place new media new media within a longer historical perspective, we will see that many of these principles are not unique to new media and can be already found in older media technologies. I will illustrate this by using the example of the technology of cinema.
(1). “New media is analog media converted to a digital representation. In contrast to analog media which is continuos, digitally encoded media is discrete.”
Indeed, any digital representation consists from a limited number of samples. For example, a digital still image is a matrix of pixels — a 2D sampling of space. However, as I already noted, cinema was already based on sampling — the sampling of time. Cinema sampled time twenty four times a second.
So we can say that cinema already prepared us for new media. All that remained was to take this already discrete representation and to quantify it. But this is simply a mechanical step; what cinema accomplished was a much more difficult conceptual break from the continuous to the discrete.
Cinema is not the only media technology which, emerging towards the end of the nineteenth century, employed a discrete representation. If cinema sampled time, fax transmission of images, starting in 1907, sampled a 2D space; even earlier, first television experiments (Carey, 1875; Nipkow, 1884) already involved
sampling of both time and space.36 However, reaching mass popularity much earlier than these other technologies, cinema is the first to make the principle of a discrete representation of the visual a public knowledge.
(2). “All digital media (text, still images, visual or audio time data, shapes, 3D spaces) share the same the same digital code. This allows diffirent media types to be displayed using one machine, i.e., a computer, which acts as a multimedia display device.”
Before computer multimedia became commonplace around 1990, filmmakers were already combining moving images, sound and text (be it intertitles of the silent era or the title sequences of the later period) for a whole century. Cinema thus was the original modern "multimedia." We can also much earlier examples of multiple-media displays, such as Medieval illuminated manuscripts which combined text, graphics and representational images.
(3). “New media allows for random access. In contrast to film or videotape which store data sequentially, computer storage devices make possible to access any data element equally fast.”
For example, once a film is digitized and loaded in the computer memory, any frame can be accessed with equal ease. Therefore, if cinema sampled time but still preserved its linear ordering (subsequent moments of time become subsequent frames), new media abandons this "human-centered" representation altogether — in order to put represented time fully under human control. Time is mapped onto two-dimensional space, where it can be managed, analyzed and manipulated more easily.
Such mapping was already widely used in the nineteenth century cinema machines. The Phenakisticope, the Zootrope, the Zoopraxiscope, the Tachyscope, and Marey's photographic gun were all based on the same principle -- placing a number of slightly different images around the perimeter of a circle. Even more striking is the case of Thomas Edison's first cinema apparatus. In 1887 Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, began experiments to adopt the already proven technology of a phonograph record for recording and displaying of motion pictures. Using a special picture-recording camera, tiny pinpoint-size photographs were placed in spirals on a cylindrical cell similar in size to the phonograph cylinder.
A cylinder was to hold 42,000 images, each so small (1/32 inch wide)
that a viewer would have to look at them through a microscope.37 The storage capacity of this medium was twenty-eight minutes -- twenty-eight minutes of
continuous time taken apart, flattened on a surface and mapped into a two- dimensional grid. (In short, time was prepared to be manipulated and re-ordered, something which was soon to be accomplished by film editors.)
