New media refers to any media resource which can be accessed without a limitation on time and place, can provide interactive feedbacks and allows for real time generation of content.
As this definition indicates, new media opens the possibility of a two way communication channel for most end users thus eliminating the monopoly of a few producers over widely available content.
In old media resources ranging from 14th century print to the television introduced in the late 80s, the production and distribution of content was a costly affair thus limiting the content to a few individuals. This restricted the variety of the content available for the masses.
However new media, by reducing the cost and time factors involved in the creation of widely available content has blurred the line between authors and readers. In a metaphorical sense old media can be taken as an auditorium where only one person has a mike and others listen to only this particular person, while in new media every person has a microphone to speak and several earphones to listen to any particular person they want.
A schematic for new media where every node can have a two way communication with other nodes
This particular feature of new media has affected society in many ways like in the case of old media it was rather easy to manipulate the collective consciousness of society by exercising control over the few media resources existing in the society while new media decentralizes this control of a few nodes over the content society is being exposed to, thus building up many small blocks of collective consciousness following many independent ideologies.
Thus we can conclude that new media is in many ways is really ‘new’ in the sense that it has radically affected the nature of communication existing in the society until its introduction from a one way communication originating from few sources to a rather independent and rapidly expanding network of dynamically generated content.
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