If we take a look at “new media” or interactive digital mediums like the internet its plain to see that media changes over time. With the invention of hypertext (Ted Nelson, 1960) it became possible to link pages of information together. You could present unstructured texts which could link to other ideas, and elaborate on those ideas on a different page. This was made possible with the internet however it was not a new idea. Jacques Derrida published a book called Glas in 1974 which illustrated this idea of an unstructured text as it is not clear in what order the reader should follow the text.
With multimedia being so adaptable a new strategy of trying to get systems to evolve into doing similar tasks has become increasingly popular and common. This form of technological convergence strives to get different forms of media to interact with each other. With these tools interacting with each other we can now read books on our smart phones, listen to our music, and check out email. Companies are getting in on the action too. For example non-digital media such as print based advertisement can be remediated into an interactive treasure hunt.
Will there always be new media? As technologies converge, become more accessible and easier to use there is no reason why media should not continue to evolve. Who knows maybe one day we will be able to submerge ourselves into alternate realities of our choice…just don’t forget you’ll probably still have to do the dishes in real time.
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