Traditional Media Vs. New Media

WHAT IS TRADITIONAL MEDIA?

Traditional media or old media include print media such as books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, scholarly journals, pamphlets, fliers, broadsides, billboards, etc.

Other traditional media are the electronic media such as radio, television, movies, CDs and DVDs, digital still photography, video recordings, audio recordings, interactive video games, etc.

Traditional media differ from the New Media of the Internet, which include such diverse technologies as blogs, wikis, machinima, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, podcasts, virtual worlds and web pages.

Since media are pervasive in our lives, you probably can think of more!

First...

Print media

Let’s focus first on print media.

The term print media usually refers to the industry associated with the printing of news and information on paper or other hard copy base material and then the distribution of the printed matter.

Typically, the term points to books, newspapers and magazines, but can include also such media as newsletters, scholarly journals, pamphlets, brochures, fliers, broadsides, etc.

Books

A book usually is a physical object used as a print medium. It is a written work printed on several pages that are bound together.

It’s a database storing information as a collection of written, printed, illustrated sheets of paper, parchment or other material fastened together to hinge at one side.

Ancient history

Books are considered the oldest mass medium.

When writing was invented in ancient times, anything that could be written upon was used — stone, clay, bark, metal, plants, skins.

Around 5,000 years ago, Egyptians wrote on papyrus, a plant grown along the Nile River. The Sumerians wrote on clay tablets in 2400–2200 BC.

Mass printing of modern books began just 560 years ago.

Today there are non-physical books published in electronic formats known as electronic books or e-books.

Newspapers

A newspaper is a regularly scheduled publication containing news, information and advertising. There are around 6,600 daily newspapers in the world including more than 1,400 in the U.S. They sell a total of 395 million copies a day including 55 million in the U.S.

For the most part, newspapers are funded by subscriptions and advertising. The worldwide recession that started in 2008 and with the rapid growth of Web alternatives have caused a decline in newspaper advertising and circulation. Some papers have cut back their operations or even closed down entirely.

Newspapers usually are circulated by delivery and by sales at local kiosks. Newspapers today also are available as non-print media on the Internet.

What’s in a newspaper? General-interest newspapers typically publish stories on political events, personalities, crime, business, entertainment, society and sports. Most papers also have an editorial page of opinions written by an editor or opinion writers. Other features include display and classified advertising, comics, puzzles and inserts from local merchants.

In fact, a wide variety of material has been published in newspapers, including news, weather, editorials, obituaries, entertainment features, crosswords, horoscopes, advice columns, food columns, movie reviews, play reviews, restaurant reviews, classified ads, display ads, cartoons and comic strips.

Magazines

Magazines also are published on a regular schedule. Most contain information and advertising.

Magazines sometimes are referred to as periodicals, glossies or serials. Separately, an academic periodical featuring scholarly articles is usually called an academic journal. Such journals usually have no advertising.

For the most part, magazines also are funded by advertising and subscriptions as well as individual sales. Magazines are circulated by mail and local retail sales. Some magazines offer free subscriptions.

Magazines contain a variety of articles with a focus on specific interests. Magazines dedicated to reporting news often are called newsweeklies. Magazines also are available today as non-print media on the Internet.

Next, electronic media

The electronic media include radio, television, movies, CDs, DVDs, discs, digital still photography, video recordings, audio recordings, interactive video games, etc.

These traditional media differ from the New Media of the Internet, which might be thought of as electronic because we access them from our computers. However, they are new in the sense that the old medium of radio broadcasting has been around for 90 years and television has been popular for 60 years. 

Radio

Radio is a technology for transmitting information by electromagnetic waves, which travel through the air and the vacuum of space as oscillating fields. It is wire-less.

Information is attached to a radio wave by systematically changing, or modulating, the waves, in terms of their amplitude, frequency, phase, and pulse width. Radio waves that are received are transformed into sound and other information.

Radio broadcasting is a coherent sound, or audio, program service, sent from one place to another as radio waves. Stations that are linked form radio networks to broadcast common programming.

Audio programs also can be broadcast via wire, cable, satellite and the Internet.

Television

Television is a technology for transmitting information via radio signals, which are received as moving images accompanied by sound. Those elements are referred to as video and audio. The medium has been referred to as radio with pictures. In fact, broadcast television was modeled on the existing radio broadcasting systems of the 1920s.

Commercially available since the late 1930s and popular from the late 1940s, television typically is a source of entertainment, education, information and news. Since the 1970s, television receivers also have been used to view pre-recorded programs via cassettes and discs.

HOW ABOUT NEW MEDIA?

New Media is a 21^st Century catchall term used to define all that is related to the internet and the interplay between technology, images and sound. In fact, the definition of new media changes daily, and will continue to do so. New media evolves and morphs continuously. What it will be tomorrow is virtually unpredictable for most of us, but we do know that it will continue to evolve in fast and furious ways. However, in order to understand an extremely complex and amorphous concept we need a base line. Since Wikipedia has become one of the most popular storehouses of knowledge in the new media age, it would be beneficial to begin there:

 “… a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of new media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content. What distinguishes new media from traditional media is the digitizing of content into bits. There is also a dynamic aspect of content production which can be done in real time, but these offerings lack standards and have yet to gain traction.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is an example, combining Internet accessible digital text, images and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of users and formation of a participant community of editors and donors for the benefit of non-community readers. Facebook is an example of the social media model, in which most users are also participants.

Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive.^[1] Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media does not include television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications – unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity.“

As a consequence of the quick embrace of New Media  by business, causes, communications, and a multitude of others, the question of “what is new media?” did not receive an official or standardized response. Instead, responses to this question have often entailed a series of hackneyed keywords or empty phrases whose effectiveness is yet to be determined. The question of new media isn’t a question that merely indexes new toys and tools. Rather, there is a qualitative question that lurks beneath the shining surface of the screen brandishing the images we associate as products or elements of New Media. A good question to ask instead of “what is new media?” is  “what isn’t new media?” To be sure, there are some definite signposts to guide the twenty-first century user’s query.

The term “new media” seems to escape its very definition. Loosely, new media is a way of organizing a cloud of technology, skills, and processes that change so quickly that it is impossible to fully define just what those tools and processes are. For example, the cell phone in the late 1980’s could be thought of as part of new media, while today the term might only apply selectively to a certain type of phone with a given system of applications, or even more commonly, the content of those apps. Part of the difficulty in defining New Media is that there is an elusive quality to the idea of “new.” The very prospect of being new denotes an event just beyond the horizon, something that has only just arrived and which we are just beginning to get our hands on. Perhaps in searching for a suitable characterization for this network of tools and ideas is the idea of limitless possibility. Limitless possibility for communication, for innovation, and education is certainly a fundamental element that shapes our conceptions of new media usage from now on.

Nevertheless, in seeking a definition of “New Media” we need some basic tenets that can help us get a better positive understanding of what New Media is beyond what New Media isn’t. New media can be characterized by the variegated use of images, words, and sounds. These networks of images, sounds, and text data are different from old media formats such as hardcopy newspapers because of the nesting characteristic.

Nesting is a way of organizing of the presentation of information according to subjects while paying secondary attention to context. In the place of context, nesting (most commonly seen in text or image hyper-linking) is a format that fosters organization in a way in which elements interact with one another instead of simply following a straight order. This new organization of data does not require a “back story” and each interactive element of information stands alone.  New media requires a non-linear interpretation, since many sources are often oriented around the same subject-center, but are not always collated. At the end of the day all this means is that one of the primary characteristics of new media is that it is freed from the linear restrictions of older formats such as newspapers, books, and magazines.

  

Perhaps this conception of new media is only part of the whole picture and the skeletal outlines of a much more profound discussion. We recognize that many online interfaces enrich university and office experiences, making nested and comprehensible write-ups, drop-boxes, and support-based chat centers. The first thing that anyone using “new media” in the twenty first century realizes is that the technology and capability for innovation does not necessarily determine its usefulness or it’s potential. Of course, that all rests on the shoulders of the user, or does it? 

AND WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

OLD MEDIA OR NEW MEDIA?

Yet if we were asked to think of other "new media," we might have a harder time coming up with obvious examples. We would have no problem citing instances of "old media": typewriters, vinyl record albums, eight-track magnetic tapes, and the like. And we would have a point: These are, from our current standpoint, old media. But they were not always old, and studying them in terms that allow us to understand what it meant for them to be new is a timely and culturally important task, an exercise that in this volume we hope profitably to apply to media much older than we are.

But old media is very essential in our life.It started the new media.