What’s new about new media?

            New media is evolving. There is always a new media, and new media today might be old media tomorrow. What’s new? They are similar in some senses.

            

            Internet empowers people. Viewers become content providers because of easy access. Attention economy caught people’s attention to look at this new media—web, as if there is never such media to provide oceans of information, and it makes attention a scarce resource. If we look back at cable, DBS, and MSOs, which provided viewers multichannel, attention economy seems applied. Multichannel provided more information than broadcast. Each TV station competed for viewer’s attention. A remote is crucial. If the channel was not appealing, it lost viewers’ attention. Rating is a measure of attention, and rating determines advertising revenue. Isn’t it similar to the Internet? Websites compete for attention because attention represents advertising revenue. Click is the measure of attention, just like rating. In this sense, new media is not that new.

            Is new media research new or not? As Guantlett (2007) pointed out, traditional media is replaced with “long tail” of alternative media. Internet fundamentally changed the way in which we engage with media, that is, new media change media consumption behavior. In spite of new changes, Guantlett stated that the old part of new media research is to rework critical perspective, like power, hegemony, or polysemy, to fit new media context. In my opinion, critical perspective never grows old. Where there is media, there is power. The questions for critical researchers ask are how to empower people and how to resist hegemony. The new for the new media research is like how firm make more money in the changing media environment? What is the business model? Or how new technology reshapes the landscape of media? How new technology redefines the concept of market? How traditional theories apply to new media?