Month: September 2017

“The medium, or process, of our time- electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and evert aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing – you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically.”

This paragraph is very interesting to me because I often think about this and have conversation with others regarding this topic. I find it funny how the author refers to new media as “electric technology”.  McLuhan picked a good point that it is changing everyone. Its changing everyone life. I myself study actuarial science and incredible how someone’s life can be calculated in terms of number such as their mortality rate. It’s unfortunate that in my line of work I see individuals as numbers instead of seeing them for who they are. This such electric technologies are truly amazing and because of it we can finally achieve obstacles that we never thought it was even possible. On the other we have this communication barrier among people because its often done using technology. People at their jobs can be sitting next to each other and if there’s a question, the norm is to email each other instead of just tapping their neighbors shoulder. I wonder where technology will take us because anything is possible nowadays.

“A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions. This is another consequence of the numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2).”

These sentences stand out to me the most because it is the reason why new media is as popular as it is now.  In the beginning when new media came along people were against it , and  older generations are still against it in present day. However,  the vast majority of people decided to switch over to new media, and the main reason behind that is variability , which is the fourth principle of new media. We see this variability principle being used in various places. I believe it is being used very efficiently in the news industry. More and more people nowadays are reading their news online, and are able to  follow various articles while the story unfolds and changes. This variability features allows us to update the news  with more accurate information for millions of readers and this can be done in seconds. If new media didn’t exist and we were still reading our newspapers we wouldn’t get updates on our story right away; the update would come a day later making it an old story. In addition, this variability principle allows us to always work on our “project” and continuously make it better. Also, allows us to make an update of our previous work without starting from the very beginning. It provides us the ability to always create more and better content since the creator is always learning as he/she is working on their content. Variability principle makes us extremely efficient in our work.