New Media Attributes

Disclaimer: This is lifted almost directly from my draft PhD thesis. It is posted here for interest, but recognise that concepts are explained in detail in the full version of thesis. (I thought I would spare the Web the need to post it in all its 5000 word glory.)
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‘New Media’ is a commonly used phrase, along with other apparent synonyms ‘digital media’ and ‘interactive media’. On closer inspection however, new media embodies a whole set of arguments and connotations. It is therefore important to set out clearly what the term means in this context.
Whilst new media understandably embraces a wide range of technologies (for example, the Internet and hypertext, mobile phones and physical computer games like Nintendo’s Wii) there are several defining characteristics which can be drawn out. Although these traits are not necessarily all present in each example of new media, there exists enough of a correlation between media objects to render the attributes meaningful and indeed invaluable for future discussions on the relationship between new media and storytelling.
Synthesising several sets of characteristics results in the following list of new media traits:

1. Digitality: the underlying technological structures which enable new media objects to be easily accessed, manipulated and remoulded.
2. Multimodality: the range of modes in which users can interact, impact and experience new media.
3. Immediacy: the twin goals of new media to provide such an immersive experience that it renders the medium invisible and to make media so pervasive that its incongruity becomes unnoticeable.
4. Dispersal: the distribution of new media objects across networks, accessible media creation tools and the geographical dispersal of increasingly mobile physical devices all enable dispersed production and consumption of new media.
5. Co-creativity: the experience and social dynamics of co-creating new media objects with other users as a bricoleur, contributing to revisions through feedback, interacting within and out-with predefined parameters.
6. Ephemerality: the transient nature of new media objects, as shown by the finite lifespan of their physical existence (e.g. mobile phones superseded by newer models), current accepted formats (e.g. file types/protocols) and the ever changing, mutable content they embody.
   

A final note on interactivity
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, interactivity was not adopted as a characteristic of new media in the definition for this thesis. Interactivity is a fundamental of new media in the same way that digitality is. However, as was mentioned at the start of this section, to explicitly include interactivity as an attribute in its own right is in many ways stating the obvious. Digitality was included because the direct consequences it affords of modularity and replicability were considered to be facets of digitality. The consequences of interactivity are particularly enmeshed in co-creativity and ephemerality but to some degree impact on every attribute. Therefore it was not deemed necessary to forcibly delineate interactivity into a distinct characteristic.