What is New Media?

As life and society evolves, it responds to the market forces of scarcity or abundance, and those who adapt the best to the new realities are favored, while those who cannot/will not, face extinction -- and until then, are plagued by chronic, persistent, overwhelming difficulties in their lives more than most.

It is the fatal failure to adapt. Such persons will even insist and demand that the rest of the world must change to suit them -- rather than the appropriate response of personally and individually changing -- as the best response. It might be that before a universal law granting the right of way to all pedestrians, at all times, anywhere, one is unfortunately struck down and killed by a car driver who hasn't gotten that news yet.

Clearly over the last half century, the world is a very different place than it had been for most of history. The greatest change is that those things that were once scarce, because of science and technology, have become plentiful. But the human being, having evolved over millions of years, favored those who could adapt to scarcity, hardship, and struggle. However, when those conditions of scarcity change to abundance in one's own lifetime, many cannot adapt and will perish by their failure to adapt.

The obvious case is to eat as much as one can because food might be scarce and unreliable. Many will eat themselves to death because they don't make the adaptation to unlimited food resources. One is now more likely to eat themselves to death rather than starve to death.

An even greater change, has been the explosive growth of information -- so that one is likely to become dysfunctional not because of ignorance, but more likely from overinformation. Information is no longer scarce, as in the days of the first appearance of the school on the prairie and frontier newspaper, but one has trouble now avoiding information intruding in our every waking moment.

The result of overinformation is paralysis -- that one is so overwhelmed processing the information, that they cannot act appropriately in a timely manner. Eventually, one cannot act effectively at all. One's entire time and energy are consumed in processing information -- endlessly.

Modern information processors recognized that they had to filter out the extraneous before they let it take root in their minds -- avoiding and eliminating all the distractions, diversions and pettiness that was not their urgent sphere of influence, their actual living and concerns -- in which their actions could make a vital and critical difference. So being able to detect the significant and significance became the prime skill -- or one could not tell every bit of trivia, deception and manipulation from the cherished truth of the matter.

Such an evolution in information and communication processing, is what is being defined as the new media (style and culture), as opposed to the old mass media done more. It is also called, personalized media -- information that one wants, rather than what somebody else wants us to know. This is a huge shift in the power dynamic that threatens the way we've been accustomed to do things.

Many who had tremendous power and influence in the old media, will only have as much as the next guy -- even if it is more than anybody had before. But the hierarchy of information and control has been dissolved -- and those who benefited most by the old arrangement will of course fight until their dying breath to maintain the old status quo. Meanwhile, the rest must go on to create the new possibilities of information and communications -- as the most critical aspect of any discussion of the future.