Relative

Tactical, situated, local (2007)

I think a great deal of the use of these terms is tactical and situated and local.

So, I think when we call ourselves, here in the English Department at [Ohio State University], when we talk about digital media, we are in part distinguishing the work that we do from print media. And we are, I think we are distinguishing ourselves from that more conventional endeavor of literary studies.

Although we partake in literary studies and we have a lot of connections and great admiration for our colleagues. And I also think we are trying to tell the university, and the community at large, that we are not an English Department that is print only. We are an English Department that is part of the contemporary digital world, the technological world.

Facing up to 'new media' (2010)

The Introduction to Writing New Media was when I had to face up to, like, how am I using this term in this book [Writing New Media].

And, I had already figured out before that that it couldn’t mean just a digital text, right, because any webpage would then be new media, even something that looked like what already existed. So digital didn’t cut it. And it was either add to the digital, or something else. And I couldn’t come up with anything that differentiated the digital from what was going on, because interactive gets you all kinds of trouble, to say that new media is interactive, because, what? Clicking a link? Is that where you’re going to set the bar? And, because, how are you going to differentiate that from reading any of the “choose your own path” stories, or even just reading in general, the kind of imaginative kinds of stuff.

So I was like, okay, digital isn’t enough, interactive isn’t enough, and I don’t remember now, as we’re talking. What I did was, sort of, go through and think about, all right, stop trying to define it from this analytic way, but what are the texts you think are new media, and what do they have in common? And I realized, as I was doing that, that I was bringing in texts that weren’t digital. They might have been produced digitally, but they didn’t have to be on the screen, and that’s when I started thinking about... for me... it was texts that... where somebody was pretty alertly taking advantage of the technological features that differentiated a text from earlier possibilities.

Multimodal from new media (2010)

Multimodality, for me, is like one of the first obvious results of that particular definition of new media [see the Contextual category for Anne's definition].

[My question: How do you mean?]

Well, because what it is... I think about the opening of Manovich’s Languages of New Media, right? And one of the first things he said was “well, it’s all because of digitality, and everything can be digitized” and so it doesn’t have to do with networks, it doesn’t have to do with anything, it’s just that once you can digitize text, sounds, pictures, animation, video, they can be glommed together and put together: multimodality, right?

So you didn’t have to be networked. Who cares about wireless. All you have to do is be able to digitize stuff. So that’s just tied to the very first feature up above in this chapter on new media. So for people who are engaged with text, that going to be, sort of, the first main thing that strikes you is, okay, crap, now I have to deal with the visual features of a text and not just the alphabetic features of a text, and I have to start talking about “Am I going to include a video or an animation, or am I going to do this just as text?” So that allowed me then to, sort of, put multimodality into this set of things that result from the new mediaization of stuff.

Naming (2010)

Well I mean I think here you’ve got one of these instances of the naming. Somebody who comes, perhaps, more from a technological position might name the new device by what is criterial about that technology, and say digital. Somebody who comes, sort of, astonished to all the wonders that are being produced, says “I haven’t seen this before; this is very new.”

So I think it’s... the point from which something is named, I think, appears very much in the name. And I think that might be the first thing to bear in mind. I have absolutely not, in any way at all, sufficient technological knowledge to understand what it means, but for me, for instance, the notion of digital means that there is a form or representation at one level, that these media use, in which the form of appearance, the modal form of appearance, is not decided. So something can appear as script—in font, as writing—or it can be turned into speech. So it names a level at which the modal specificity isn’t decided. Now, that’s me, as somebody entirely ignorant, thinking about what might, among other things, be involved in talking about the digital. That’s what these things offer. And that isn’t present in new. In new there’s just the wonder of the novelty.

Digital vs. new media scholarship (2008)

The other reason I use new media a lot now, and actually I was using it in my earlier interview today about digital dissertations and digital scholarship, is... I made the argument, they were like “what’s digital scholarship?” and I was like “there’s not scholarship in English studies today that isn’t digital because we all write with word processors and we all use online databases—it’s all digital." But then I wanted to stop and say “Okay, but there is something special about what they’re really asking.” But I wanted to call that new media scholarship because I was taking the idea that new media scholarship—not scholarship about new media but scholarship that was new media—would in some ways be pushing the boundaries, reinventing scholarship, doing something different than the print form using the affordances of digital technologies in ways that make us rethink.

And to me that connects to new media as connected to avant-garde art traditions, which a lot of scholars have looked at, a lot of scholars in our field, in other fields, have looked at. So new media is, in some way, a way of pushing us to try to do new things and to attempt to connect the creative and scholarly traditions.

Multimodal / digital / multimedia (2007)

I don’t know that I do decide [which term to use, when] except to say that there are lots of things that are multimodal that, for me, don’t necessarily seem multimedia.

And I know that doesn’t necessarily make sense when I really think about it, but, just to give you a snapshot of how my brain works with it: I think a student can, just by working with a print text and including a lot of different modalities, or different genres, can produce what I would call a multimodal text; whereas, for some reason I would tend to use multimedia with more electronically-enabled textual production. And again, like I said, now that I think about it I don’t know that that actually, terminologically, makes sense, but that is the split that I find myself enacting.

So multimodal would be the more encompassing term for all of it, there are texts that can be produced, whether they’re print-based or electronically enabled, that can engage a variety of different modes, of different genres, of different ways of presenting information, but I might use multimedia as a more specific subset of a term to specify electronically enabled forms of communication that are multimodal.

The new media, digital media (2010)

There’s the whole Web 2.0 stuff. And, if you think of a Tweet, is that a text? I think it is, except that then it works against our sense of... because when you say new media text I think people think of something that’s somewhat expanded, as opposed to a Tweet or a text message.

So there’s also, then, the more communications-oriented term, which would be the new media, right? So that would be computers, cell phones, all the other kinds of devices. And then, for me, and I’ll push on to where you were going before, digital media become the things that are hidden in your devices that communicate back to you. So that could be your thermostat, that could be, you know, the people now who turn on their lights... there’s that commercial now... the woman’s getting on the plane, "oh I forgot to turn the lights on in the dining room," and she pulls out her phone and punches something in... So I see the new media, digital media, I mean even those that aren’t quite media, I don’t know what else people call them, but they’re all little digital communication devices between you and object rather than you and someone else.