What is new media?

Lev Manovich (2001) wrote that new media could be "graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts that have become computable." Manovich reminded us that new media wasn't necessarily new and questioned the label itself: What is new media and what isn't it? To what does new media relate historically? How exactly does it differ from old media? [see Remediations (1998)]. In Multimodal Discourse, Günther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001) expanded on the idea of multimodality presented by Kress in Multiliteracies (1999), where a text is multimodal if it includes such elements as sound, graphics, and time-based elements, in addition to (or without) written text. But, these definitions remain broad and, perhaps, too open when trying to determine what might count as scholarship in this field. In thinking how we might group new media texts, even as a way to help administrators group scholarship published in online texts, we have created three distinct categories: online scholarship, scholarship about new media, and new media scholarship (see below).

• Online scholarship encompasses almost anything written in an online scholarly journal to date, including PDFs, hypertexts, and webtexts -- all presented with written text as the main mode of communication;
• Scholarship about new media is similar to online scholarship, except the subject matter is about the reading of or teaching strategies for new media or multimodal texts; sometimes these texts will use supplementary media, but written text is still the main mode of argument; and
• New media scholarship uses modes other than (mainly) written text to form an argument.
  

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