Understanding New Media: Augmented Knowledge and Culture

By Kim Veltman

$69.95 sc
Available Now
ISBN 1-55238-154-4
620 pp., tables, illustrations
7" x 9"

Media Studies

About the Book

A recent study claimed that there are 7 million new web pages being created daily, and that the Internet already has some 550 billion pages. There are 70 major languages online and it is predicted that Chinese will soon be the most-used language on the Internet. In 2000, as the so-called dot.com bust was about to hit, the Internet had 200 million users. By the end of 2005 there were over 1 billion fixed-line users, and predictions of a further billion within a decade.

The term “new media” is most often associated with the Internet and the phenomenal technological advances that have taken place in the past decades. In Understanding New Media: Augmented Knowledge and Culture, author Kim Veltman looks at these developments and identifies five types of consequences of the networked environment — technological, material, organizational, intellectual, and philosophical. Veltman reviews physical changes (e.g. development of size and speed in computing, wireless communication, agile manufacturing), and argues that the most profound potential changes lie in intellectual and philosophical domains. Unlike technological determinists, Veltman shows that there are differing and sometimes competing goals and visions for new media around the world. He reveals a big picture that is long term and which even the director of Google has claimed it will take at least three centuries to achieve.

Hence, the digital revolution is something fundamentally different from simply the introduction of yet another medium to our culture. Information Communication Technologies (ICT) are becoming Universal Convergent Technologies (UCT). This calls for us to rethink McLuhan’s brilliant and provocative suggestion that every new medium simply uses the prior mode as its message. It marks a paradigm shift in our relation to all media, to all our senses, all our expressions. The new media are transforming our definitions of culture and knowledge and transcending barriers in ways that will have lasting implications for generations and centuries to come.

About the Author

Dr. Kim H. Veltman is scientific director of the Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute and has been coordinator of E-Culture Net, a European Network of Centres of Excellence in Digital Cultural Heritage.

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