Re: [-empyre-] New Media Reader

[Jill Walker <jill.walker@uib.no>]

On 02/01/2004, at 6:04, Henry Warwick wrote:

> Will what we call "New Media" be "New" in 20,000 years? Somehow, I 
> doubt it.

Of course not! Neither is "the novel" or for that matter "le nouveau 
roman" of the fifties particicularly novel or new. The renaissance has 
a smack of "new" in it, too, don't you think, and how about 
new-classicism and modernism? Even the neolithic era is prefixed by new 
though I suppose the era must have been named well after the event.

Actually, if you start to think about it, new or a synonym is often 
added to a genre when the genre is about to die. Nouveau roman - well, 
we still have novels, of a sort, but the classic novel of Dickens or 
Flaubert is not entirely in vogue.

Perhaps we should call new media new media precisely because it will 
soon explode the idea of media?

Or perhaps not.

In any case, it's hardly a new and observably not a doomed idea to 
prefix a genre with "new". The knowledge that it won't stay new forever 
has not stopped us before.

Jill

----
Jill Walker : Department of Humanistic Informatics : University of 
Bergen
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill