> A good example of how some areas of > wikipedia are suffering from a lack of participation. It's probably > because most media activists are busy posting on their own websites...
I am not sure whether the opposite is always helpful. As much as I respect Olia, I don't find her edits of the Wikipedia article very constructive. Before her edit, the article said: | New media usually refers to a group of relatively recent mass media | based on new information technology. It is based on computing technology | and not reducible to communication in a traditional sense. Most | frequently the label would be understood to include the Internet and | World Wide Web, video games and interactive media, CD-ROM and other | forms of multimedia popular from the 1990s on. The phrase came to | prominence in the 1990s, and is often used by technology writers like | those at Wired magazine and by scholars in media studies. | | The term has garnered negative connotations due to techno-utopian claims | by new-media proponents about the revolutionary social and personal | benefits of new media; the claims of revolutionary transformation of | people's lives were widely seen as unjustified. All the same, new media | have only grown in popularity, and their current ubiquity is slowly | causing social changes; their initial proponents' error may have been in | the speed with which they claimed media would transform society, rather | than the prediction itself. [...] While this is not perfect, it's not a bad text either. Olia completely deleted it and replaced it with: | New Media is the field of study that has developed around cultural | practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for | production, storage and distribution. | | New Media studies reflect on the social and ideological impact of the | personal computer, computer networks, digital mobile devices, ubiquitous | computing and virtual reality. The study includes researchers and | propagators of new forms of artistic practices such as interactive | installations, net art, software art, the subsets of interaction, | interface design and the concepts of interactivity, multimedia and | remediation. | | Media, in the plural, refers to the variety of technologies and formats, | (such as computer games, the World Wide Web and Virtual Reality), that | have been developed over the past few decades. | | "New" in this context means: | | * the relative novelty of digital computing | * a belief in the computer as the future | * the unprecedented speed of evolution and mutation of devices and | * technologies | * undeveloped, imperfect and experimental environments | * subjective novelty, (most of the artists and theoreticians | * currently studying digital culture have migrated from different | * disciplines) The whole entry, IMHO, is based on a confusion of the term "new media" with "new media studies" and should have been a separate article with the according title. Two other editors subsequently abriged Olia's text into the following: | New media is an umbrella term for media that are based on new | technologies. Triggered by the media theories of Siegfried Kracauer and | Marshall McLuhan, film, radio and television were subsequently | understood as new media in the 1940s to 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, | the term was primarily identified with video, since the 1990s with | computers and the Internet. The term "media" is sometimes used as an | abbreviation of "new media". | | New media are also the common denominator of such disciplines as (new) | media art (from Nam June Paik to net.art), (new) media activism, (new) | media studies (from Marshall McLuhan to Lev Manovich) and journalistic | media criticism (from Neil Postman to Howard Rheingold). [...] Obviously disagreeing, Olia has deleted the above text again and replaced it with her previous version of the article. -F -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
