The New Media Book (review)

The catchwords "new media" and "new technology" have permeated film, television, media, and communication studies for over a decade. Since 1990, emerging digital media technologies have increasingly become the hot topic for scholarly study in moving image culture, widely theorized in academic circles, and the subject of practical considerations. An archivist dealing with new media must continually ask the painful question: which "texts" and technologies should be stored, preserved, and made accessible to future generations? Dan Harries's The New Media Book refers to a vast array of technologies in the short span of its 250 pages: the Internet and World Wide Web, satellite broadcasting, digital and CGI effects, computer graphics, CDs and DVDs, cell phones and personal data assistants (PDAs), video games, computer graphics and software, digital music, online comics, high-definition television, digital video, and cinema. Even if we could conceive of an enormous digital archive (a new Library of Alexandria conceived as endless arrays of terabytes) to house these digital texts and preserve the technologies needed to access or play them, we would only be able to save a fraction of today's digital media creations. Questions we need to ask for future research include: Do we have to preserve not only the movies, but also their commercial tie-in Web sites, their DVD formats, their fans' Web sites, and intertextual digital publications? And if we are not able to save (and the present indicates we probably will not be able to) the vast majority of digital texts made since 1990, are the inclusions and exclusions from the digital archive going to reveal our contemporary moment's engagement with questions of technology and ideology, especially race, class, and gender?

Digital technologies are changing the way individuals are producing and consuming media texts. At the commercial level, we are witnessing major changes in production, distribution, and exhibition practices of new media. The essays in The New Media Book often return to lessons learned from older media as a useful guide to the present and future. Most new media have been developed in dialogue with existing "old" and established media formations such as cinema and television. The essays in this book tend to use historical context and previous models of technological change to blunt any facile notion of "newness." What emerge most frequently throughout the essays are snapshots of the contemporary media environment without the utopian or technological determinism of earlier new media writings. In fact, after reading this book, one might walk away recognizing Criterion laser discs, QuickTime movies, or "bullet time" cinematography from The Matrix as today's versions of silent film prints, the zoetrope, or Muybridge's chronophotography.

Since this book is published by the British Film Institute, The New Media Book emphasizes moving image culture and its two major forms, the cinematic and the televisual. While scholars in this collection, such as Sean Cubitt, who writes on special effects in cinema, or Michael Allen, who treats computer-generated imaging in mainstream movies, reveal the ways digital media tools have led to emerging cinematic or televisual practices that have formal and ideological implications, many of the other authors describe cinema or television as analogues to other digital culture practices, such as Web browsing or video game playing. Marsha Kinder's contribution on the role of narrative in films and games, built on a theoretical understanding of earlier cinematic experiments, is exemplary in this regard.

The New Media Book, with its limited and judicious use of cyber-this or e-that, is refreshingly free of the neologisms and jargon that have dated earlier anthologies of new media. In their place, the more ubiquitous term "digital" has emerged as the most frequently used synonym for new media. One slightly novel usage that appears a few times in the book is "viewser." Articulated most fully in Dan Harries's essay contribution to this volume, "viewser" is a hybrid of "viewer" and "user." The term is necessary to bridge the more...