New Media
New Media is a term used to define all that is related to the internet and the interplay between technology, images and sound. As studies of online community proliferate, the concept of online community has become a more accepted social construct. Studies encompassed discursive communities; identity; community as social reality; networking; the public sphere; ease and anonymity in interactions. These studies show that online community is an important social construct in terms of its cultural, structural, political and economic character.
It has been demonstrated that people's ideas about community are formed, in part, through interactions both in online forums as well as those in face to face interactions. As a result, people act in their communities according to the meanings they derive about their environment, whether online or offline, from those interactions. This perspective reveals that online communication may very well take on different meanings for different people depending on information, circumstance, relationships, power, and other systems that make up communities of practice. People enact community the way it is conceived and the meaning of community evolves as they come up with new ways to utilize it. Given this reality, scholars are continually challenged to research and understand how online communities are comprised, how they function, and how they are connected to offline social life.
Symbolic Interaction Theory was discussed in “The Cyberself: The Self-ing Project goes online, Symbolic Interaction in the Digital Age.” Robinson discusses how Symbolic Interaction theory explains the way individuals create a sense of self through their interactions with others. However, she believes advances in technology have changed this. The article investigates the manner in which individuals form their online identity. She uses symbolic interaction theory to examine the formation of the cyber “I” and a digital “generalized other.” In the article, Robinson suggests individuals form new identities on the internet. She argues these cyber identities are not necessarily the way the individual would be perceived offline.
Read more about this topic: Symbolic Interactionism
Famous quotes containing the word media:
“Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children’s attention. While parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)