New media everywhere

Matt Kirschenbaum asks “What if new media simply became a part of what writers and artists did, not something special or new?”

Well, first thing you’d need to do is stop calling what we do new media, but that’s peripheral. I’d tweak Matt’s question just slightly to ask: What if new media — or whatever name we give it — is just something that people do? Not artists or writers, per se, but people in general. New media is, after all, just expression, creation, manipulation using a computer. Some of it is mundane (e-mail), some of it is beautiful though perhaps not art (elegent code)*, and some of it would qualify as art because of the way it partipcates in an emotional and intellectual dialogue with the viewer/user. Digital communication today is a completely normal mode of human expression for most people. Very little is ‘new’ about it, even if it is very young medium. So I’m with Matt. Let’s ride that bandwagon of normalcy. If we ply our trade well it will be highly considered, irrespective of medium designations.

* This is a topic for another day. I’m not so sure code isn’t art.