As a general trend, new media is essentially becoming digital. But what does this mean, and perhaps more importantly, why does it matter?

What we as humans are doing by moving toward new media is viewing what was once old media with higher resolution. Just as we examined the real world as a continuous structure with the naked eye but now realize that it can be broken into exceedingly small particles, we are breaking down photographs, video, text--all things we consider continuous--and re-examining them under a digital media microscope. In this sense, becoming digital is not really moving toward the new, but rather, looking at the old anew. We always had the ability to customize film and distribute it; anyone with the patience and the money could have taken an old movie film reel and pieced it into their own creation. The digital age has brought instead a new way of looking at the old; a way that makes it far easier to customize, to personalize, and to create.

On a physical and chemical level, photographs are digital, but on a level that we cannot easily manipulate. The swaths of shade and color, light and dark are really collections of atoms lined in arrays, reflecting very particular amounts of light at very particular wavelengths. Quite simply, our growth into the digital allows us to create a reality that competes with what is. The resolution is a bit choppy, and the computing power a bit limited, but we are slipping into ways of creating that rival the intricacies that define our reality. We have not created a new media, we have done more than that. We have created a new way of representing and creating reality, something we have always done through media in the first place.

In our last reading, we discovered Manovich's perspective on the "New Media" and how it can be differentiated from old media. Each of the issues he presents can also be applied to our becoming digital: Things are indeed becoming represented by numerical atoms, so to speak and are packaged into modules; this is the "physical" part of digital..but it isnt the only part. The most critical aspect of becoming digital is the affect it is having on us as humans. With this increased ability to create and share, there is a lot more creativity going around, the big companies are listening to the little people, there are completely new ways to interpret and convey the same old meaning. The "new media" that is emerging from becoming digital is bringing about a completely new societal construct. People are no longer limited by the amount of money they have, the time-zone they live in, or their technical abilities. The Digital age gives the average user the power to construct, define, and share reality, digitally.

Becoming digital may bring a lot of things to the table, but the most important thing it does for us is allow us to easily share our reality at a resolution unheard of in the past.