Four guidelines for conquering new media

By Matthew Gillis

After a semester of exploring new media, I’ve decided to reflect on the digital experiences I’ve had and decide which lessons are worth taking with me as I continue to venture into the ever-changing world of technology. I’ve compiled a list of the four biggest lessons I’ve learned throughout my digital adventures that one should follow when conquering new media.

1. Create your own new media. As we’ve discovered, we’re all submerged in a world that is dominated by technology (whether we like it or not), and we’re dependent on it in order to function in society. Technology structures the way we maintain communication, from the use of cell phones to Facebook, to how we educate ourselves, from Google searches to social bookmarking. But the biggest lesson I’ve learned from our use of technology is that we have to learn how it works and the best way to do so is by creating our own new media. In the introduction to Douglas Rushkoff’s book Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age, he stresses that in order to maintain control in a world dominated by digital technologies, one must learn how they work to be able to manage his or her everyday life. Learn HTML, start a blog, or make a Twitter. Don’t you want control over your reality?

2. Embrace technology. The benefits of using many of the new media technologies that I’ve written about throughout the semester are seemingly endless. Specifically, social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Google Reader, and Delicious make gathering information easier and faster than ever before and supplement traditional media forms, such as newspapers and encyclopedias. Take advantage of our culture of shared thinking by connecting with others on LambdaMoo or by sharing your “random, fleeting observations,” which Julian Dibbell describes in “Future of Social Media: Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought,” on Twitter. Without a doubt, I’ve learned that there’s no harm in trying these technologies, which aim to comfort us and make our lives easier. You’re only doing yourself a disservice if you don’t.

3. New media isn’t perfect. Danah Boyd writes in her article “Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitious Web 2.0 Technologies for Everyday Life,” “As you build technologies that allow the magic of everyday people to manifest, I ask you to consider the good, the bad, and the ugly.” While you should take advantage of the benefits of new media, don’t forget that technology is not perfect, as I’m sure many of you have frustratingly experienced before. Your iPhone could break at any minute, your Wi-Fi could go down without warning, and your Facebook could become hacked. While new technologies usually generate utopian hopes for its users, as Fred Turner describes in “How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology,” it’s important to be aware that technology isn’t actually foolproof. In the same token, it’s important to question what you see when using these new technologies. In an age where everyone is a publisher online with sites such as Wikipedia, information is bound to be wrong. We can’t expect that what we’re reading is perfectly correct, or else we all may fall into a culture of misinformed people.

4. Look out for the future. I know it may seem impossible to predict what’s coming next in regard to new media, but I think it’s important to the process of deciding how to interact with the technology around us. As I wrote about it my last post, I believe that technology is headed toward a reduction of information with the use of imagery over text as seen in technologies such as Pinterest and Instagram. It’s important to be prepared for new technologies by educating ourselves about imagery as a communication form, for example, especially because that new media may end up being a part of our everyday lives.

Now go forth and dive into our media-filled world.

Question what you read

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Original.

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Edited.

By Matthew Gillis

Wikipedia has capitalized on today’s societal idea of shared thinking. What could be more valuable than an encyclopedia that is created and maintained by the one’s experiencing and learning the things they’re writing about?

After signing up for a Wikipedia account, I began looking for photography-related articles that I could knowledgeably contribute to. However, the surprising part of the Wikipedia experience is that you don’t have to know about the articles you want to edit. As Stacy Schiff explains in her article “Know It All,” Wikipedia doesn’t favor the university professor over the high school cheerleader. Like many aspects of the web, anyone can contribute.

However, I found many drawbacks to this collective contribution. As I was reading the photography page, I discovered countless grammatical errors, several biased entries, and numerous inaccuracies. Desiring to contribute to Wikipedia as a member of our shared-thinking culture, I corrected several of the grammatical errors, added information about amateur photography, and removed biased facts about commercial photography.

Before learning more about the process of a wiki site like Wikipedia, I had taken what I read on the site as truthful information, despite many of my teachers’ warnings. I find that to be true with many written and published information. You take what you see at face value, and you believe what you read. I mean, honestly, how many of you have ever questioned the veracity of a newspaper article? But what makes something in writing, whether online or in print, seem worthy of our trust?

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Original.

Photo By Matthew Gillis/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Edited.

I never believed that the edited information I provided was false, which made me surprised to find several of my contributions removed just hours later. While I see the practicality of having an “oversight” function, as Schiff describes, to eliminate vandals and inaccurate information, I was offended to see my work dismissed. Similarly, I am insulted when others edit my photographs to their liking. We gain a certain attachment to the works we create, whether in writing or through photography, and we tend to defend them as if they are the best, most truthful development.

I believe this is why we trust what we read. Once an idea is put into writing or captured on camera, we become attached to the validity of it, because we place high value on the time we took to create it. I think we overextend the idea of valuing effort to other people’s work as well.

Schiff suggests Wikipedia’s “breadth, efficiency, and accessibility” to be the site’s defining features over traditional encyclopedias. However, the reader’s false sense of trust with Wikipedia’s content (created by anyone, including Joe Shmoe) may be creating a culture of misinformed people.