New Media Manifesto

The arrival of new media and its digital form introduced new possibilities to content creators. As computers evolved and became more and more affordable, people started to be on both ends as the consumer and the creator. From that point, the idea of authorship started to change. 

It was no longer required to create from scratch. Softwares allowed anyone to not only create content more easily but also to take someone else creation and build upon it. Additionally, softwares to make other softwares gained tremendous popularity, creating this loop of infinite creativity. The line between the author and the consumer started to be less and less distinguishable.

Later, the arrival of the Internet and Social Medias also altered this idea of authorship as people started to come together and collectively contribute to each other's creation. A participatory culture was born.

Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1995)

Software to edit and remix content

The particularity of New Media is that it seems like it was never intended to be consumed only. As softwares started to gain popularity in the mid-80's, they always had the option to both view and create content. The application "Notepad" for instance, since it became available in 1985, has always allowed users to not only view text files content but also to create new ones. Similarly, more advanced softwares such as Adobe Photoshop can open almost any digital picture but also provides powerful tools to create new content, often based on someone else creation.

Software to create more software

Steve Job's introduction of the Mobile App Store in 2009 pushed this idea that anyone can become a content creator. 

Apple introduced a series of tools under the name of "iPhone SDK" that would allow anyone to create mobile apps for iPhone. Although similar tools existed long before the iPhone era, Apple made it more accessible. They made it sound as if learning to code and creating content was easy and that anyone can do it.  

The Internet, Social Media, and Participatory Culture

The Internet and the raise of Social Media created an interesting culture where both the consumer and the author can collaborate and together be the creators.

Real Men Real Style's creator Antonio is one example as he started a YouTube Channel to help men to better dress and take care of their personal image. The channel originally offered content based on Antonio's ideas but soon shifted to topics requested by his audience. Soon enough, all of his videos were based on followers' ideas. 

2011 Video

 

2016 

A culture of anyone can by anything started to also gain popularity with business pushing this idea of DIY.

Community Curation Creation

https://jbrodriguezsite.wordpress.com


Since this project required the participation of a community, it was interesting to see its development thought the period it was publicly available. Although the idea of social medias is to make us believe that we can easily reach out to anyone and make connections, it is a different story to invite others to reach out. When I first posted my invitation on Facebook, it took a good hour before I got any response. This was surprising to me considering how quick people have engaged in some of my previous posts. Additionally, with over 1000 friends, I was expecting great participation. But this one was different since it was asking something specific rather than indirectly inviting anyone to share their opinion. It was posted at a prime time when there's usually a great amount of activity on Facebook but still failed to reach out people. At first, it seems that the invitation of sharing a weird dream was perhaps a little too intimidating. After a few hours, more people started to engage but participation was still low.  It is interesting that I had to manually extend invitation to some of my friends to get the conversation going. After some more inputs, more and more people engaged and finally I was able to reach a great level of participation.

I think it is fair to say that communities engaging in new media want it to be simple. People are also more willing to engage if it comes on their own. New Media seems to be a culture of "we only engage when its convenient." We read emails and texts whenever we want and reply also whenever we want. In the end, community still engage but those factors (and many others) definitely affect participation.