I've been taking this class for five weeks now, but I think I've only really now begun to understand what "new media" really is. Initially I though new media was the internet and technology. New media was Facebook, the itunes store, youtube, and basically any other technology that allowed us to interact with machines and each other, or conveyed information. I though that in the class we would be covering only this topic. In retrospect that would have been a fairly limited subject.
So it surprised me when Oulipo was included in the New Media Reader. I had though that Bush was included because he had to some degree predicted the internet, Licklider because he examined how computers might develop to help us, and Nelson because he devolved the idea of hypertext that was used in the internet. Covering those readings made sense to me. But what did "A Hundred Thousand Million Poems" have do with Myspace or Netflix? What about McLuhan’s analysis of how technological developments impact human societies? I had to rethink my idea of new media studies. I came to realize that Bush didn’t just predict the internet but explored how new technology might affect us. Furthermore, Nelson’s hypertext was something more complex than what we’d find on a website.
Now I think that new media is less about technology and articles that predicted the internet and more about expressing ourselves in new ways through new technology. It is further about understand how these new technologies and modes of expression affect us, or might affect us in the future. It involves plenty of analysis and philosophy. Maybe I would have understood this earlier if I had paid more attention to the introductions by Murry and Manovich. But I now finally understand why it is classified as an “area 1” requirement for Pomona, as it is similar to an English class in its analysis.

It would probably be hard to give a concrete definition to what "new media studies" encompasses, and I don’t know if anyone else has already tried, but I would challenge anyone, including Professor Fitzpatrick, to come up with one.