Here I was thinking I was very sophisticated interacting with digital technology like no generation before in my new media environment until Lev Manovich had to come and bop me on the head and say, "sorry silly, your just using and old media with a fancy spit polish and a semi conductor". And in a tempered response I quipped, "Well pardon me Mr. Manovich, I was under the impression my grandmother did not use myspace to communicate with her friends when she was a young girl". He responded, "Quid pro quo good Sir, for you see myspace is nothing more than a virtual malt shop, it is the same connection existent in 'potentially infinite versions', why new media is nothing more than 'old media converted to computing'”. The conversation ended with a "good day," and I was on my way.

So I am now gleefully confused with what "new media" is. Its not that I disagree completely with Manovich, that the same type of fundamental interaction one has with new technology is not different than the interactions and relationships of the past, I just would like to believe that our modern advancement has in some way allowed us to enter a new type of existence with connections no one in the past could have imagined or conceived.

Perhaps he is right, that in the last one hundred years the connections are very similar; writing a letter now like an email, victrola to ipod, pictures to movies; but in what is the more expansive view of the existence of man, I would say our methods of communication and interaction with the world have developed substantially; pictographs to an alphabet, fire to science, wheel to engine. So yes maybe new media isn't all that new, but it is certainly not that old.

Sure there are basic instinctual modes of interaction, but I believe technology and new media builds on these and creates new modes in the process. It is essentially an argument that every advancement builds on a previous advancement, but then to say that advancement does not represent a fundamental change or that since at its core it is a similar type of action, it makes our new technology not so philosophically groundbreaking.

I disagree, myspace is more than a malt shop ever was, they are different, and people go to each for a different social reason. If they were the same, both services would not exists in todays world. Digital media does incorporate concepts of the non virtual world, but it is not like the real world. It is infinitely expanding and unrestricted, while the real world is much more static and limited to the confines of its resources and time. Digital media is without bounds and that fundamentally changes any interaction one has with it to one unlike that of the analog world.