New/Digital Media

UTOPIAN

Del Sola Polle (1977)

Suggests new media will facilitate a positive media world

A wider range of media texts can be produced that meet the needs of many more groups in society.

Provides individual citizens with the capacity to produce/publicise texts themselves.

This facilitates the growth of different media representations.

DYSTOPIAN

Habermas (1991)

Argues that media texts should provide a space for citizens to debate and criticise government actions & form public opinion.

Suggests new media outlets produce similar sorts of representations that focus primarily on celebrity and trivia.

Alternative Media Forms

New media technologies facilitate small-scale media productions.

This provides for alternative views that challenge dominant ideologies/values of society.

The Royal Commission on the Press (1977) defined alternative media as:

Dealing with the opinion of small minorities

Expressing attitudes hostile to widely held beliefs

Espousing views or dealing with subjects not given regular coverage by publications generally available at newsagents.

HISTORY OF NEW MEDIA

Theories can help define and characterize new media. In the book New Media, 1740–1915, media is examined as “a cultural process that involves not only the actual transmission of information but also the ritualized collocation of senders and recipients,” according to editors Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree. Thus, new media reflects societal values and societal transformation.

Modern Art

Modern Art or Modernism is the loose term given to the succession of styles and movements in art and architecture which dominated Western culture from 19th Century up until the 1960’s. Movements associated with Modern art include Impressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Futurism, Pop Art and Op Art. 

Modern Art rejects the past as a model for the art of the present and is characterized by constant innovation. Modern Art grew out of the Impressionist's rejection of the 'imitation of life' school of art. Their emphasis on the act of painting, on the paint itself, can be seen in the Expressionist and Cubist art of the turn-of-the-century.  Modern art was also often driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.

From the 1970’s artists and movements began to react against Modernism and post-modernism was formed.