Ever since the beginning of time, people have taken it upon themselves to improve on existing technologies.  These gradual improvements have taken mankind to where it is today.  One such area of human improvement is media and communication.  Humans developed languages and writing systems, riggings and machines, and mass communication and computerization.  In other words, new media as defined by the modern man is the development and use of new technologies in order to create a partially or fully digitized product.  With every new technological improvement that people develop comes a shift in cultural perspective and language.  Humans are constantly adding new words and contexts to their vocabulary.  For example, before the 21^st century, “becoming friends” heavily involved face-to-face interaction and “tweeting” was an action only reserved for birds.  New meanings attached to existing vocabulary is a sign of intersubjectivity of cultures.  They have standardized meanings associated with specific symbols, something that would be more difficult to do without the aid of computers.

In his piece, Manovich lays out differences between old and new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.  In order to create new media, old media has to be digitized into numerical representation in two steps: sampling and quantization.  Through this process, there is the digitalization (or at least the partial digitalization) of media as well as the opportunity for individual customization.  Modularity refers to the ability of new media components to retain independence even through the combination of many modules and sub-modules.  Numerical representation and modularity allow humans to program automated actions, thereby removing humans from the digitization process if they so choose.  These automations can be as trivial as a photo-editing command or as complex as developing artificial intelligence.  Automations are not only limited to pre-recorded actions, but also to the conversion of information from paper to computers databases.  Computerization allows us to compile hundreds of years of history and information into a non-tangible space.  Variability, refers to new media’s ability to have multiple versions of anything.  It makes clear modern society’s rejection of the industrial society’s ideal of standardization and the new phase of individual customization.  Variability is dependent on both numerical representation and modules, which allow components to be arranged in numerous orders.  Transcoding is the characteristic of new media in which two layers of information are read: a “cultural layer” and a “computer layer.”  The computer layer is simply computerized data as a computer would understand it.  The cultural layer is the meanings and contexts that humans interpret from computer-generated symbols such as images, words, etc.

New media has had a profound effect on our culture and society because of its universality.  But in a sense, new media is a culture in and of itself that transcends every other existing society.  It is this generation’s improvement on technology and represents what is to be left of our time.  New technologies have swept over the modern world like wildfire, leaving behind converted land and peoples in its wake.