New Media

Looking back on the history of old media there are a series of events, technologies and cultural conditions which gave rise to the concept of New Media.  Industrialization can essentially be looked upon with various opinions such as “the enemy of free thought and individuality; producing an essentially cold and soulless universe”. (Creeber, 2009, p.12)  Creeber believes that with the significant development and advance on technology it is having brutal effects on human life.
“Consumer culture dominates the cultural sphere that we live in”. (Creeber, 2009, p.14) Cultural changes are accepted as the inescapable due to our consumer society, where both consumption and leisure have become what clinch’s our experiences rather than work and production.
“Some critics have suggested that the differences between human and machine is now beginning to disappear, tending to eradicate the old ‘human’ versus ‘technology’ binary opposition upon which so much off the pessimistic theories of modernism were based” (Creeber, 2009, p.17)
Modernism tends to believe positively when it regards the power of modernity and to revolutionise human life for the better. Then modernism discerned modernity as self-contradictory due to the clash of it celebrating the technological age and an uncivilised disapproval of it.
We can select and approve which identity we want to adapt to. Creeber argues that with the significant increase in interactivity of New Media, consumers get to make their own identities. This is helped through websites like Facebook, twitter and MySpace where the user can create profiles where there is no filter to the content that is published, whereas in the past we were limited to things we do with our lives.
Andy Warhol’s pieces of work can be understood as basically ‘postmodern’. Warhol’s ‘Campbell’s soup cans’ (1962) disorganises the distinction by which we seen as “’art’ and products of ‘mass production’” (Creeber, 2009, p.17)