New media, social networking, and software development.

I would like to discuss the evolution, and merger of new media, social networking, and software development. During my presentation I would like to use 2 pieces of software as a demonstration of how developers of the entertainment software incorporate social networking, as well as new media ideas into their products. I will be discussing these issues on an example of "Steam", by VALVe, a digital content distribution system, as well as "Spore" a game developed by Maxis. I will discuss how the developers did intentionally incorporate the mentioned issues into their software, for the purpose of creating communities, creative growth, as well as for pure economic reasons. I will add aditional content to this post later on, in the mean time feel free to visit the main sites of interest: Spore Steam Here is also a video demonstration of Spore during the TED conference(Jul. 2007)

“The New Media technologies: Overview and research framework”

The review of “The New Media technologies: Overview and research framework” by Linda Weiser Friedman & Hershey H. Friedman. The paper is very informative, it presents to the reader a lot of information, all divided into separate sections, that deal with “new media”. It allows us to look at new media which is so common nowadays, from other perspective that sometimes we might be used to. The issues related to new media are defined into more specific groups, such as information relating to technology involved, the social influence of new media, the business applications and etcetera. The article gives a new comer to the “new media” topic an excellent overview, not only from the perspectives mentioned above, but also a “historical” perspective, which allows one to realize how “it” all begun, and evolved. Even though the idea of new media is an issue that is very temporally dependant, since the technology evolves so rapidly, I do believe that the paper does describe “new media” with the use of different definitions very well, since it is hard to pinpoint what is new media, without the use of time references. Since as described in the paper, there is a constant convergence of the new media with the old media, I enjoyed the comparison of this “evolution” to the “Darwinian’s” evolutional theory. New media is truly an evolving concept, and I also believe as it was stated that it is defined by: communication, collaboration, community, creativity, and convergence, but I also believe that it thrives upon it.

What is New Media?

A short video in which several leaders of the digital media community voice their opinions on "New Media".