One more key element of New Media art and visual culture is the huge and, perhaps, not fully answerable question:
What is so different about New Media that makes it a distinct artistic and cultural category?
While not often raised directly by artworks themselves, this question permeates the entire field of New Media and is a point of critical discussion of Media Studies and many scholars. New Media as a field is quite similar to Contemporary Art: they both operate in roughly the same time frame, the latter usually agreed to be directly preceding the former; both raise questions of the definitions of art and attempt to blur boundaries between art and non-art; both tend to often be in direct response to current global events or issues; both are often largely conceptual in nature. What is it that makes us define New Media as separate from Contemporary Art?
Marshall McLuhan, known as the father of media studies
, is famous for the saying: . This, perhaps, is the one key lens through which we can propose the unique significance of New Media as a separate movement and field of study. McLuhan argues in his essay The Medium Is the Message that ...the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology
(203). It is not the content of the work that is transformative to the larger structures, but the medium of the work itself that drives change: a new medium allows for new possibilities, these possibilities allow people to interact with the world in a substantially different way, and the resulting change in the wider cultural systems result in both large-scale change and the demand for the development of current and future new media.
This theory suggests that despite the numerous parallels (which sometimes are not even parallel and are just purely identical) between New Media and Contemporary Art, the effect of the digital media greatly outweighs any conceptual significance of individual works. The media of television, Internet, digital photography and photo editing, artificial intelligence, video games, social media, computer applications - all these create a qualitatively different experience for the user and become extensions of man
, allowing for greater abilities that in turn shape how humans interact with each other, the wider systems, and the medium itself. The proposed key elements of hyper interconnectivity, transparency and visibility, community participation and grassroots organizing, existing culture mixing with conventions of technology, and the aesthetics of early stages of new technology all arise (or become qualitatively different from their previous historical iterations) through the effect of new digital media.
Perhaps this is the definitive answer to the question of what makes New Media so different
. Perhaps a few decades will pass, even more incomprehensibly impactful technology will arise, and what we now consider to be groundbreaking will be nothing more than the beginning of the introduction of humankind to a new technologically-driven era. I don’t believe this question will be answered soon, as not enough distance has been placed between the present day scholars and the temporal period of what is considered New Media art and visual culture (and, perhaps, Contemporary Art is just as fresh and will have to be reevaluated too).
However, whatever the future may bring, there is a shared feeling among many - scholars, artists, and viewers alike - that there is something important about this, some quality of the New Media experience that makes the present day feel so unlike anything the history has seen before.
