What is new media (so far...)

New Media as a class has not been quite what I expected. This has without a doubt been a very elusive topic. Yes the the new Dell PC is "new media" and the Apple iPhone is "new media" as well. And though I expected the class to look at some of these examples of new media more closly and perhaps the social, cultural and technological underpinnings that brought them about, I never expected the class to be about cyborgs. I will now attempt to summerize what new media is.

It does make sense though to have the class about cyborgs (now it does, though I am still a bit confused at times). It makes sense that in order to truly understand these new technologies a person must understand not only themselves but their location within the universe. I use the term 'location' in as much the literal sense as I do the metaphysical sense. I hold that McLuhans message that we must understand media or we will be controlled by it. McLuhan also states that media are political and for something to be political necessitates that it effects the body. These statments help to break us from our traditional line of thinking and allows for the cyborg to enter in.

The cyborg is as Harraway states an "ironic political myth." The cyborg is a hybrid; a combination of the physical and the additional. The cyborg seems to have all the knowledge and associations without the boundaries that typically come with knowledge and society. Due to this, the cyborg moves beyond those myths (the associations and boundaries that confine us)while still retaining them; able to pull them apart and reconstruct them in a way that is suitable for the 'now.' The cyborg moves from the old to the new.In this way, the cyborg is the effect that new media has on the body (physical and spiritual).

So what is new media? New media, in all of it's conventions, allows us to move beyond ourselves and come into our own.

Or something like that...