The last few decades have seen radical changes in technological advances and developments. The term “new media” is difficult to define in the vast jungle of technological advances that affect many areas of society today. 3D-televisions, smartboards, DVD’s, recording devices, cellphones, tablets, iPads, smartwatches, Google Glasses and computers are only a trifling list of technological devices invented in the last 30 years. It is also impossible to ignore the creation of the World Wide Web in 1995, with its radical growth from sixteen million users in 1995, to three thousand and seventy-nine million in December 2014 (cf. Internet World Stats 2015). The internet is changing the daily life of individuals in areas such as shopping, job hunting …show more content…
It can be considered a specific sub-category of new media. Likewise, digital media could also be regarded as a sub-category of new media as it is defined as “audio, video, and images that exist in a computer-readable format, and can reside on a local device (CD, DVD, hard drive), or remote location (website)” (University of Guelph 2006, n.p., quoted in Spears et al. 2015, 1). Digital media is hence a more specific aspect of new media. As media itself is used as an umbrella term for a number of distinct categories, so too new media “seems to escape its very definition” (Socha and Eber-Schmid 2012, n.p.). Not only does the broad terminology depict a problem, but the use of the word ‘new’ further amplifies the difficulty of knowing what new media actually is. “The very prospect of being ‘new’ denotes an event just beyond the horizon, something that has only just arrived and which we are just beginning to get our hands on” (Socha and Eber-Schmid 2012, n.p.). Comparing yearly advances to technological devices created only five years ago, it is clear that defining ‘new’ is not easy. Where do we draw the distinction between ‘new’ and