What is New Media?

The easiest way to define New Media is Facebook, Twitter and Blogs.

However, New Media encompasses a simple list of technologies such as:

• HTML

• CD-ROMS and DVD-ROMS
  
• Streaming Media (Music and Videos),
• Web Applications,
• Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Friendster,
  
• blogs and wikis
  
• online chatting
• Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
• Media Sharing
• Internet Searching Tools
• Podcasting
• E-Commerce and Online Shopping
  

The development of the internet paved way to the evolution of New Media. If the internet were still nonexistent, we would never experience the global advantages of using New Media. If we realize from the above examples of New Media, most of them, if not all, use the internet to function. Because of the internet, it does not matter wherever you are located in the world. You can chat with your relatives online even if they are right in the other side of the world; you can even listen to internet radios and share media. The Internet remains a space of opportunity to everybody through the use of New Media.

What we call now as Old Media was also once new. But as developments occur, so does the transformation of New Media from Old Media. New Media is the improved and digitized version of Old Media. How did they transform? Here are some examples of Old Media and their respective equivalents in New Media today:

• From Books, we now have e-books, online encyclopedias and wikis.

• From Journals, online blogs are now available for writers and those love writing

• Nowadays, we use texting and Voice Over Internet Protocols replacing our telephones
• We can now listen to music of our preference through podcasts. They now replace our radio stations
  
• Instead of televisions, we can now watch episodes on the internet through Video Sharing and Video Streaming sites.

An article from the New York Times entitled "Who Needs a TV? I’m Watching on a Laptop," discusses about one of the trend that people do nowadays, watching shows on a laptop instead of the television. It cites some sites that offers free online viewing of shows. It's amazing how we are able to save more time watching the shows that we only want to see rather than flipping through channels to see what's on.