Starting in 2018, I will be teaching a course in Writing for New Media. I'm excited because it's an opportunity to push past the obvious utterances like "new media = web" and "short paragraphs, use 'you' a lot," and to actually dig in to what we mean by all of the terms in the title.
For example, when we say "new," do we mean the 21st century? Because the tools and techniques of 2001 have already been pushed aside in favor of emerging practices and loci. Don't believe me? Go update your LiveJournal and tell your buddies on Friendster. Do we mean the 20th century? Shall we challenge our conventions of telegraphy? And do old mediums ever really die? Do they evolve?
The Ship of Theseus: Take the telegraph, keep the tele, remove the graph, add a phone, drop the phone, pour in bits, drop the tele (Greek: far off / far away), make it immediate...is it still the same ship?
As for media, that term implies a middle -- something in between (media - medium...something between the observer and the thing) and of course in the postmodern we know that everything is itself a thing. There is nothing BUT media such that the thing itself is media.
So given this mind-boggling weirdness, what will it mean to write?
I am challenged to theorize my praxis like never before. I have written for the web, for television, and of course for "traditional" (whose traditions?) publications, but now I will be looking for consistent threads, recursive tropes, a persistent zeitgeist, and simultaenously points of departure and fragmentation.
The ecology of new media, teaming with life - let's dive in!
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