Paul Levinson’s New New Media captures essence of the participatory internet – Book Review
Paul Levinson is a foremost authority on media and communications, and his most recent book, New New Media, contributes significantly to that reputation. New New Media is a comprehensive introduction and users’ guide to what is known as “web 2.0,” the multiple forms of electronic interaction that did not exist in our culture only a few years ago. Levinson explores how these technologies are supplanting our attention and engagement, and therefore transforming our society.
This is the missing textbook to the course that everyone is taking. In it Levinson not only enumerates the various classes of new new media and their relationships with older forms, such as newspaper to blog or television to YouTube, he also, through means of germane examples from the contemporary political and social sphere, illustrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of each of these new forms, making it an excellent primer for thoughtful engagement with the unfolding culture.
Levinson’s intellectual pedigree makes him ideally suited to render opinion on the range of new communication platforms like Wikipedia, MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter. His expertise as a scholar of media captures the essence of this new new milieu. Similar to McLuhan in the sixties, Levinson aims his (digital) camera at the present moment to quadrangulate the future not from the past, but from the present. New New Media demarcates a whole new class of communication media, which transform both time and space:
“Here in our 21st century, all new new media are both space-binding and time-binding, due to the speed (across space) and retrievability (across time) of any information conveyed on the Web.”
While Levinson continues to contribute to the field of Media Ecology with this new work (he is Chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies at Fordham University), New New Media is less scholarly interpretation and more a mash-up of reportage and travelogue. Levinson’s narrative functions as “the antennae of society,” capturing the transitory inputs in our movement from consumer to participatory culture, while fully understanding that the hidden ground of how we are communicating with one another represents the part we cannot see of our own unfolding.
He demonstrates that while the medium may still be the message, in new new media, the messenger is the medium. The social aspect of the media experience is placed at the forefront of our interactions with new new media and Levinson observes that the speed of participation is also heightened in an era when “anyone reading a blog can start a blog nearly instantly.”
New New Media speaks of Levinson’s own participation with these forms. He is both a blogger and podcaster, and there is no doubt that he intends to extend his new book through the very tools that he describes:
“I expect that New New Media and its updates will be available not only on printed paper but in various forms on the Web…”
In this way, Levinson aims to understand not just the qualities that define a medium as “new new,” but also the transformative effects that our contemporary communications have on culture and society, and the forms of that culture, our media, like books.
New New Media serves both as a compendium to the present age of communication media and also as a record of how we first engaged with these “open forms”. Everyone knows someone who is openly critical of new new media, perhaps without understanding how these emergent forms exist to compliment our new technologies and modes of interaction. If there is a Luddite on your gift-giving list, New New Media would be an excellent choice to help them seem less like a Connecticut Yankee at a Star Trek convention, and more like a citizen of this day and age.
You can enjoy a free chapter on Twitter from New New Media here.
Review by Ken Hudson
