What have we learned from the seminar so far?

The seminar, so far, was an interesting journey, starting with Marshall McLuhan’s definition of what he considered New Media in his time up until the question of what we currently see as contemporary forms of media, be it remediated versions of older media, such as digital paintings in contrary to classical paintings with pen and paper, or completely new forms of media (and here I can’t even think of anything which is not, at least in some way, only remediation, but something completely new; maybe someone can help me out here. Do we even have something really new? Have we reached our limits already? I hope not…). When we continued talking about the New New Medium on the basis of images, movies and videos, we were questioning our perception of reality: in this highly manipulative world of media things can no longer be guaranteed as visual truth. What is reality? Who defines the truth? Taking a closer look at the example of video games, we see that this form of new media combines various kinds of media and creates something new. We came to the conclusion that video games have emerged into a whole new culture, which is not limited to being one form of new media, but remediates various kinds of media, be it music, movies or traditional arts.

The symposiums were dealing with really interesting questions and conveyed some intriguing approaches to trying to explain the different forms of New Media and how we perceive them; I am looking forward to the remaining sessions.