When Lev Monovich asked the question “What Is New Media” from his article published in “The Language of New Media” it did make me think of my opinion of the subject itself. One could ask themselves, if they any knowledge of when new forms of technology became the norm, where does one media era end and the other begin.

Does new media of the 2010s include something like VCRs which first came out in 1975 and mainstreamed by the middle 1980s. Does it include DVRs that were introduced in the 1990s and were used by a large majority of homes by the middle of the 2000s. Are both of these technologies now old media as one increasingly streams what they want, when they want it. Or are streaming services merely an extension of something that has been slowly progressing for the past four decades.

Are video games new media when they were first introduced for home use with the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console in 1972. Video Games in research seemly reached their zeitgeist around 1982 and 1983 when the older dominant video console by Atari beat out one of the then dominant three television broadcast networks in the Neilson ratings and had several major competitors with in Intellivision and ColecoVision. Not only did they have a huge percentage of the population playing their video games in the early 1980s, the video dominated the public consciousness with every product tie in imaginable. Video Games of the time like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Q-Burt and others not only had their own national televised TV shows but were also had their own products from canned pastas, cereals, bed sheets, watches, wall paper to just about every other product imaginable.

So one can ask themselves, did “New Media” begin in 1991 with the beginning of the Information Age in the wake of the arrival of the World Wide Web or with such mainstream accessibility to the previous mentioned products and how deep they went into the publics conscious and psych, did the New Media revolution actually start will before the 1990s. Where do these created era stop and start terms end? Some have argued, for example, that a new era was begun in 2003 with the arrival of Friendster and MySpace and the beginning of “Internet 2.0”. Others will say the the internet has continued to mostly driven by companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, eBay etc. that have their beginnings in the 1990s. Still others will argue that a new era was begun with the introduction of the Apple i Phone in June 2007 and the arrival of the smart phone. Still, people state that is nothing more than taking the computers and laptops or the 1990s and making them smaller while others state that it’s not the start of a something new but the mainstreaming of what PalmPilot and BlackBerry introduced in 1997 and 1999 respectively.

My personal thought is that we can trace most new media from the early 1990s and the mainstreaming of the internet, at first with the wide spread acceptance of email. While Video Games may have debatable older mainstream success, much of what we use today is based around the ability of tons of information to be accessed fast and easily. This was not as possible to the general person until the arrival of the internet into the average home in the 1990s via such services as AOL, Prodigy and others. Though CompuServe and bulletin boards may have been access by a small percentage of the population, it took an easier to use system like AOL to bring it to the masses. Though VCRs let people time shift shows and watch movies when they want at home for the first time, it’s a system that is not as easily accessed and not as affordable as streaming is in our current time. Previous products will always be what influences future ones, but with New Media our current system is not brand new as some may say, but it’s also not quite a quarter of a century old yet as well.