New Media

I've been "part of the internet" for more than half my life now. And it's been an extraordinary experience altogether. It's magical to see new ways of thinking emerge (and eventually subdue) in this brave new world, to see how brilliantly or terribly people can interact and exchange thoughts and knowledge and creativity, to be part of things you never imagined could exist.

What I really want to comment on here, though, is the effect the internet has had on expressing oneself. Anyone who wants to can interact, in one way or another, with the rest of the world out there, and more so as the damn thing spreads in faster-than-electrons speed. And the greatest part of this is that anyone can potentially offer golden parts of their soul to others, should they care to share them and should others care to discover them.

New media have been emerging ever since the beginning. And I'm not just referring to web design or the graphic arts here, which have gone a long, long way already. Nor am I referring to colder, yet still containing insight and creativity, forms of creation like advertising or copywriting of all kinds, or programming or online gaming. I really have no idea what my focal point is, but it's probably the kinds of media that have attracted me personally, either as a "creator" or a "consumer".

From fields like film, tv, comics and animation, you get flash animations, or fanfilms and zero-budget videos, or webcomics, or even machinima - short films or series created using a game engine. From fields like writing you get things like blogging or forum posting or online magazines and fiction depots where anyone can post and share the stories they write and comment on them. From the traditional arts have stemmed fields like digital art, via personal websites or online galleries. All of them almost zero-cost ways to communicate, making the media market so unstable it trembles in its feet - in a good way mostly. And I'm impressed, every single time I discover something new.