New light: fragments and responsibilities

The phrase 'new media' asks one more time the question about periodisation. Do these media mark a genuine departure from earlier phases of modernity? Are they symptoms or precursors of biopower, avatars of fragmentation and commodification, epiphenomena of the triumph of the sign? Is the information economy a genuine break with material goods and services,  the intensification of global trade in audiences and attention, or a qualitative shift towards new orders of government and politics?

Binaries of triumph and doom are the all-too-familiar accompaniments of almost every technological innovation in media, by now a familiar construction of trauma. The newness of new media however rides only partially on their own innovation. To a great extent it relies on the changes overcoming the old media, as they repurpose themselves in the same process of change. Political life responds to the democratisation of the public sphere by removing itself from debate, replacing dialogue with public relations spin. At the same time, art responds to the rising skillset of new media artists with an apparent devaluation of skill and a revaluation of concept.

Pitched between civil society, the well-made media and the art world, new media reconfigure old tasks at a moment when the older arts have abandoned them. The relations of politicised aesthetics and aestheticised politics slouch round one more time: now each performs its metacommentary on the other, have their relations changed again?

Sean Cubitt, Screen and media Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand