Longform and listicles, tinyletters and tweetdecks, snowfalls and subreddits — we are awash with new forms of media. Each new day seems to bring a special new media experience: Blogs pop up over here; data visualizations, over there. And really — how the heck did podcasting become relevant again?
It
all seems random, but if you look closely, and live long enough to
actually care, you start to see patterns — a historical logic to new
media emerges from the seemingly happenstance. And more importantly, if
it is indeed a stable history, if our media inventions are not random,
then we inhabit a predictable environment. We can see the future in the
past.
This
brief history of new media sketches a timeline for how we ended up
where we are. It proposes three phases of media innovation — Surfing, Drowning, Diving — to outline what has happened and to anticipate what comes next.
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