Re: <nettime> What *ARE* New Media?

[Brandon Keim <brandon@gene-watch.org>]

> Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:36:52 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> What *ARE* New Media?
> 
> But is it acoustic, or, more radically, dispersion? I see more and more
> people doing wifi hotspots, cellphone with sms, etc. etc. Surroundsound is
> still monolith, house-bound, Cartesian; there's always a focus, an origin
> - - - the screen itself (btw I can't believe that the consumer market's
> dominated by home theaters - I would have thought wifi pdas, gameboys
> etc., game phone etc.).

So home entertainment centers are 'monolith' because there's always a
'focus' -- but somehow PDAs, gameboys, and the like are different?  There's
nothing more pathetic than some poor schlepp on the subway with his eyes
glued to a three-square-inch PDA screen, dead to the world around him.  The
advent of improved devices -- larger screens, more color -- somehow feels
even more pathetic, as if attempts at improvement only throw into relief the
fundamental limitations; and as for little kids who run around with gameboys
stuck to their faces, they are sad, for they are learning to dull themselves
to their surroundings.

'The pda is almost like the concretization of my thought' . . . ?  If this
is new media, you can have it; I have no wish to concretize my thoughts in
something so limited.

However, I would really, really love to have a pair of souped-up glasses
which transformed the baseline view of reality according to programmed
specifications; so I would see what was around me, but rendered as a
Japanese woodcut, a Van Gogh, on some days a Picasso . . . and so on.  That
would be genuinely new media.  In the meantime I'll use my imagination.

b

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