From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
New media usually refers to a group of relatively recent mass media based on new information technology. Most freqently the label would be understood to include the Internet and World Wide Web, video games and interactive media, CD-ROM and other forms of multimedia popular from the 1990s on. The phrase came to prominence in the 1990s, and is often used by technology writers like those at Wired magazine and by scholars in media studies.
The term has garnered negative associations due to techno-utopian claims by new-media proponents about the revolutionary social and personal benefits of new media; the claims of revolutionary transformation of people's lives were widely seen as unjustified. All the same, new media have only grown in popularity, and their current ubiquity is slowly causing social changes; their initial proponents' error may have been in the speed with which they claimed media would tranform society, rather than the prediction itself.
See also: mass media -- media studies -- medium
