Emergence of new media

The wider kinds of social and cultural change were being identified and described and had been, to varying degrees, from the 1960s onwards. The following are indicative of wider kinds of social, economic and cultural change with which new media are associated:

(i)                 A shift from modernity to post modernity - a contested, but widely subscribed attempt to characterize deep and structural changes in societies from the 1960s onwards, with correlative cultural changes. In terms of their aesthetics and economies new media are usually seen as a key marker of such changes.

(ii)               Intensifying process of globalization -  a dissolving of national states and

                  boundaries in terms of trade, corporate organizations, cultures and customs,

                  identities and beliefs.  

(iii)             A replacement, in the West, of an industrial age of manufacturing by a ‘post-industrial’ information age – a shift in employment, skill, investment and profit, in the production of  material goods to service and information

                  ‘industries’ which many uses of new media are seen to epitomize.

(iv)             A decentring of established and centralized geopolitical orders: the weakening of mechanisms of power and control from Western colonial centres, facilitated by the dispersed, boundary-transgressing, networks of new communication media.

 

New media were caught up and seen as part of these other kinds of change, and the sense of ‘new times’ and ‘new eras’ which followed in their wake. In this sense, the emergence of ‘new media’ as some kind of epoch-making phenomena, was, and still is, seen as part of a much larger landscape of social, technological and change, in short, as part of a new techno culture.

Indian perspective : Digital Revolution in India