Towards a generalization of new media

Abstract

With the spate of new media for different purposes, how should we study them collectively so that we can have a better understanding of them to develop their next generation? In this paper, we generalize new media from a designer’s perspective and adopt digital artifacts from new media including digital video, digital music, and websites to represent new media. We find out that these digital artifacts possess many characteristics of cultural products; therefore, it is possible to use the creative work ontology, which has a special focus on cultural products, as a starting point to generalize new media. We conclude that new media have rules, structures, features, and biases for the generalization.