Member-only story
A Decade of Doing New Media, An Academic Look Back at the 2010s
In January 2009, I was three years into a web television study and preparing to teach an introduction to digital media course within a traditional media comm school. Just before the semester began, a spectacular and honestly, shoddy photograph changed the way I saw New Media. A man named Janis Krums was aboard a commuter ferry when Captain “Sully” Sullenberger successfully crash landed his plane in the Hudson River. The ferry acted as the first responder and Krums took a photo (vertically and through dirty plexiglass) of the event. While journalists raced to the West side of New York City, Krums had already uploaded the image to Twitpic with the caption “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick people up. Crazy.” His iPhone 3G photo was front page on several newspapers the next day. It inspired me to propose a more holistic pedagogical approach to new media studies.
Originally, in my naïveté, my digital media course was founded on the idea that web television would define the next decade, that independent creators would manage to dismantle the gatekeeping of traditional media, and that YouTube, the site still in its early years, would usher in a new era of media. Although the decade unfolded more similarly to the manner Tim Wu predicted, I still felt students needed to be prepared for as the shifts in media…
