New Media is about platforms, it gets its existence as 'media' from these. These platforms are themselves startlingly new. In this blog we have noted similarities between content of new media and earlier internet forms. But have the platforms changed this content. This is a key question in social media platforms.
There has been a tendency to ground interaction totally in the real world. That is the assumption and direction is that new ways of interacting are not enabled. However interest graph networks perhaps represents the native form of internet interaction most faithfully. Here, it is such that the social element is not necessarily grounded at all. But the content tends to be. To make new content one may need to utilize both platforms and native networks.
But what about social networks. This seems like a key question to me. Is there a way to utilize a social platform in such a way as it enhances new media content. Social is powerful, it is perhaps the interest graph at one of its strongest representations.
But other than expressing highly grounded social content, they do not necessarily support content *development* per se, unless it is highly grounded in the real world. Yet the social connections can be a platform in and of themselves, just as social connections provide support in the real world.
Social networks provide a way to enable such support, but of course the issue and strength of this, is that they come from the network, one cannot make such support. Indeed it is an expression of the creative process in life, one makes, then one shows what one has made to others.
On interest graph networks one tend to show it to a very self selected audience that one cannot really know what they makes of it. On social networks it is more a mutual self selection, but one does not tend to show in the same way, as the assumption is that an interest graph is more like a professional showing, more formal in effect.
One might say this is a kind of simulation, except for the fact that this content exists for new media. The question is then, the extent to which this simulation becomes real. What do we mean by real. Effect in the real world, except to the extent that the internet is that real world.
I believe this difference is like a new world, a time of creative freedom and output. By defending internet freedom, I really mean defense of this realm. However like all new worlds, it can remake the old world as well.
One way of looking at this is the extent to which platforms adapt to content development and then the extent to which they adapt to the content itself. Is a seamless future on in which platforms become invisible to content development. Probably not, the seamlessness may be in the enhancement of this co-operative model which already exists, between social new media and its various graph and the content itself.
Co-operative problem solving is arguably powerful, but perhaps hard to get right, as it needs the individual to create the core content that get cooperatively enhanced (that is one does not want to curtail this core development by connective structures). But adaptively, new media in its form may provide the kind of adaptive grained changing structure to enable this more fully. Now that is perhaps the new in new media. Always, new technology has created new kinds of content.
Co-operative adaptive structures may provide some kind of enhancement that may enable something new as well. This is not co-operative problem solving, it is co-operative sharing being enabled. Like those technologies that made sharing more liquid in the past, like printing presses, but much closer to networks of people, that is co-operative.
