To what extent can content be of an explorative, even novel nature in new media content. That is, content which does not create a response or inform, but rather content which...well, in new media it is a key question, what is it that one can do beyond even this.
It is new, so it also carries at least a suggestion that it can produce something new on content. There does seem at least to be a necessity to translate content into new media. It may be it is only a new way of delivering and publishing content. But really the sense of it is that it is more than this. I have explored some ways of its novelty, re: content. That sense of development of expression over time, the development, shifting and coexistence of themes, delivered in a way immediate and adaptive.
All enabled by the 'new' of delivery, platforms, publishing and indeed presentation, using emerging technologies to do with design and delivery on devices.
So to what extent does this produce something new ? Well, if one could see technology here as enhancing at the level of the production of expression, then it may enable something new. But whether it does may depend on whether this enabling may produce something new.
My feeling is that it either is enabling or will enable the new, even if it is a small incremental change. However small incremental changes are the kind of changes which can produce something new, as structured creative difference piles on difference, supported by a facility to do this.
The thing about the internet is that it structures, it hides or absorbs the edges, indeed, the formlessness, that may precede change in forms. But it does not mean it is not happening. This is what is intriguing to me about new media - it provides a new way of enabling the source of development, difference. As to whether anything gets produced which is different is another matter, but it may provide a platform to find this if it exists, or can exist, at least.
It may be that is could speed up the time taken to produce such content. This is a mechanistic view of content (like the time expected before a machine with a desired function may be built), but indeed it does tend to be viewed in such a way on the internet, and here I am looking at the new, the creative, the future of it, as another mechanistic form to be developed.
The difference is, the function is not necessarily clear, nor its description, except as something new in content, so it may have to emerge, in a platform or set of platforms which enable it. But like the machine example, if the function is not something radically new, if new media is close to old media, it may either, not emerge or may emerge with some facility, but may not be so startling in its novelty, yet sustained nonetheless by a sense of difference.
It might be said though about new media that it is constantly new, like the technology it resides in, and to an extent is. In that ferment, like a continuing renaissance, the new may not be so obvious, especially the more it is tech, with a functional life, but it may emerge from it.
To utilise the capacity of new media development, content may actually need sometimes to be closer to functional rather than expressive aims. Not to constrain content, but to free its potential. But it still retains the power of expressive forms, in this may be something new.
