New Media

New media is a fluid term. Today, it means the convergence of traditional media, including film, music, audio, and video, with the interactive power of the computer, cell phone, and other computer- and Internet-enabled gadgets. Tomorrow, the definition may shift as new technologies emerge and others fall from favor. The key element of new media is interactivity—the push-pull interaction of Web 2.0 and social media. With new media, people with access to the Internet and basic computer software has the ability to create, post, distribute, and consume information anywhere, anytime, on any digital device. In an ideal world, new media can be empowering, leading to the democratization of information. Many scholars see enormous possibilities in all this, but it is unclear if new media will ever live up to its potential. Gender has emerged as one issue that confronts the new media.

New media—as a term and as a technology—dates back to the 1990s when certain technological, economic, and social conditions coalesced to make these media possible. As media and cultural scholar Rosalind Gill points out, new media require certain conditions: the general affordability—and the [Page 254]widespread adoption—of personal computers with high-speed microprocessing capabilities, the pervasive accessibility of the World Wide Web to the general public, and the growth of dot-coms. Sociologist Saskia Sassen contends that those conditions did not exist until 1994.

The general public's embrace of new media did not take place until the 21st century, when certain Websites that encouraged interactivity emerged and gained popularity: Wikipedia, the online, collaboratively built encyclopedia, established in 2001; the social networking sites Myspace and Facebook, started in 2003 and 2004 respectively; and YouTube, the video-sharing Website that debuted in 2005. Each of these Websites was designed, built, and launched by men. Although there are feminist Websites online that encourage new media interactivity (for example, http://feministing.com, http://webgrrls.com, and http://feminist.com), they pale in comparison to the popularity of the Websites most commonly used by the general public: Wikipedia, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube.

The involvement of women in new media has been the subject of much debate. New media scholars have built on the work of those who have studied women and computers in general. Those scholars found that males dominated the computer field and that women were seldom included in the design and development of computer technology and, therefore, lagged behind in the field.

Much the same could be said of the new media. Women have been excluded from the design and development of the computer hardware and software that make new media possible. Moreover, women have not been involved in the design and development of key new media Websites, specifically Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. However, over time, women have become central to new media—interacting, creating content, distributing and consuming it—and making it their own.

This did not happen overnight. Research into Internet usage (a key ingredient for the new media) in the early 1990s revealed a gender gap, with women significantly less likely than men to use the Internet and, therefore, unlikely to participate in the new media. Studies indicated that the gender gap vis-à-vis the Internet did not last long. The Pew Research Center found that the gender gap had virtually disappeared by 2000. Even then, however, men spent more time online, and today men remain the most common early technology adopters and seem more at ease with the Internet and computers than women.

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