Generative content creation #1 critical review

This critical review is the result of reading several papers and documents for the Generative Content Creation that i am taking as online course. The papers, diverse as approach, have as general topic new media and multimedia and are from Packer, Randall and Jordan and Manovich.

The field treated is extremely interesting as it touches many points of the master degree i'm following in IMKE and offer a broad view of the world of communication and arts that technology is currently offering.

The material i have been reviewing treat the very general definition of the terms New Media and Multimedia, and is meant to help understanding the concepts that will follow .
New Media have revolutionised the world in ways that we still don't fully comprehend and are changing at a pace that we could only compare with Moor's law. In fact, the ability of new media to change so quickly can be largely attributed to the rapid evolution of technologies, to which are deeply tied.

The materials i read for this post are meant to help defining the basic terms used for the course such as the definition of the terms "new media" and multimedia. These two terms can be seen as describing the same concept, but as we will see, authors give different definitions of the terms.

One key figure in New Media Studies is Lee Manovich, a professor at UCSD who is conducing various studies on New Media. As his area of interest touches different fields from social studies to semiotics, his definition of New Media can be considered one of the most complete. For Manovich, New Media are a sort of direct evolution of the "old" media, that are translated into numerical data (digital numbers) that can be accessed and manipulated by computers.
This direct translation brings various consequences that are very specific of the computers themselves. New Media can be defined, because of their nature, by 5 main arguments: Numerical Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability and Transcoding (Manovich 2001).
These characteristics, together with programmability (probably the most important of all), make new media a game-changing type of medium that has become an essential element of today's culture.
If we look at today's new media panoram it is, in fact, very difficult to ignore the relevance that computer software and even smartphone's applications is gaining in our society. By becoming more and more pervasive, new media are gaining time and attention once reserved to old media. Consumer computers, smartphones and tables constitute in my eyes the clearest and brightest celebration of new media for their ability to be so versatile to offer interactive contents (as for Manovich definition), but also an extraordinary way to access old media. Through digitalization, a smartphone becomes a radio, a video player, and even a book.

The definition of the concept of Multimedia by Packer, Randall and Jordan (2002) is very similar at first to the one of New media expressed by Manovich. Even though similar, for them Multimedia includes five essential that need to be considered such as: Integration, Interactivity, Hypermedia, Immersion and Narrativity. One point of difference from the other authors, however, is that Packer, Randall and Jordan do not consider essential for multimedia to be being computer-based.

Rockwell and Mactavish (2004) describe multimedia as: Computer-based, Rhetorical artifact, Multiple media, Integrated and artistic whole, and Interactive. They also provide a classification of the Types of Multimedia (Web hypermedia, Computer games, Digital art, and Multimedia encyclopedia),

It becomes clear, if we consider those different definitions that multimedia can be simply considered as a sub group of what we call new media, that is a more generic hat.