New

Last night, we met with Renee Hudson, a former student of Lisa's (when she was teaching 7th grade English)... a Stanford grad, now working on her PhD in English at um, the best university in the world, UCLA. She was a TA for one of the weeding out classes for the English major; this quarter, she's TAing for a Shakespeare class, so there was much to talk about.

You know the US Army ad campaign "There's Strong. And there's Army Strong."?

Well, there's smart and there's Renee smart (read, scary smart).

There were things she talked about that flew right by both me and Lisa... and there a few things that she talked about that not only I "got" but was fascinated by... and one of them was the concept of "New Media."

She said that while we all know that there is new media, it's difficult for even the experts to say what exactly it is. So we tossed around ideas.

Is it any of the electronic media? Is simple hypertext new media? Is it a blog? Or is that really just another serialization (like Dickens from a hundred and fifty years ago)? Or is it mixed media? I sort of leaned toward the use of either a new or existing medium that comments on or expands the meaning/experience/appreciation of another medium.

So while footnotes in a book are not New Media, neither would be a novel and a separate compendium or chapbook. But a director's commentary on the dvd of a film is.

All very fun, all very philosophical. Not necessarily useful for me, as I think about getting back to coding tomorrow morning.