Emerging Traditions in New Media Australian Media Traditions 2007

What is a media tradition? This paper inquires into the possibility of there being media traditions in new media. In posing the question in relation to new media, extra issues arise. “Old ” media, by their very nature, are saturated with traditions. This essay contends that many of these have made their way into the new media, almost without being noticed. To develop the analysis, the distinctive structure of the internet is explored as a composite multimedia platform (it is such because it has visual and audio aspects). This is achieved first by examining the work of Lewis Mumford, and then by using Harold Innis’s idea of spatial or temporal bias to guide the inquiry. After this, the ideas of media platforms and formats are used to develop a sense of emergent traditions in new media. What is a media tradition? Much has been written on the word medium.1 But what of tradition? Like the word medium, it is from Latin, meaning to hand something over (trado – I hand over, I yield, I bequeath, I entrust to, I tell, I betray). The related word traditio, a noun like tradition itself, meant surrender or teaching. These strangely ambivalent meanings resonate in the descended modern English word-field (tradition