Excerpted from Robert Logan posting on PBS/MediaShift

One of my objectives in updating Marshall [McLuhan’s] work is to identify the characteristics of new media and contrast them with the electronic mass media that McLuhan dealt with. Given that the medium is the message, I began my analysis by identifying the characteristics or messages of new media that are different from mass media that McLuhan identified such as the light bulb, telegraph, telephone, radio, phonograph, camera and television.

I actually began this exercise back in 1996 when I first identified the five messages of the Internet published in the first edition of “The Sixth Language” (Logan 2004). Back then the notion of new media had not yet been formulated but at that early stage I identified the following five messages of the Internet:

1. two-way communication

2. ease of access to and dissemination of information

3. continuous learning

4. alignment and integration

5. community

Although one or two of these characteristics apply to traditional mass media, what is unique about the Internet is that all five of these characteristics apply and help define the impact of this medium. As it turns out all of these characteristics also apply to the general class of new media. Since formulating these five messages of the Internet my study of new media revealed that there are also nine other additional properties or messages that characterizes most new media. They are:

6. portability and time flexibility (time-shifting), which provide users with freedom over space and time

7. convergence of many different media so that they can carry out more than one function at a time and combine — as is the case with the cameraphone

8. interoperability without which convergence would not be possible

9. aggregation of content, which is facilitated by digitization and convergence

10. variety and choice to a much greater extent than the mass media that preceded them and hence The Long Tail phenomenon

11. the closing of the gap between (or the convergence of) producers and consumers of media

12. social collectivity and cooperation

13. remix culture which digitization facilitates

14. the transition from products to services