New Media Glossary & Terms

Here are a few explanations of the new media terms used in this blog:

Augmented Reality
Overlaying virtual images on top of real images through the use of computer technology. For example a video might track you walking across a screen environment and suddenly a virtual creature appears on screen next to you.

Blogs
A blog is essentially a website that contains information posted by a dedicated user or a group of bloggers. A blog can contain news items, short essays, annotated links, documents, graphics, and multimedia. A blog is normally accessible to any Internet user.

Bluetooth
This is a wireless system, which allows different devices to communicate with each other. Portable computers can link to desktop computers or network between mobile phones via Bluetooth. Bluetooth transmits a signal over short distances (up to around 10 meters) between telephones, computers and other devices without the use of wires.

Global Positioning System (GPS)
Digital navigation technology. The ability to find out where you are in the world via a satellites to give correct location data.

Hybrid Space
New forms of digital architecture combining virtual/digital space with real/physical place. Previously separate media such as film, graphics, still photography, animation, 3D computer animation, and typography, are now overlaid and merged in numerous ways to create hybrid space where both realities can be explored simultaneously.

Interface
Interfacing is the way in which people use technologies. A mouse or keyboard is the way we usually interface with computers. For games machines and consoles we use a joysticks as the interface to the game world. There are also software interfaces that enable one program to link with another.

Locative Media
Digital media technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS) used in real outdoor spaces to enable social connections, networks and interactions. Google Maps for example uses location-aware media.

New Media
Term which embraces all of the 'new' forms of electronic media -- newer than TV and radio, that is -- such as multimedia CD-ROMs, the internet, and video games. New media describes a variety of artistic practices that use analogue or digital technology within an electronic and/or internet domain.

Pervasive / Ubiquitous Computing
The term “Pervasive Computing” was introduced by IBM in 1998 and describes the integration of computers in our surroundings – computers embedded into architecture for example – computer being everywhere and very applicable to the mobile device being omnipresent, pervasive.

Pervasive computing is the trend towards increasingly ubiquitous (another name for the movement is ubiquitous computing), connected computing devices in the environment, a trend being brought about by a convergence of advanced electronic - and particularly, wireless - technologies and the Internet.

User Generated Content
Public can interact and contribute to news websites via text messages and images or create their own digital content such as for online games that can be accessed and edited by other users

WI-FI
Wireless networking is a way of transmitting information without cables that is reasonably fast and is often used for laptop computers within a business or a university or school campus instead of a Local Area Network (LAN) that uses cable connections. Wifi systems use high frequency radio signals to transmit and receive data over distances of several hundred feet.