Assignment: New Media Definition - Crosbie

a. How does your capstone measure up according to the definition proposed in Vin Crosbie's "What Is New Media?" How might you alter your project to fit better?

As it stands right now, our internet "game" concept is rather one-sided. Instead of being a fully interactive program, with as much user input as program output, it instead delivers the visuals to the user in a certain way, and they are unable to change it. The problem with using the internet as the content generator is that while the user can view webpages, there isn't a whole lot they can do to edit them - they can just look at what the designer chose to show you. So, our project, which relies on the contents of websites for it's visuals, is rather fixed.

Since giving users the ability to alter the visuals, and hence the websites, is of questionable legality, we must make up for the deficiency in another area. Our planned "community" feature, where users can share their discoveries, could be the area we need to push the most. After the user has explored the galatic representation of the internet, they can meet with outher explorers and share, withhold, or barter their discoveries. They can look at what other people have explored, combine it all together, or chose to keep exploring on their own.

Another possibilty for making the game more user-input friendly is to do more in the exploration part. Perhaps by changing it into more of a Warcraft game (for lack of a better example), where the user could gather the "resources" of the planet, and use it to take over other planets, or go against other users. Planets represented by media-rich websites would be literal gold mines for whoever happened across them first. The user could strive to become the richest person in the galaxy, or they could begin a galaxy-wide conquest.

So, the balance between making people want to explore for the sake of exploring, or wanting to explore for the sake of competition, should probably be thought out.

b. Do you agree or disagree with Crosbie's definition, and why?

For the most part, I agree, but I think he may of over-simplified things a bit, or maybe been a bit too stringent on his criteria of what is "media," "medium," and "vehicle."

Yes, land/air/water and one-to-one/many-to-one/many-to-many can be mediums, but I think things such as television, magazines, and newspapers, are a bit too complex to just be "vehicles." Television, for example, can deliver entertainment, information, advertisements, visuals and audio, which can all serve as vehicles for the intent behind them. So while I think he was trying to do a good thing by dumbing New Media down enough to try to make it simple, I really don't think it's going to be as clearly defined as that.