T I M E L I N E
Digital New Media is the constantly growing field of study consisting of interactive media, hypertext, etc. and made possible by computers. It is still a fairly young subject of investigation. The digital medium was fused from technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century. The term digital new media did not come about until the 1940s. Several European countries made efforts to discovering this uncharted, exciting area of interest. Initially, the United States was reluctant to fund programs for new media. However, in recent years, the United States has surpassed the rest of the world in facilitating exploration of new media.
The first two essays written on the subject, merely established a pattern for what would eventually grow into an area of study. One essay was written by Jorge Luis Borges, the inventor, philosopher and engineer. The other was by Vannevar Bush, a storyteller-librarian and scientist.
Borges story, The Garden of Forking Paths, is one of the most influential pieces of writing in the new media field, as well as in the 20th century. The tale describes an imagined labrynth; one "in which all men would lose their way." It professes a concept of constantly diverging paths and infinite futures. An idea remarkably similar to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was not proposed until more than a decade after the story was published.
Bush, was inspired by his alarming discovery, that the library shelf was no longer an adequate map of study. In response, As We May Think was published in 1945. In this story, Bush introduced a concept he called the memex, a "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."
Both of these men proposed impossibly brilliant ideas, but the extent of their genius was not fully realized until much later.
Other great pioneers of the field such as Turing and Weiner, helped understand the potential of the computer for symbolic representation and for the capturing of complex interactive systems.
In the 1960s, ideas began to be realized as the field of computer science was defined. It was a time when Licklider and others were proposing the internet, when Weizenbaum inadvertently created the first believable computer-based character, and when Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext."
Although invented by Borges, and coined by Nelson, the first hypertxt novel hopscotch, was written in 1963 by an Argentinian author named Julio Cortazar. In 1987, Stuart Moulthrop created a hypertextual version of Borges' Garden of Forking Paths.
Digital New Media is the constantly growing field of study consisting of interactive media, hypertext, etc. and made possible by computers. It is still a fairly young subject of investigation. The digital medium was fused from technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century. The term digital new media did not come about until the 1940s. Several European countries made efforts to discovering this uncharted, exciting area of interest. Initially, the United States was reluctant to fund programs for new media. However, in recent years, the United States has surpassed the rest of the world in facilitating exploration of new media.
The first two essays written on the subject, merely established a pattern for what would eventually grow into an area of study. One essay was written by Jorge Luis Borges, the inventor, philosopher and engineer. The other was by Vannevar Bush, a storyteller-librarian and scientist.
Borges story, The Garden of Forking Paths, is one of the most influential pieces of writing in the new media field, as well as in the 20th century. The tale describes an imagined labrynth; one "in which all men would lose their way." It professes a concept of constantly diverging paths and infinite futures. An idea remarkably similar to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was not proposed until more than a decade after the story was published.
Bush, was inspired by his alarming discovery, that the library shelf was no longer an adequate map of study. In response, As We May Think was published in 1945. In this story, Bush introduced a concept he called the memex, a "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."
Both of these men proposed impossibly brilliant ideas, but the extent of their genius was not fully realized until much later.
Other great pioneers of the field such as Turing and Weiner, helped understand the potential of the computer for symbolic representation and for the capturing of complex interactive systems.
In the 1960s, ideas began to be realized as the field of computer science was defined. It was a time when Licklider and others were proposing the internet, when Weizenbaum inadvertently created the first believable computer-based character, and when Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext."
Although invented by Borges, and coined by Nelson, the first hypertxt novel hopscotch, was written in 1963 by an Argentinian author named Julio Cortazar. In 1987, Stuart Moulthrop created a hypertextual version of Borges' Garden of Forking Paths.
posted by Griffin at 10:16 AM
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