The New Media Reader

The New Media Reader is a massive collection of papers, articles and book excerts anticipating or contributing to the emerging digital medium. It includes most of the significant work from the 1940s onwards, thus in a way sketching a cultural history of "new media."
The first section addresses the complexity and combinatorial possibilities of digital media, including the earliest precursor of what eventually became hypertext and the www: Bush, Engelbart, Nelson and other computing pioneers along with prescient artists such as Ascott and Oulipo. In the second section, the social nature of the new media is explored in an equally appropriate selection ranging from McLuhan to Baudrillard and Deleuze/Guattari. The third section is slightly show more more loosely connected around activity and action, including work by Papert, Turkle, Stallman, Winograd/Flores and others. In the fourth and final section, countercultural and revolutionary themes are explored in writings of Suchman, Ehn/Kyng, Bolter, Moulthrop, Agre, CAE, Berners-Lee and others. The supplementary CD contains several hard-to-find examples, including a few seminal games and artworks and a generous video excerpt of Engelbart's 1968 demo of the NLS system.
As the selection of names above illustrates, the New Media Reader is an impressive attempt to map the cultural history of the digital medium. It should be required reading for any interaction design student. Even though the history of our field is short, it is substantial and the perspective on digital artifacts as media is growing steadily in importance in the foreseeable future. show less