New Media and New Forms of Communication

The merging of text, sound and video

It is known that the new media imitates the forms of the previous ones. It happened before with radio and television and it happens today with the Internet. The ways of presenting information are a copy of traditional media. On-line newspapers are a mere 'version' of printed ones, on-line radios are in no way different from hertzian radios and even Net televisions copy cat the ones formed in the analog era.

Still, it is also true that the new media do stand apart from previous media and give birth to new types of information and it's presentation.
Marshall McLuhan's most famous quote, "the media is the message" is precisely the insight that new means of communication need new forms of communication.

The symbiosis between newspapers and data bases

Hypertext and interactive, on-line data bases, establish a contact between newspapers and information systems. A news story in an on-line newspaper can redirect the reader, through a link, to an encyclopaedia, or it can be presented within a context with other stories, selected by a search on a database.
So far, a newspaper archive was in a way lifeless - it was ressurected only by each day's newspaper, and even so for that day only.
On-line access and hypertext give us acess to previous newspapers as if they were today's ones. What we have here is a new sphere of journalism, the connection to the archive, given by the on-line possibilities.