As I sat and wondered what I was going to talk about as a new media I was checking my email on my Nexus and could hear the notifications on my phone and found myself thinking about how much Google has become so intergraded into not just my life but millions of others. I then realized that Google in its own right is a New Media. Google has become much more than just a search engine but a fluid entity that made technological advances by being on every device, or platform, used by its users. These are just a few of the many things that Google does that shows its talents at variability.
- Google Drive
- Google has leapt into the cloud computing craze by giving its users free space to store
and share documents that can be retrieved on any platform. - Google+
- To give their users a sense of community they initiated their own social site that is synced and available across all platforms.
- Chrome Sync
- This feature makes it so that a person’s personal settings, including bookmarks and browsing history follows them to any device they use, including mobile devices. For example my bookmarks from my desktop are synced to the mobile Chrome browser on my Nexus.
Google really puts Manovich’s definition of Variability to the test by showing how liquid it is by using sophisticated algorithms along with databases to transfer and change data as quickly as the user alter them across multiple platforms, as shown with their Chrome Sync. These are not simple copies but like what Manovich states Instead of identical copies, a new media object typically gives rise to many different versions.
This is true with the cross platform syncing because a browser on a mobile device is different than what is on a laptop or desktop. (Manovich)
Audra Mann
@WSUVcollegeMom
Work Cited
Manovich, Lev. “What Is New Media?” The Language of New Media. n.d. 36, 37.