ABSTRACT
How, in detail, do these discussions about culture bear upon new media and itspractices? In what follows we discuss three ways in which we think new mediaengages with as well as contributes to our current understanding of wider contemporary cultures. First, we discuss new media as an extension of existing media forms and institutions in which we account for new media as the result of the application of digital technologies to existing cultural practices. Here, new media is, as might be expected, thought of as a continuous extension of, rather than a radical break with, the current landscape of media culture. Second, we discuss new media as it has been taken up and framed by the institutions of contemporary artistic cultures. This, we assert, has become largely a matter of the way in which new media is argued as the latest extension of the European modernist avant-garde with its typical stance of rejecting the established modes of artistic language and representation. Third, and much more speculatively, we discuss some of the ways in which new media, now in its widest sense as the world of information and data, has been seen as challenging fundamental notions of thought and human nature. We have defined these three areas of discussion as follows and will look at each one in turn:
A New media as a continuous extension of existing media culture in which the rules of representation are maintained.
