![[New] Media Savvy](http://www.umainetoday.umaine.edu/files/2009/06/media-thumb.jpg)
A documentary photograph by new media major Jolene Belanger.
Those uses may be clever and fun, like the light-up wearable patch, but UMaine’s new media students have learned to go deeper, to not just use technology for technology’s sake. For his senior capstone project last year, Maxwell Terry created an alternative to money called AUX. It works as “a kind of universal receipt” for Web-based exchange of goods and services. Though Salvaggio’s career aspirations involve journalism, his current focus in new media is a Facebook-style social networking site that connects nonprofits with potential funders. Jolene Belanger used her Web skills to create an online “hacktivism” project that questions why a college education can’t be free for everyone.
Belanger’s interest in graphic design drew her to new media. Growing up in Glenburn, Maine, her mom had a home-based scrapbooking business where Belanger taught classes. Increasingly, her students were turning to digital media — an area she wanted to explore. But Belanger, who is now a sophomore, has discovered new media is so much more than that.
“When I think of new media, I think of a small microphone capable of reaching many ears in the digital realm of the Internet — the greatest concert ever invented,” Belanger says. “New media is the language of my generation. It is the voice of the individual in a society serving the masses. It is the modifier of old media and developer of the new.
“It is the process of development and the intent that feeds an idea. It can be framed in a gallery or engineered for practical use. Redefining is the function of new media; that’s why we find it most challenging to define.”
Indeed, depending on whom you ask, the answer to the question, “What is new media?” varies. But that’s part of the appeal. It’s new. It’s constantly inconstant. And students and faculty define and redefine the term every day.
“In other disciplines, students learn the canon and become masters of the canon,” Blais says. “Our (new media) students create the canon.”
