My New Media Class so far

What kinds of technologies are part of the new media?

Wikipedia, social networking, virtual worlds, blogs etc.

How important is the Internet to the new media? Why and how are the new media replacing and / or enhancing the old media?

Most of the new media recently have emerged from the internet itself, so the Internet is vital to the production of new media as well as the continuation of the existing new media.
In the article "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" in the New York Times, it said "a core group of seven people who met through the blog brought the case to the attention of the community board and met with the authorities. “A group of people who did not know each other came together and traded information,” he said." As you can see from this quote and if you read the rest of the article, blogs in some cases have replaced telephones and email as a medium of information sharing. In a century where information can be accessed and shared in seconds, telephones and email have been put on the backburner.

Another example, in "How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks' Power" in the New York Times, it said "by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans." From this quote it is evident that Obama used social networking to his advantage. By utilizing new media, he did something different from previous candidates that relied on the old media strategy with telephones and email. Obama turned towards new media, specifically social networking to reach out to America.