The New Media Reader says the new media refers to the computer or digital medium that is intended to be "read" on a screen or through other electronic devices. It draws on many antecedents, is spawning a variety of formats and is underpinned by the technologies actively used today: the internet, MP3s, digital film, P2P clients, recent video games or (not unexpectedly) blogs.

In the Introduction Janet H. Murray says the term "new media":

is a sign of our current confusion about where these efforts are leading and our breathlessness at the pace of change, particularly in the last two decades of the 20th century. How long will it take before we see the gift for what it is—a single new medium of representation, the digital medium, formed by the braided interplay of technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century?

Lev Manovich says that the art institution lagged behind the rest of the cultural and social institutions in dealing with new media technologies, adding that:

This resistance is understandable given that the logic of the art world and the logic of new media are exact opposites. The first is based the romantic idea of authorship which assumes a single author, the notion of a one-of-a-kind art object, and the control over the distribution of such objects which takes place through a set of exclusive places: galleries, museums, auctions. The second privileges the existence of potentially numerous copies; infinitely many different states of the same work; author-user symbiosis (the user can change the work through interactivity); the collective; collaborative authorship; and network distribution (which bypasses the art system distribution channels).