There is a lot of talk about the 'new media.' It's unclear what it means. I decode it to mean digital media--eg., digital photography. I understand this kind of photography to be a part of the discursive practice of photography as understood in the sense of Geoffrey Batchen's work on photography his essay "In Desiring Production Itself: Notes on the Invention of Photography' in R. Diprose + R. Ferrell (eds.) Cartographies: Postructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies in Space.

The broad tradition of photography as a visual practice is understood thus: it was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition"; a practice that is brought into being by the desire to make pictures. This discursive practice allows us to step outside the boundaries of modernist aesthetics of photography: sharp focus, a full range of tones, clarity of detail, no darkroom trickery -- based on the fundamental principle of formalist criticism, namely, that each medium had its own unique properties and should be judged according to its fidelity to internally specific criteria. The logic of photographic exceptionalism used the art historical concepts (artist, style, oeuvre, masterpiece) to think in terms of photography as art (as an art institution object).

What does 'new' mean in new media? We need to understand 'new' differently, once we have stepped away from a modernist aesthetic---and the traditional conservatism that surrounds art gallery culture and its transhistorical, transcendental aesthetic assumptions of its trustee- and audience-derived power base; and stepped toward an open consideration of photographs as historically and culturally begotten artifacts.

In his
So how do we do this. Roe says:

The key to understanding this question of the "new" in new media in this orientation is through three closely allied concepts from Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger: the "future-to-come" (spectrality) from Derrida; the "yet-to-come" (virtuality) from Deleuze (via Bergson); and "projection" from Heidegger. For Heidegger, projection belongs to Dasein (being-in-the-world, a being of the same ontological sort as ourselves). ... The word Heidegger uses for projection is Entwurf, the basic meaning of which his translator tells us 'is that of “throwing” something “off” or “away” from one' (Heidegger, 1973: 185, n1). In relation to Dasein, then, it is a pro-jecting, a throwing of existence ahead of itself. It has nothing to do with 'comporting oneself towards a plan that has been thought out' but, on the contrary, Heidegger says 'any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself; and as long as it is, it is projecting' (Heidegger, 1973: 185). This connects to the structure of understanding as projection, understanding throws possibilities ahead of itself, and 'in throwing, throws before itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as such' (Heidegger, 1973: 185).