It is imperative that cultural producers and consumers be critically aware of the power which these technologies exert, the motives underlying their use, and the nature of their appropriate and inappropriate integration within contexts relevant to the formation of personal and collective identities. While new media offers new possibilities and sites for transforming the power base of information production and dissemination, it simultaneously provides new means of reproducing dominant subject positions and power relations. Our present ontological shift is a rupture with our previous perceptual relationship to the world. New media technology and content harness human desire through aesthetic means. A new media ontology is therefore aesthetic by nature, as aesthetics is concerned with how ideas are formed, shared, and contested through the senses.
New media is an aesthetic, a form of art-making.
However, it presents new challenges for negotiating meaning through sensory input by providing new types of experiences and forms of art production and consumption. In light of the new media ontology, the field of aesthetics should return to its original breadth of meaning as the branch of philosophy dealing with the senses. This definition must also be restated in light of the political dimension of new media aesthetics. The project of developing a theory and criticism of new media must therefore respond to a number factors in order to meet these new demands. These synthetic relationships require the field of new media to be linked in symbiotic relationships with other more traditional media forms in subtle though important ways, rather than be seen as a replacement for previous technologies.