New media (Porvenir)

New media refers to media produced and available online. Such media can include games, animation, podcasts, and social networks.

As distrust of establishment news reached an all-time high, and following a slew of Hollywood sex scandals, new media enjoyed a veritable renaissance, absolutely overtaking its legacy media counterpart by the 2020s.

How internet killed the television star
Since its 1983 inception, the internet captivated the imaginations of people across the world. As its accessibility and capabilities improved over the years, so too did usage of the internet across generational lines. This brave, new frontier soon became beyond a shadow of a doubt the future of humanity, providing ample opportunity for new means of commerce and recreation.

In 2003, Valve Software launched Steam, an online video game distribution service. Steam allowed gamers to purchase indie and AAA titles digitally. One of Steam's most popular features was its reasonable pricing, with the service becoming well-known for sales and deals. By 2013, Steam took up 75% of the online gaming market space, with many devoted console gamers largely switching to PC gaming and Steam. Valve CEO Gabe Newell was quickly a titan of industry, dominating not only the gaming world, but also neurotechnology as Valve later pioneered brain interfaces and virtual reality.

2004 saw the birth of social network Facebook. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and other tech moguls, Facebook was one of the first and largest social media platforms. Though Facebook was initially designed solely to allow friends and family to reconnect or socialize from across the world, the company expanded in 2014 to purchase Oculus, a virtual reality company. In the 2010s, Facebook oddly enough also became a trusted source of news, with 52% of site users claiming to first get headlines from their feed. By 2021, Facebook's main site alone was the seventh most visited on the entire internet. In 2005, the video streaming platform YouTube was created by Paypal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. For the first time in internet history, regular people could produce and share original content with others across the globe. YouTube's state purpose of "broadcast[ing]" oneself attracted figures later recognized as icons amongst Gen Z'ers and millennials. Such figures included Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg, Jenna "Marbles" Mourey, Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox of Smosh, Lauren "iwantmylauren" Francesca, Justine "ijustine" Ezarik, and Ray William Johnson. Aside from independent creators, entertainment companies such as Rooster Teeth, James "Angry Video Game Nerd" Rolfe's Cinemasacre, and Doug "Nostalgia Critic" Walker's Channel Awesome saw most of their audience grow from YouTube despite also running their own sites. Another medium that capitalized from YouTube's golden age were news & politics podcasts. As American polictics grew more polarized than ever in the 2010s, disdain for the traditional news media from both sides of the ideological aisle peaked. 45th U.S President Donald J. Trump's 2016 campaign stoked media skepticism, and rode to the White House on societal revolt against the handful of corporations that controlled the market. On the opposite side of the spectrum, young progressives turned on the "liberal" media ostensibly overnight, angered by the revelation that leftist hero and independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was denied the nomination of the Democratic Party under unscrupulous circumstances twice. As such, multiple podcasts successfully tapped into public desire for an alternative to the perceived biases of major networks. The Young Turks, a progressive outlet founded by Cenk Uygur and Ben Mankiewicz, was created in 2002 and later moved to YouTube in 2005. During the 2015-2016 election cycle, TYT viewership skyrocketed, with millions subscribing to the channel. Secular Talk, founded by libertarian-left commentator and later politician Kyle Kulinski, discovered in many regards, a broader audience as Kulinski's appeal to populists of all stripes was unmatched. Another spinoff of TYT called HasanAbi, helmed by Uygur's nephew Hasan Piker, maintained a presence on YouTube and Twitch. The late Michael Brooks (1983-2020) was credited for converting scores of conservatives to various forms of leftism. Following his untimely passing from a blood clot, Brooks' sister Lisha and cohosts ran The Michael Brooks Legacy Project. The Project carried on Brooks' work through documentaries and books. Centrists, and right-wingers were not however without representation; The Phillip DeFranco Show hosted by the eponymous right-libertarian DeFranco was recognized for an air of ingenuous balance. In short, it truly seemed, at least for a time, that anyone with a microphone and a webcam could be just as if not more successful than CNN, MSNBC or the Wall Street Journal.