Old vs. New

Though the differentiator between New and Old Media varies across different disciplines, the most common differentiator is digital content. Two representative examples of Old Media include books, which are text, or radio which is radio waves. In both instances, they are replaced by their 0 and 1 equivalents, i.e., eBooks and Podcasts. In addition, Second Life, a fantasy life lived online, is digital while it's Old Media equivalent, your "real" life is not compose of 0's and 1's. Another method is to rank the content's manipulability, Old Media has the tendency to be strict and unmalleable by the consumer, while New Media content tends to have the ability to be changed, doubled over and bent backwards by the consumer. In one simple example, CD's are Old Media, yet the ability to Burn them to your computer's hard-drive and convert them into Ringtones represents New Media. Lastly, the third method available is availability itself.
Old Media methods required far more exertion when attempting to obtain the equivalents in information, for example, Twitter allows us to see what's on the mind of millions of people with just a couple of clicks. It's Old Media version would have been the telephone, and calling up thousands, or even hundreds of people is quite the tedious task. To sum up, if one is posed with the challenge of deciding whether something is Old or New Media, identifying whether its digital, manipulable, and easy to obtain is more thank likely to give you the correct answer.