Introduction

Imagine what McLuhan would say if he saw the world as it is today. His theories were completely viable, and his “sprawling metropolis” has grown even wider, both in physical and technological ideals (16).

    As Liu notes plentifully in his own work...

Markdown is yet another example of this evolving and shifting medium, a new “scale or pace” that McLuhan noted in his work, The Medium is the Massage.¹

However, that is not to say that Markdown is some kind of “ultimate new media” that originated from nowhere. In Alan Liu’s piece, A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, this relatively “new media” is “haunted” by media of the past.

Markdown Specifically

As expected, the Markdown application shows a nearly entirely new version of medium that I would never have used without outside help. Unlike most applications I use, it:

• Has a new application and appearance that is unlike most applications that I previously have used.
• Lets humans create information that’s easy to share, even more so than the basic applications that are known to do so, such as Word or Google Docs².
• Teaches the basics of coding, a much more complex concept, through an easy-to-use and dynamic interface.

In Conclusion

Markdown is part of the New Media due to:

1. The simple development of web pages.
2. The hundreds of options that are conceived through the interface.
3. Its ability to be built off of.

It has shown qualities of coding that I haven’t used before, while being significantly easer to use and more natural under my fingertips. Therefore, it has solidified its own, unique place in the current generation of New Media.

¹Taken primarily from the first chapter of the work.
²Not to say that word nor Google Docs are not relevant text editors that gets information across, but they do not allow for the same depth of information that Markdown allows for