New Media: An Introduction provides a comprehensive, accessible and timely overview of the major forces shaping new media technologies. It understands the new media not simply as forms of technological hardware, but also as 'social software', both shaping and being shaped by the social, cultural, political and economic environments in which they are developed and used. New media developments are analysed in relation to broader trends of digitisation, convergence, globalisation, interactivity, networking and the growth of creative industries in the context of the 'new' or 'creative economy'. In the second edition of New Media new material on computer games and Internet Law has been included, with particular reference to massive multi-player online games, the open source movement and the future of copyright and intellectual property regimes. Mobile telephony, wireless technologies, social software, indigenous new media initiatives and the rise of alternative online media forms are some of the new media developments discussed in this highly original and successful text book.