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MANOVICH, Lev, The Language of New Media, ed.The MIT Press, London, 2001.

What Is New Media?
"What is new media? We may begin answering this question by listing the categories commonly discussed under this topic in the popular press: the Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs and DVD, virtual reality. Is this all there is to new media? (...)The two separate historical trajectories finally meet. Media and computer - (...) - merge into one. All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for he computer. The result: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short, media becomes new media."
(...)
Principles of New Media:
"...some of the key differences between old and new media.(...)
1.Numerical Representation.
All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations.(...)
2. Modularity
This principle can be called the "fractal structure of new media". Just as a fractal has the same structure on different scales, a new media object has the same modular structure throughout. Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, behaviors, are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities. The objects themselves can be combined into even larger objects - again, without losing their independence.(...)
3.Automation
The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. Thus human intentionality can be removed from creative process, at least in part. (...)
4.Variability
A new media object is not something fixed once for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions. This is another consequence of numerical coding of media (principle 1) and modular structure of a media object (principle 2).
Old media involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual, and/or audio elements into a particular composition or sequence. This sequence was stored in some material, its order determined once and for all. Numerous copies could be run off from the master, and, in perfect correspondence with the logical of an industrial society, they were all identical. New media, in contrast, is characterized by variability (...). Instead of identical copies, a new media object typically gives rise to many different versions. And rather than being created completely by a human author, these versions are often in part automatically assembled by a computer. (...) Thus the principle of variability is closely connected to automation.
Variability would also not be possible without modularity. Stored digitally, rather than in a fixed medium, media elements maintain their separate identities and can be assembled into numerous sequences under program control. In addition, because the elements themselves are broken into discrete samples (for instance, an image is represented by an array of pixels), they can be created and customized on the fly.(...)
5.Transcoding
(...)The fifth and the last principle of cultural transcoding aims to describe what in my point of view is the most substantial consequence of the computerization of media. As I have suggested, computerization turns media into computer data. While from one point of view, computerized media still displays structural organization that makes sense to its human users - (...) - from another point of view, its structures now follows the established conventions of the computer's organization of data. (...)"