What happens when the medium truly is the message? What if media, rather than humans, drive history? And how does software reshape what culture even means? This course constructs a new media theory canon through the work of three essential thinkers: Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and Lev Manovich. Rather than treating new media as a list of technologies (smartphones, AI, social platforms), we interrogate the ontological shifts they produce. We begin with McLuhan and his concept of "media ecology." We ask: How do digital interfaces extend or amputate human senses? What does the "global village" look like in an age of algorithmic fragmentation? McLuhan provides the vocabulary of hot and cold media, figure and ground, and the tetrad of media effects. We then turn to Kittler, who dismantles McLuhan's humanism. For Kittler, media are not extensions of man; rather, humans are side effects of media systems. We explore his claim that "media determine our situation." We confront: What happens when optical media, gramophones, and computers process data beyond human perception? In Kittler's world, the computer is the "universal medium" that absorbs all others, and discourse networks not authors or subjects produce history. Finally, we study Manovich, who bridges the German media theory tradition with software studies. Manovich asks: What is "new" about new media? His answers numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding become our analytical toolkit. We analyze how software layers (the cultural layer and the computer layer) collapse into each other, producing the database as a symbolic form and the interface as an ideological battlefield.