What's so new about new media?

As I am reading literature about new media I can not help but notice that references almost exclusively date post 2000. What I am wondering is whether this is the consequence of an epistemic big-bang, a cataclysmic impact of the internet that has rendered all prior knowledge irrelevant, or is the truth more banal, as I indeed fear it is. I will be true to my name and start by exploring some of the buzzwords that are often associated with new media. The one that perplexes me most is "cyber"; the origin in the word "cybernetics" is obvious, but what do cybernetics have to do with the internet? I can easily imagine the word being used to describe air conditioning, since it employs a self-correcting feedback loop to keep the temperature in a room constant. Strangely enough nobody seems to be talking about air conditioning when using the prefix cyber. I can also imagine it being used to describe the autopoiesis of biological systems and - if I use my imagination to stretch the concept of autopoiesis to social systems - describing social systems as being steered by cybernetic loops, as Luhmann does. It is therefore obvious that there is nothing particularly cybernetic about the internet and that most of the authors that use the prefix cyber could not care less about systems theory. Why this confusion of terms? The cynic gives a simple explanation: cybernetics are obscure enough that not many people have a conception about the meaning of the word, yet it has a connotation of theory, making it a perfect empty signifier. Why do we need it? Because if we just talk about the internet - again the cynic replies - someone might notice that if we look at it theoretically, it really isn't as specific as it seems at first glance. Communications over the internet are anonymous, but so where a lot of newspaper articles in the 18. and 19. century, it enables synchronous communication, but so does the telephone. The question that arises is whether the internet is so specific that it warrants the binary classification of old/new media. This seems problematic since the distinction between old and new is completely arbitrary: the radio was a new medium a century ago and it won't be possible to defend the notion that the internet is new for much longer. That something is new does not mean that it is profoundly different from the old, and that something is old does not mean it can not go through profound changes. If we argue that the internet is so profoundly new that it warrants the term new (which is a radical proposition if I have ever heard one), it would be much better to say which characteristics constitute it's newness, giving us something more tangible to hold onto than the mere fact of being of recent origin. We can say that the emergence of mass media constituted a major break, and that they are indeed constitutive of modernity, but I can not see that the internet or other "new" media are part of - or even cause of - any profound social transformation. That is, if we don't go so far as propose we are moving to a new epoch called cybermodernity.