Dotcom fever was the worst thing to happen to new media. Caught in the crazy whirl of debates on the "new economy", of venture capitalists hunting down anything internet and employees hurtling around offices on scooters, the phrase "new media" was hijacked and tied firmly into the dotcom craze. So when the bubble burst and revealed the cyber-revolution to be a shimmering illusion, new media, by association, deflated and lost its glory.

When you talk about new media these days, the excited, energised faces are gone. People no longer rant until the early hours of the morning about the technology’s power to change the way we live. Rather, when you mention "that phrase" in conversation, people look embarrassed, as though you are out of fashion, talking about yesterday’s next big thing. New media, once such a potent term, now makes one think of spectacular business failures.

But we should not dismiss new media by perceiving it as part of the doomed dotcom revolution. If you analyse the meaning of the term, you begin to understand the true nature of this technological beast. You have "new" – which is fairly self-evident – and then "media", deriving from the Latin medius, meaning "middle". So new media translates roughly into "new middles", new things that stand in between one thing and another. To expand, those "new middles" mean new ways to connect one thing to the other through the use of new channels that relay data.

This purist description sounds tedious and boring, until you remember that absorbing data determines your experience and perception of the world. And new media means we have new channels to send and receive that data, channels that function to communicate ideas, philosophies, services and all sorts of information to other people.

However, many of the MBA graduates with business plans and venture capital did not recognise the power of simplicity behind the technology, preferring instead to see new media as a commercial superhighway where the traffic flowed only one way. Instead, the real pioneers have been – and still are – those individuals who approached new media in its purity, as a "middle" that joins one thing to another. Their initiatives focused on the simple idea of a two-way channel that allowed people to communicate with each other over great distances.

Often connecting to others who share specific interests, these individuals or groups have built global networks with the idea of "just communicating with others" in mind – very basic, very simple. And it is these projects that have turned out to be the most successful because their dynamics work around connecting people together. They recognise the existence and personality of the person at the other end of all those wires, and incorporate this into what they communicate. Users then develop a sense of belonging to a particular network and a community is born.

But these individuals tend to be hidden from sight, usually known only within their created communities. So the people who need to create new services and products that work for citizens and consumers very rarely see the projects and initiatives that reveal the successful ways in which new media can be used to connect people. However, getting the right people to notice the little projects that show how new media can benefit, entertain and inform society actually comes down to a simple equation. You present them with the most innovative projects you can find. And then you give them champagne.

The New Statesman decided to do this five years ago. We created an awards scheme – primarily out of sheer excitement about the idea of e-democracy. We wanted to explore how e-democracy could work, what it could achieve, and we wanted to push the individuals with the vision and the nerve to take these steps forward into the spotlight. And it worked. The initiative became the New Media Awards and, over the past five years, we have seen some truly visionary ideas and projects winning trophies, be they a scheme for contacting your MP (FaxYourMP.com) or linking wordsmiths with short-story fanatics (ABCTales.com). And our Elected Representative Award has, according to Cabinet Office sources, created some ripples of jealousy among MPs who consequently sped off to improve their own websites.

However, New Media Awards is changing direction this year. We realise that sometimes you need to go back to look forward; you need to understand the foundations in order to see how the house can be built. So, this year, the New Media Awards will focus on that simple description of new media as a “middle” that joins one thing to another. We want to root out and push into the spotlight those people who make the most of these new channels to “only connect” and, in the process, we hope to reveal the future for 21st-century citizenship and modern e-governance, and to rethink the notion of community.

These are big ideas. But now that the dust has settled on dotcom fever, we need to rediscover new media. To get people excited again, we need to go back to what appealed to them in the first place, those new channels to connect people together and those new ways of relaying data. To progress, we need a new media renaissance – except, this time, no scooters allowed.

Alex Greenwood is online editor of the New Statesman