New Media, Old Media: A History And Theory Reader
Her second book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Chun argues that cycles of obsolescence and renewal (e.g. mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing) are byproducts of new media's logic of "programmability". The book asks how computers have become organizing metaphors for understanding our neoliberal, networked moment (Updating to Remain the Same, 19). Seb Franklin for The English Association's The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory writes in regards to "The methodology developed in Control and Freedom," and ways ""in which archives of critical theory and the history of technology meet close analyses of software and hardware rooted in Chun's training as a systems design engineer, is refined and extended in Programmed Visions, providing a basis for a detailed inquiry into the ways in which software and governmentality are historically and logically intertwined."[11]
New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader
Steve Anderson is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, history, technology and culture. He teaches the production and theory of digital media and documentary in the School of Theater, Film and Television and holds a joint appointment in the department of Design Media Arts.
Breaking from SpeculationLev Manovich begins The Language of New Media with a personal recollection which moves fromMoscow, in 1975, ten years forward to 1985, then to 1995. The chronological pattern is far toocommon to readers of new media theory. Thankfully, that's part of the point. Before embarking onspeculations about 2005, 2015, and beyond, Manovich breaks off in mid-sentence. Quietly replacingone pattern with another, he turns to film history to shape his new media theory. He laments, "Iwish that someone in 1895, 1897, or at least 1903, had realized the fundamental significance of theemergence of the new medium of cinema" (6). According to Manovich, no systematic accounts of theemergence of cinema were undertaken while it was in its infancy. The absence of a historical recordhas forced film theorists to laboriously construct a history from "a set of random and unevenlydistributed historical samples" (6). Today, as the rhetorics, forms, and institutions of new media develop, scholars are awareof the significance of the new forms. But as happened with the birth of cinema a century ago, thedetails aren't being recorded. For Manovich, the danger is that when 2005, 2015, and beyond actuallyarrive, new media theorists will find their discipline lacks historical texts. Using the recent pastto project the shape of the near future, the pattern Manovich refuses, has displaced that essentialwork. What's left out, of course, is the present. "Most writings on new media are full ofspeculation about the future," he continues. "This book, in contrast, analyses (sic) newmedia as it has actually developed until the present moment, while pointing to directions for newmedia artists and designers that have yet to be explored" (10). Recording the present doesn'tpreclude some conjecture about the future, but instead shows the ways the future may be presentaround us, in emergent forms and practices. The book's focus on the present, and its overall coherence and attention to detail, differentiatesThe Language of New Media from other books in the field. Manovich's work builds a concisegroup of principles for analyzing new media. Its most important argument is the careful developmentof a record of the present state of new media which focuses on the complex relationship betweencinema and new media. Manovich also confronts the problem of terminology for new media, suggestingseveral revisions for widely used terms, and proposing additions to the lexicon. Finally, the bookis clearly constructed with pedagogy in mind. Besides the careful treatment of terminology, theelegant structure of the text and Manovich's attitude toward his own work demonstrate carefulattention to the book's rhetorical potential.Defining New MediaThe methodological work started in Manovich's introduction extends well into his firstchapter. Manovich begins with a historical inventory, but the first form he mentions is LouisDaguerre's proto-photographic daguerreotype, introduced in 1839, not Charles Babbage'sManovich: "It is my hope that the theory of new mediadeveloped here can act not only as an aid to understanding the present, but as a grid for practicalexperimentation" (10).proto-digital "Analytical Engine," conceptualized six years earlier. In fact, rather than Babbage'sEngine (perhaps better thought of as the first exampleof vaporware), Manovich notes the punch-card reading Jacquard loom, built around 1800, createdsophisticated designs from card input, making it a "specialized graphics computer" (22). Thus thefirst programming produced images, not calculations. With this gesture, Manovich begins to build hiscase for developing his account of new media as a parallel history of images and the machines whichproduce them. The bounds for new media are set by five "principles of new media" present in most new mediaobjects, which "should be considered not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of aculture undergoing computerization" (27). Many of the characteristics reflect differences ofindustrial and post-industrial economies, such as the industrial division of manufacturing intodiscrete tasks for the assembly line (numerical representation), or post-industrial "just in time"inventory control (variability).Numerical representation: new media are "composed of digital code" and thus can be"described using a mathematical function" and can undergo "algorithmic manipulation"(27). Conversion from analog to digital form requires sampling: building a regular pattern ofquantified units in space and/or time.
Modularity: new media objects are object-oriented, composed of parts made up of smallerparts reminiscent of a "fractal structure" (30). Thelogic of computer programming and the makeup of new media objects reflect this modularity; both areoften made from independent parts which retain a measure of autonomy even if embedded in another newmedia object.
Three more complex general tendencies are built on these foundational principles:
Variability: "A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but somethingthat can exist in different, potentially infinite versions" (36). Manovich lists seven examples ofvariability common in contemporary new media, and also considers more foundational differencesvariability enables: for example, hypermedia elements and structure need not be "hardwired" as inold media. Variables replace constants, and data separated from algorithms (as in computerprogramming). But to some extent this variability is radically limited to selection from a group ofpre-packaged forms: a concept Manovich will later expand as "selection."
Transcoding: the "reconceptualization" which occurs during computerization, thetransformation of media into computer data. The mapping of concepts such as plot, sentence, familyportrait, or summer blockbuster into the computer's text, packet, pixel, or other data structure,creates a composite "blend of human and computer meanings" (46). (In computer science, the term"transcoding" itself signifies movement of data between formats.)
The last of the five principles, transcoding, is "the most substantial consequence ofthe computerization of media" (45). Manovich suggests thinking of new media as "two distinct layers– the 'cultural layer' and the 'computer layer'" (46), though he proposes this distinction in amanner which does not imply disconnection between the two. "Transcoding" facilitates complexrelationships between the systems of organization of culture and the means by which we affect thosesystems in computing. For example, conventions of computing interfaces influence the design ofhypermedia. Students instructed to "build a database of information" may proceed differently thanthose told to "take notes and organize raw material." Programmers may design computer-basedinterfaces and shape media formats based on cultural objects, like the controls of media players,which emulate the VCR. In other words, Manovich argues that computer and culture influence each other. Of course, this isnot a groundbreaking assertion, but embedding that relationship into the theory of new media sets atone for the text and distinguishes Manovich's work from others which portray the relationshipdeterministically. Sadly, the dominant common sense of computer design and use follows thedeterministic pattern. As Robert Johnson notes in User-Centered Technology, computers areoften thought of as "black boxes," and the humanagents and cultural influences which shape the design of their interfaces and use patterns areinvisible. Manovich's principle of "transcoding" illustrates the gravity of this misconception. To further separate these five principles from other conceptual problems, the next section, "WhatNew Media is Not," debunks six commonly accepted assumptions about new media. Once again, Manovichrelies on comparisons between cinema and new media, as he systematically demonstrates that neitherdiscrete representation, random access, or multimedia are the unique province of new media. They areproperties present in cinema as well. Likewise, claims that new media are new because of"digitization" and "interactivity" fail under critical pressure. The periodic sampling oftenconsidered unique to digitization is at the heart of film, and considering any medium "interactive"is a mere tautology (50, 55). But this is not merely a terminological clarification, though itcertainly serves that purpose, as demonstrated below; it is a reminder that "newness" in and ofitself may not correspond to significance.New Media and CinemaReaders of The Language of New Media may be tempted to misrepresent or simplify therelation of new media and cinema that Manovich carefully develops over the course of thework. Indeed, the cover art – a heavily manipulatedphotograph of film stock which literally wraps around the text – gives some credence to thenotion that Manovich's argument is simply, "New media works like film." But this sort of judgmenthas obvious flaws. Some reviewers have configured the sixth (and final) chapter as a "coda" or "envoi," and with goodreason. The fifth chapter ends with a shift to the past tense, a ruminative final paragraph whichbegins, "In this book, I have chosen to emphasize [...]" (285). Manovich admittedly structures the text so that the sixth chapter is a reversal whichreflects back upon the first five (12), a design to some extent represented in the form of thisreview. But he also notes that the chapter continues the trajectory of the book as a whole. And,most importantly, it's possible that Manovich downplays the nature of the reversal which does occurin "What is Cinema?" to achieve greater rhetoricaleffect. For Manovich cinema provides a double influence: film theory is the "key conceptual lens" (9) withwhich he investigates new media. Film, especially the work of the Russian avant-garde, and DzigaVertov in particular, is the primary source of explanatory examples. "Vertov's dataset," Manovich'scollage-like prologue, is a series of stills from Man with a Movie Camera accompanied byquotes from the text. The stills reappear throughout the work, at section breaks, and in fact arethe only visuals included in the text. Unfortunately, this focus minimizes the effects of print literacy on new media. Manovich notes someareas where the influence of print is apparent. "Cultural interfaces rely on our familiarity withthe 'page interface,'" he notes. "Given that the history of a page stretches back for thousands ofyears, I think it is unlikely that it will disappear so quickly" (74, 75-76). Manovich calls on thework of Roland Barthes when tracing the genealogy of the screen from Renaissance painting throughprint to cinema (104), and again when arguing that the history of the logic of selection predatesthe development of new media (125). But the influence of the forms of print culture is overshadowedby the power and influence of cinema. In some ways, this focus is simply a function of remaining true to the established method of arecord of the present, and recognizing the "general trend in modern society toward presenting moreand more information in the form of time-based audiovisual moving image sequences, rather than astext" (78). There are many specific representations of this trend. Writing of the work of virtualreality programmer and theorist Jaron Lanier, Manovich argues that the repression of linguisticforms in new media is a continuation of "the fantasy of objectifying and augmenting consciousness[...] the desire to see in technology a return to the primitive happy age of pre-language,pre-misunderstanding" (59). Shifting to the emergence and influence of new technologies at the turnof the twentieth century, Manovich argues that cinema "impressed itself [more] strongly on publicmemory" than forms of electronic communication which emerged at approximately the same time, because"the ability to communicate over a physical distance in real time did not seem by itself to inspirefundamentally new aesthetic principles the way film or tape recording did" (162). The traditionalstyle of photography and cinematography with its "linear perspective, depth of field effect [...]particular tonal and color range, and motion blur" (179) towered over visual culture, shapingemergent computing technology, yet was seldom foregrounded as a certain kind of realism(191-92). But though dominance of new media by cinematic forms is a representation of the current status ofthe relation between technology and culture, Manovich shows this need not be the case. Theavant-garde, in particular, have always resisted conventional models. Vertov's dataset derived itslasting strength from that conscious differentiation. Notably, continuation of the tradition ofquestioning established forms occurs when new media designers cope with the technical limitations ofcomputing. For instance, the first versions of the Mac OS were monochromatic, because display technologies simply couldn't representcolor very effectively (63). In its infancy, QuickTime worked best with very small framesizes. These limitations forced an interesting historical convergence: 041b061a72