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Defining the Digital Environment

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, physiological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible with out a knowledge of the way media works as environments.

Summary: The Language of New Media

The Language of New Media proposes a historical and critical framework for the analysis of new media objects. The text begins with a discussion of five key principles that differentiate the new (computational) media from the old: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. To anyone with even the most rudimentary experience with computing devices and software, these principles border on the self-evident; nevertheless, they succinctly frame the book’s subsequent discussions of the core operations and affordances of new media objects and their relationship to cultural production.

Manovich identifies selection, compositing, and teleaction as the main operations of new media systems. Comparing the imaginatively-productive rifts between shots that characterize cinematic montage with the seamless blending of virtual and real objects in CGI works — and further iterating this comparison with an intriguing juxtaposition of Jurassic Park and the paintings of Socialist Realism — Manovich goes on to discuss the true correlate to the cinema and the novel brought about by new media, namely, the database.

The book’s penultimate section, “The Forms,” argues that, despite the tendency of many works to replicate or echo the linear narrative system of the cinema, the underlying logic of the database is a spatial one, wherein paradigm — or what a screenwriter might call the “story arc” — is suppressed and syntagm — the units of expression that construct meaning — is foregrounded. Manovich concludes with a discussion of the changing nature of the cinema and other cultural forms brought about by the challenges and possibilities raised by new media.

Lev Manovich

Print:

Static
Fixed
Linear
Unidirectional communication

Books: Gutenberg Bible 1454/5

‘The Electronic Word’. Richard A. Lanham.

Digital:

Fluid
Malleable
Simultaneous Media
Accessable
A conversation as apposed to a monologue
Remember Derrida?

Yugo Nakamura “Design & the Elastic Mind Website: