Manovich

Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media has been very helpful in clarifying what elements make up what we refer to as new media. My previous conception of what distinguished old and new media was limited to superficial analogies. I used to think that when I scanned my beloved David Bowie records into digital files I was clearly taking old or analog media (my physical records) and replicating them as new or digital media (mp3 files). David Silver, a professor at my undergraduate school, was all about the transformative power of Web 2.0 and users’ abilities to respond to and change web sites and programs, and I may have ended up misrepresenting Silver by thinking that new media is mainly defined by its interactive qualities (and Manovich calls interactive an “overused word” (228)). The town print newspaper would be old media while the openly changeable Wikipedia of Silver’s Web 2.0 would be new media (and I should clarify that Silver did not invent or even primarily popularize the phrase Web 2.0). Still, Manovich’s book clearly emphasizes that there is more to new media objects than their internal makeup of numbers and code. Why couldn’t I classify my digitized Bowie LPs and Silver’s broad Web 2.0 as new media and leave it at that?

After getting farther into Manovich’s book and also chatting with Scott today, I understand that their composition of digital code is just one of the primary elements that classify new media objects. I find variability to be especially relevant. Manovich writes, “A new media object is not something fixed once or for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions” (36). I mentioned to Scott that when DVDs first came out (and this might have been around the time Manovich was writing) a big part of their marketing push was a focus on ‘alternate angle’ options. Many of the movies released in the first wave of DVDs included alternate angles- angles that were shot and not used in the final film that viewers could access at different points by pressing the ‘angle’ button. This seemed like a form of variability where the viewer is able to interact with the film by varying the angles. When I told Scott this, he stressed that a blogging platform like WordPress or a social network like Facebook was even more productive for thinking about variability because they are databases and Manovich emphasizes the database in the world of new media. According to Scott, Facebook is one large database (that is also part of a larger database, the Web) where what is viewable varies by both users and devices. I’d also add that variability is also a part of Facebook because a user can decide what to post and remove on her account. So I have learned, as Todd alludes to in his post, that an object’s digital storage is just one aspect of it being new media.