“After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate — the database.  Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence.  Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other.”

In his efforts to distinguish new media from traditional media, Manovich posits a distinction between narrative and the database.  This distinction serves to illustrate a conception of art history that understands the prevailing mode of cultural expression primarily in terms of what technological capabilities are available for use.  Implicit in this conception of art history is a sequential progression of media forms, wherein the book leads to cinema, which in turn leads to the computer; the computer, being most recent, is therefore more advanced or complex than cinema or the novel.  Additionally, this distinction overtly connects the novel with linearity, to make the novel a representative of traditional media generally; simultaneously, the database is connected to non-linearity and taken as a representative form of the new media.  The manner in which this argument is constructed, however, creates a number of problems.

For example: the choice to oppose traditional forms to the database is in many respects arbitrary.  Manovich’s choice to associate the novel with linearity as a means to signify the properties of traditional media glosses over common traditional forms for which this association is meaningless.  It makes no sense to discuss a painting or a photograph in terms of the linearity Manovich attributes to narrative — even though a picture can tell a story worth a thousand words.  Neither does it make sense to discuss a single painting or photograph as a database — especially if the image is visually abstract, and therefore not amenable to description as a collection of distinct objects.  Even if Manovich’s account of literary works is taken at face value, novels such as Finnegan’s Wake can be understood as organizaed towards a depth of referentiality rather than anything linear or narrative; the same holds for poetry.

Furthermore, Manovich’s definition of the database is profoundly unclear.  After describing the database as a collection “of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other,” Manovich provides contradictory details further down the same page.  If, for example, a database can be “organized into hierarchical classes,” it follows that, if two elements are located at different levels of the hierarchy, they by definition possess a different sort of significance (even though an interface may render this hierarchy transparent to a user).

Finally, Manovich does not here take into account that a user of a database may well experience the database as a sequence of events — though the beginning and end points of that sequence may well be arbitrary.  When a user accesses an electronic encyclopedia, for example, he or she does not experience the whole collection at once: a user might begin with what seems like a reasonable starting point, and make numerous attempts to more narrowly focus his or her investigation of some subject matter.

Like any printed reference text, such as a dictionary or a thesaurus, an electronic encyclopedia may be experienced in an arbitrary order, and it is the careful tailoring of individual sentences into a logical sequence that gives the text its meaning — not whether those sentences are bound in an alphabetized book or stored on a CD-ROM.  A video game too may be stored as a database on disc, but may only have meaning in virtue of the sequence in which a user accesses different parts of that database.  The designer of a database often enough provides a means by which users can access the database in a structured, sequential, manner.

Omitting a discussion of this structuring of experience results in something like trying to describe a novel in terms of the properties of the alphabet.

The third such notion that Manovich addresses is the ability of new media to support the “random access” of information.  Manovich formulates this popular notion as follows:

“New media allow for random access.  In contrast to film or videotape, which store data sequentially, computer storage devices make it possible to access any data element equally fast.”

The background of this claim involves an important technical concept in contemporary computer design.  When people talk about how much “memory” their computer has, they frequently refer to Random Access Memory (often called RAM), as opposed to hard disk space.  Hard disk space is where computer programs and user files are kept for long-term storage; RAM is like a scratch pad that a computer uses while manipulating data retrieved from a hard disk.  Although today, hard disks are quite fast, this distinction represents an important development in the history of computing, as data was once stored on magnetic tape.  Historically, for a computer to access a given file, it needed to fast-forward or rewind a large amount of tape in order to retrieve the data requested by a user.  As this could be a time-consuming process, solid state RAM technology was developed in part so that once the relevant data was located on the tape, that data could then be manipulated with less delay.  Cost was among the primary reasons that solid state RAM was not used for all storage.

Thus, distinctions between new media and old media based on the concept of “random access” would draw an analogy between film and the magnetic tape that computers once commonly used to store data.  To view a particular frame in a given film, one must feed the film through a projector and first view every preceding frame — even though one may not be interested in all those other frames.  Under this analogy, new media represent the invention of RAM, and therefore the ability to easily retrieve an arbitrary piece of information without having to review a mountain of unimportant data first.

This analogy is meant to draw attention to an important functional distinction between new media and old media.  The perceived relevance of this distinction is that new media facilitate a unique form of non-linear interaction which was impossible to achieve with previous media technologies such as film.  As Manovich here observes, “once a film is digitized and loaded into a computer’s memory, any frame can be accessed with equal ease.”  Thus, new media are purported to provide unique ways of fragmenting and re-ordering time and space.

Although Manovich (perhaps correctly) denies that “random access” is sufficient to create a unique identity for new media, his argument here fails to directly address why.  One of Manovich’s central objectives in The Language of New Media is to ground the emerging conventions of new media in an existing body of literature on film criticism; to this end, his argument against the relevance of “random access” relies on various precedents in the history of cinema — such as the Phenakistiscope and the Zoopraxiscope — that demonstrate a rudimentary form of “random access” in non-digital motion picture technology.  However, the ability to scan through time “mapped onto two-dimensional space” found in esoteric technologies such as the Phenakistiscope is not really present in cinema as we understand it today; thus, the critique which Manovich would here present is more an observation of a historical coincidence than it is an observation about how the development of cultural and artistic traditions contributed to certain ways of perceiving and ordering experience.

If we abandon Manovich’s assumption that the history of cinema provides the most appropriate way to interpret the emergence of new media aesthetics, we can then see that other, less esoteric examples of “random access” in pre-existing media forms not only make themselves apparent, but also provide more compelling evidence to substantiate claims against the purported importance of “random access.”

Most obviously, the printed book is a traditional media form that readily supports “random access.”  The ability to access arbitrary information in a printed book is what gives reference texts such as dictionaries and encyclopedias their utility.  Moreover, the liturgical function of the Bible relies on the ability to retrieve specific passages — and those passages only — on different occasions.  If we consider that printed books can contain material other than text, we are obliged to acknowledge that books of art reproductions and magazines are frequently browsed in highly non-linear ways.  The “choose-your-own-adventure” book is just one example of the ways in which the non-linear, “random access” features of print can be exploited for aesthetic ends.

In “old media” such as painting and photography, analyses which oppose the purported linearity of traditional media forms to the non-linearity of new media break down.  It makes little sense to speak of an individual painting or a photograph as sequential, since any part of the image can be viewed at any time without first having to review large amounts of irrelevant information.  The cultural values that give rise to different modes of expression or the widespread acceptance of certain modes of expression are more nuanced than presented by Manovich.  While recent history may present researchers with an entertaining menagerie of technological oddities and curious names, there are broader cultural trends that in many cases do better to illustrate the social and cultural dynamics influencing the development of different media.

“Historically, the artist made a unique work within a particular medium.  Therefore, the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level of an interface did not exist.  With new media, the content of the work and the interface are separated.”

The larger context for this claim relates to an application of Manovich’s Principle of Variability: a particular new media object can be viewed in many different ways.  As Manovich observes, new media make it possible to “create different interfaces to the same material.”  This is, however, more of a linguistic illusion resulting from the terms of Manovich’s reductionist analysis than it is an observation about how new media function (either as cultural traditions or as computer programs).

Manovich is here using the word “interface” in an expansive sense, wherein text and cinema, for example, are understood as “interfaces” to shared bodies of cultural knowledge and traditions.  It is somewhat unclear what, exactly, it might mean for Manovich to suggest that a new media object exists in multiple mediums in a way that is substantively distinct from traditional cultural productions.  A CD-ROM, for example, won’t fit into a radio; and while the audio contained on a CD-ROM can be played back over the radio, a painting can just as readily be reproduced in a book.  And while it is true that a particular image might be retrieved from a DVD Player as readily as from a web browser — thus providing an example of multiple interfaces to the same work — it is still unclear how this is substantively distinct from how one might appreciate the literary content of a traditional drama either on stage or in print.

The history of art is filled with countless variations on the themes of the creation myth of Judaism, the narrative of Christ, Greek folk heroes, and the like.  And while these mythologies are not themselves the creations of a single artist, distinct artworks which portray these myths are different “interfaces” to specific cultural productions.

Moreover, an artist who makes use of allegory and symbolism provides an audience multiple ways of “interfacing” with a given artwork.  Iconography and symbolism are frequently used in religious or philosophical art to indicate a transcendent reality distinct from the material world of the senses.  Likewise, allegory is used to implicate general truths distinct from the particular facts of a given narrative.  In a given painting, we may find symbolic uses of color, gesture, geometric composition strategies, and culturally significant objects used to generate different sorts of meaning.  One might appreciate the aesthetics of a painting’s colors or forms in a way quite distinct from what those colors and forms are being used to say about historical, philosophical, or mythological ideas.

It might be illustrative here to mention Dante’s notion of a “polysemous” artwork — that is, an artwork “endowed with many meanings.”  A polysemous artwork involves four distinct types of meaning: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.  One literary statement might be at once appreciated for the economy and the skill of its construction, for the useful information it conveys, for the transcendent truths which it indicates, and for the moral teachings the statement imply.  A given reader need not be aware of each of these levels of meaning, nor be attentive to each to appreciate the others. Here we have a Mediaeval formulation of what multiple “interfaces” to a single artwork can look like.

Painting is more than pigments on canvas, just as a book is more than “a rectangular page containing one or more columns of text, illustrations or other graphics… pages that follow each other sequentially, a table of contents, and an index” (see page 71).  A book is also a cultural tradition; the obstacles an author (such as James Joyce) must overcome while trying to get a book published confer upon the book a type of authority.  That perception of authority contributes to how a reader might cognitively orient his- or herself to the text.  As more people read texts online, more people come to the realization that there is something emotionally satisfying about holding a bound book in their hands while they read — something quite apart from the content of the text, or what is required of one attempting to “interface” with the text.

While it may be argued at this point that what new media brings to art is the ability to make these multiple modes of “interfacing” somehow more explicit than what is found in traditional art forms, there is little reason to attribute this change to anything about how new media is structured.  The ability to “interface” with a work of art in multiple ways existed before the development of new media, and social practices designed to foreground this multiplicity likewise existed before the development of new media (the museum being an obvious example).  And while it may then be suggested that new media places this multiplicity “within” the artwork in a way distinct from that found in traditional media, Manovich’s argument would seem to preclude this line of reasoning, as he suggests that there is a distinct way in which “the content of the work and the interface are separated” in new media.

Moreover, the best interfaces are those which are most transparent: if, when a person sits at a computer, he or she spends too much time trying to figure out how to operate the computer, the interface is not a useful tool for getting actual work done.  Successful interfaces rely on common cultural signifiers, the consistent implementation of functional components, and a degree of unobtrusiveness.  If an industrial designer tries to be too innovative with the design of a light switch or a doorknob, users will become frustrated when they can’t figure out how to make it work.  And while there may be an aesthetic argument for new media artists addressing the conventions of the interface itself — of directly addressing the complexity of multiple interface possibilities — to identify this possibility as somehow inherent to new media practice misses the point of what an interface actually does.

“We begin to see that the printed word and cinema also can be thought of as interfaces, even though historically they have been tied to particular kinds of data.  Each offers its own grammar of actions, each comes with its own metaphors, each offers a particular physical interface.”

Treating the notion of “interface” both as noun and verb — as a cultural practice as well as a cultural product — certainly has advantages when it comes to a discussion of something so broad as “media.”  The objective here is to ground the conventions of new media in pre-existing forms, and to thereby establish the validity of Manovich’s attempt to interpret the emerging conventions of new media practices in terms of an existing body of criticism.  The danger of such expansive definitions, however, is that if a concept is defined too broadly, it becomes difficult to discern its proper applicability.  Such expansive definitions, therefore, must rely on a precise delineation of terminology if they are to be successful.  In this case, Manovich’s use of the term “interface” suffers in part from how the term is defined, and in part from how the term is applied.

While it may seem sensible to understand an interface in terms of a particular way of “organizing information, presenting it to the user, correlating space and time, and structuring human experience,” there is little about this list of features that uniquely signifies the notion of “interface.”  A narrative and a traffic sign both accomplish these goals.  And while there may be some novelty — and perhaps even some insight — in an expansive definition of the “interface” which suggests that traffic lights are a way of “interfacing” with a city, such an expansive definition becomes problematic when one considers that traffic lights were developed to manage the behavior of many people choosing to “interface” with cities by automobile.  By this understanding, then, “interfaces” are developed for “interfaces” to “interface” with “interfaces” — which not only reduces the term to absurdity, but provides few clues about the cultural practices that compel such developments.

While such an expansive definition may provide some insight when treated in a strictly metaphorical sense, a literal or material applications lead to undesirable consequences.  While a narrative clearly meets Manovich’s definition of an “interface,” it is worth noting that a narrative is not tied to any particular media form: narrative appears in fiction, poetry, cinema, drama, and ordinary conversation.  Thus, in terms of Manovich’s exposition of the “interface,” it is unclear why print and cinema should be more valuable to the discussion than narrative or traffic regulation.  And while it may be argued that print and cinema both refer to specific media types in virtue of their material instantiation, a book is every bit as material as a city; furthermore, such an appeal to the material instantiation of various media types provides no recourse here, since it is precisely the notion of a media types specific materiality that Manovich seeks to undermine in his discussion of new media.

In terms of how Manovich employs his expansive definition of the “interface,” the discussion suffers from serious ambiguities.  For example, when Manovich asserts that the printed word is an interface that has been historically tied to a particular kind of data, we must ask just what sort of data it is to which the printed word provides an “interface.”  If we understand this assertion to mean that the printed word has, historically, only been used to “interface” with text, we are left with something quite close to a tautology, which here provides little or no insight.  If we insist that print is a unique instance of text, we must admit that print is found in many places other than books — thus raising questions about Manovich’s discussion of the “page” as a fundamental interface metaphor.  If we examine how the printed word has been used historically, we can see quite clearly that print is not by any means bound to a particular type of data: poetry relates to feelings, an anthropological study conveys facts, a legal document describes laws, a geometrical treatise presents certain logical forms, and so on.

Likewise, cinema can be used to convey facts for the purpose of instruction, rhetoric for the purpose of indoctrination, propaganda for the purpose of persuasion, or abstract visual forms either to provide aesthetic pleasure or to illustrate certain critical theses.  Just what “data” is, and how the term ought to be applied, becomes as important here as what an “interface” is.

Manovich’s discussion of the “interface” here serves to foreground a perception that traditional media types are becoming unhinged from their material instantiation, and insofar as they are then incorporated into computer-mediated aesthetics, they become metaphorical as a result.  That is, print is no longer just print, but a signifier that becomes a source of raw material for the new media.  Although there may be some truth in this perception, to then suggest that such a trend finds either its apex or an initial catalyst in the new media is deeply problematic.  It is not a new development that printed words may be enjoyed either as a private experience between a reader and a book, or read aloud in a performance.  A book and a theatrical production each provide a distinct way of “interfacing” with the printed word.  In the case of print especially, letters themselves may also be appreciated on the basis of visual aesthetics, either in terms of a particular typographer’s skill, or in terms of the antiquarian quality of a rare historical artifact.  One can find an illuminated manuscript visually beautiful even if one can’t read Latin.

And as for the metaphorical value of print, we find in the Gospel of John the opening statement: “In the beginning was the Word.”  Even if we accept this particular phraseology as tied to the King James English, it provides a noteworthy corollary to the Shakespearean dictum that “all the world’s a stage.”

“The shift to digital media affects not just Hollywood, but filmmaking as a whole.  As traditional film technology is universally being replaced by digital technology, the logic of the filmmaking process is being redefined.”

While this observation certainly alludes to a process which many critics have observed — that digital technology exerts an influence on how films are produced by filmmakers and understood by audiences — the formulation and exposition of this observation here relies on generalities that omit many practical considerations of great importance.

The difficulty is a product of a methodological problem with Manovich’s text — that is, he begins with a reductionist approach to analyzing new media, then reasons through the potential consequences of his premises.  The problem with such an approach is that it relies entirely on the validity of the premises.  In this case, the premises are not only flawed, but in their focus on the purported “concrete” factors that distinguish new media objects from traditional media, they gloss over many cultural continuities.

The result of this difficulty is a series of observations that are equally disconnected from the history and the present reality of filmmaking.

Take, for example, Manovich’s assertion that the result of 3D computer animation is that “live-action footage is displaced from its role as the only possible material from which a film can be constructed.”  The thrust of Manovich’s assertion here is to emphasize the “newness” and the “otherness” of digital cinema; yet he does so as the expense of accuracy.

The history of cinema provides numerous examples that demonstrate the utter falsity of this claim.  Early in the history of cinema — before the Hollywood studio system came to exert a dominant influence on the aesthetics of film — we can see filmmakers such as Man Ray conducting experiments to produce moving images on celluloid without relying upon the photographic apparatus of the camera.  Man Ray’s 1926 film Emak Bakia contains several sequences produced by placing various objects directly on a strip of film and then exposing the film to light.  Aside from Hollywood’s rich history of cell-based animation (which clearly does not rely on live-action footage) we find contemporary experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage — who made numerous films by directly applying pigment to clear leader, or scratching the emulsion off of black slug — continuing the investigations begun by Man Ray.  Furthermore, it is worth considering that scientific time-lapse footage, such as of microbes or phototropism, do not qualify as live-action imagery (although they are examples of photographic motion pictures).

“the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer.”

This Principle of New Media is the least well-defined, in part due to the unusual technical term used to name it, and in part for how it draws very general cultural considerations into what is otherwise primarily a discourse about the mechanical features of computers.

Transcoding is a technical term in computer science that relates, as Manovich notes, to the translation of information from one format to another; it is an important feature of this technical term, however, that the translation occurs within a computer system. Transcoding is the translation of information from one digital format to another; thus, printing a digital photograph onto paper does not qualify. The use of the word “transcoding” is unfortunate because it deprives readers of linguistic intuitions that might be derived from a more familiar term; the use of the word as a metaphor is also problematic, because culture is neither a “format” nor a product of the types of formal relationships that govern computer formats.

While it might be Manovich’s intent in this case to argue that our experience with computers colors how we view cultural activity — that computers make us see cultural activity in a more “computerized” sense — it is important to understand Manovich’s treatment of this term as an analogy, rather than a statement about formal equivalency, or one that implies a strong causal relationship. Similar analogies have arose in the past: after the invention of the mechanical clock, for example, it became popular in Western science to approach cosmology as though one were studying a clock-like mechanical device.

Although it is undoubtedly the case that computers have had some impact on culture, just how this effect is to be understood as substantially different from the technological impact of more traditional media is unclear. In terms of the linguistic consequences of media on culture, it is worth noting that following the widespread cultural acceptance of television and radio, for example, the English language gained a new colloquialism: “to tune out” what one finds uninteresting. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in linguistics, which asserts that language plays a central role in what features of the world we can readily perceive, suggests that the emergence of such colloquialisms as “tuning out” might have consequences more profound than simply the availability of particular informal expressions. Even outside of a discussion about recording media, one can find in Christianity or Islam a mystical, cosmological significance attributed to the word.

Described as “a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it,” the cultural effect of “transcoding” is understood as affecting “all cultural categories and concepts.”

Given that computers were designed under considerations of precisely the reflexive relationship Manovich here identifies, it should come as no surprise to discover such a relationship present in new media. Manovich’s description of transcoding, however, privileges the relationship as proceeding from computers to culture, and largely ignores the impetus behind the trend in the opposite direction. The discussion of “transcoding” is problematic insofar as it is held within the context of an analysis philosophically-grounded as though practical computers, in their design and use, could be meaningfully understood apart from the cultural attitudes, beliefs, goals, and habits that produced computers and made their presence commonplace.

In many important respects, computers are modeled on human physiology and the ways our physiology allow us to perceive the world. The RBG color model used by computers to represent images, for example, is successful at reproducing the colors we see in the world because it is modeled on how our physiology recognizes color. Similarly, much of the work that went into designing computers as formal systems derives from Gottlob Frege‘s study of natural language.

The distinction Manovich draws between “the computer layer” and “the cultural layer” may be part of an attempt to structure a dialectic relationship between the mechanical behavior of computers and the cultural uses for computers, wherein “new media” becomes a synthesis of “computers” and “culture.” In such a case, culture would seem to carry the connotation of something organic, while computers would carry the connotation of something artificial; such a dialectic, however, would presuppose an opposing relationship between computers and culture that really does not exist as presupposed.

It is generally assumed that because computers are human inventions governed by well-defined mechanical relationships, they can therefore be more fully understood than something like culture, in which we participate, but never deliberately invented. Despite the well-defined nature of practical computers, there are a number of programmatic difficulties in attempting to formulate a comprehensive theory of computation. The way Manovich relies upon concepts drawn from computer science involves many of these difficulties.

Brian Cantwell Smith, in his essay “The Foundations of Computing” wrote:

“What has been (indeed, by most people still is) called a ‘Theory of Computation’ is in fact a general theory of the physical world — specifically, a theory of how hard it is, and what is required, for patches of the world in one physical configuration to change into another physical configuration. It applies to all physical entities, not just to computers.

“Not only must an adequate account of computation include a theory of semantics; it must also include a theory of ontology… Computers turn out in the end to be rather like cars: objects of inestimable social and political importance, but not in and of themselves, qua themselves, the focus of enduring scientific or intellectual inquiry — not, as philosophers would say, natural kinds.

“It is not just that a theory of computation will not supply a theory of semantics… or that it will not replace a theory of semantics; or even that it will depend or rest on a theory of semantics… computers per se, as I have said, do not constitute a distinct, delineated subject matter.”

The main thrust of Smith’s argument is that the idea of an all-encompasing theory of computation may be as incoherent as an attempt to formulate an all-encompasing “theory of walking.” For Manovich then to ground his theory of new media in terminology from computer science, without carefully delineating in what possible domains his assertions are applicable, presents very fundamental difficulties to the use of The Language of New Media for making valid inferences about individual new media objects.

“Beginning with the basic, ‘material’ principles of new media — numeric coding and modular organization — we moved to more ‘deep’ and far-reaching ones — automation and variability.”

The medium-specific analysis in The Language of New Media attempts to philosophically ground discussion in a material sense apart from relatively subjective cultural factors: the medium is understood primarily as the properties and behaviors of a material thing. While the language of the analysis draws upon diverse concepts in computer science and mathematics, history, behaviorist and cognitive psychology, economics, and aesthetics, missing is a definition of what “a medium” actually is, such that one might consider a given object as being properly discussed in the terms of a given medium.

Given the scholarly tradition towards which The Language of New Media is oriented, it might seem natural to assume that Lev Manovich’s understanding of “a medium” falls somewhere near Marshall McLuhan’s; yet two of McLuhan’s important conclusions — that electronic media would make cultural habits more tribal and more aural — are at odds with central features of The Language of New Media, which holds that cultural habits have been becoming more industrially-influenced and more visual.

Although an approximate understanding of “a medium” for the purposes of discussion might be generally acceptable, the task of distinguishing new media from traditional media on the basis of qualities which both, in important respects, hold in common presents certain difficulties. To resolve these difficulties, one might accept a more informal and broadly-defined understanding of “a medium.” To do so would, however, imply a different philosophical grounding than that used methodologically in The Language of New Media.

The example provided by “branching-type interactivity” overlooks historical continuities between new media and traditional media, while also suggesting philosophical difficulties. The word “branching” in this context has both a phenomenological meaning and a technical meaning; as a metaphor it relates to the way tree branches subdivide along their length, and describes the many possible routes one might take while navigating an interactive artwork (as though one were walking along a tree branch from a single trunk to a random leaf). In a technical sense, systems theory studies this phenomenon in terms of “bifurcation” as a way to describe the net effect of multiple individual events. The same “branching-type” behavior can be found in descriptions of interactions with traditional media objects such as books of photographs or other art prints, choose-your-own-adventure books, architecture, and installation art, all of which are commonly explored in a nonlinear and indeterminate fashion.

It could be argued that branching behavior is “in” a new media object in some structural way that it isn’t “in” traditional media; yet, just how one should most properly distinguish between the mechanical response of a book to having a page turned or a television set to having a channel changed, compared to a remote web server sending a copy of a web page, is unclear.

The example provided by “scaling” is similarly problematic. The word “scaling” has an informal sense, in which an object may be presented as larger or smaller, with more or less detail; and the word has a technical sense, which in mathematics refers to a type of linear transformation. The discussion of Microsoft Word’s “Autosummarize” feature fits neither of these uses: one third of a novel is not a scaled-down version of the novel, but rather, it is incomplete.

Although the types of variability discussed in The Language of New Media may be useful to an extent in describing the experience of interacting with a new media object, the discussion breaks down in a number of ways. Why these types of variability have the cultural value that they do is largely left unaddressed, and therefore, what meaning their application has to new media practices in terms of how new media objects are appreciated — aesthetically or in terms of convenience — remains unresolved.

“A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions.”

This observation would seem to relate more to the experience of somebody interacting with a new media object than to an artist creating a new media object; the implications for the artist are, however, relatively straightforward. A graphic designer working with a piece of graphic design software might be given some text and images, and might then try out a number of possible fonts for the text and visual arrangements of images. The text, during such a process, is not fixed, but highly variable in its appearance. Before the advent of computerized graphic design, such a design process was much more difficult.

It would seem that a large part of why the new media attract so much critical attention relates to the dynamic nature of online content. For example, in both design and distribution, visual text is no longer a static enterprise confined to the monolithic bound book, but has become a new sort of fluid event on computer screens: electronic text can easily be resized or rearranged. Yet the identification of this variability as a central feature of new media reveals at once a contemporary cultural bias towards that which is perceived as new, as well as the continuation of a historical trend that informs how, for example, the fluidity of electronic text ought to be perceived.

That the last quarter of the 20th Century brought with it some change in cultural attitudes towards mass media seems clear; that electronic computers continue to play some part in this change also seems clear. Something, then, is new; but to then say whatever properties are found in the new media are also new, or therefore fundamental to the perception of newness, is a deeply problematic approach. The problem might stem in part from the cultural value Modernism placed on novelty, but the perceived novelty of dynamic text (be it in terms of online syndicated or database-driven content, the market for branded plain-language neologisms such as “google,” or the proliferation of commonplace semantic conventions with plain-language vocabularies such as HTML or CSS or BBCODE), for example, is not strictly a recent cultural phenomenon. In thinking about why this cultural perception exists, it might be worthwhile to consider that the history of modern typography began with Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.

Among the early effects of Gutenberg’s movable type was a decrease in the cost of obtaining printed material, and an increase in the accessibility of printed material. Much of what we see in the effects of dynamic online content is in many respects similar: computers make it more convenient to access and manipulate media objects. To assert, then, that computers have introduced fundamentally new types of manipulations might reveal useful observations in a certain context, but the overall impact of computers in practical respects relates more directly to matters of convenience.

The discussion of new media’s variability, if it suffers from being too specific in its cultural scope, is perhaps too general in its technical analysis. In asserting that “instead of identical copies, a new media object typically gives rise to many different versions,” Manovich neglects one of the fundamental reasons for the utility of digital computers: be it in copying digital video from a camera to a computer, or in copying text from one computer to another, a contributing factor to the widespread success of digital computers has been their ability to make exact copies of things in a way that is impossible with many traditional media. A reproduction of a chemical photograph changes the image being reproduced because the reproduction introduces an additional amount of grain into the image; duplicating a digital picture file neither requires such a change in the product, nor do the economics of mass production and distribution imply greater costs for this increase in the accuracy of replicability.

It could be argued here that the replicability of new media objects encourages their modification, in virtue of the fact that such modifications to the product as the “customization” of a product’s use and behavior are made more convenient to the “audience” of end-users by digital computing (in virtue of the fact that products can be reproduced accurately enough to contain a great many reliable “moving parts” as well as a great degree of synchronous interoperability with other devices that similarly involve many “moving parts”); this convenience as a cultural value, however, would be an anthropological observation not directly addressed in the text. The variability of new media objects is an observation Manovich makes about the medium rather than about culture, and which he derives from his observations about the new media’s Numerical Representation and Modularity.

“The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation and access. Thus human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part.”

Although it is certainly true that many aspects of the new media are facilitated by automated processes on computers, to identify such processes as central features or concerns of new media practices does little to clarify what aesthetic issues come into play when artists make use of the new media. To ground the discussion in what is really a material observation about the behavior of computers obscures more meaningful observations about how artists working with new media behave. It is not unlike discussing a painting in terms of how the paint dries.

The difficulty with Manovich’s approach here can be discerned in the consideration of how and why one might distinguish a new media art object made in part with automated processes on a computer from a painting made with pigments that are manufactured in automated factories; The Language of New Media contains no way to determine at what point the mediation of automated processes becomes sufficient to distinguish the new media from traditional media.

Just as it might seem odd to generalize about painters on the basis of how their pigments were manufactured, it seems odd to generalize about new media artists in terms of the automated processes they employ. While a particular artist might for some reason choose to take such processes as a thematic concern in an artwork, or adjust his or her style to the peculiarities of certain such processes, to generalize that such processes are of central concern to understanding how all other artists use a given medium would seem to generalize too much.

From the perspective of the artist, there is a certain convenience to be found in the ability of computers to automate certain types of tasks; yet in the context of new media, to identify this automation as central to the medium in a sense reduces the new media artist to a button-pusher: a consumer of automated processes rather than a creator of artworks. The effect of the assertion is similar to Truman Capote’s remark about what is perhaps Jack Kerouac’s most famous novel: “that’s not writing, that’s typing.” To diminish human intentionality in an analysis of new media is to diminish the fact that media come into use because they suit certain purposes.

It might well be argued, furthermore, that the way automation affects the behavior of the new media artist is to increase the role of human intentionality: because of the convenience with which many choices of sophisticated manipulations can be presented to a new media artist, there are more possibilities for the artist to deliberately reject. Automated processes on computers are also designed with a great deal of effort and intentionality, and there is a good deal of skill involved in learning how to make use of them – either as an artist or as a consumer.