User:ThomasW/Notes The Language of New Media

Manovich, Lev, (2001) The Language of New Media, United States of America, The MIT Press

I am afraid that future theorists and historians of computer media will be left with not much more than the equivalents of the newspaper reports and film programs from cinema first decade. They will find that analytical texts from our area recognize the significance of computers take over of culture, yet , by and large, contains speculations about the future rather then a record and theory of the present. (Manovich,2001, p6-7)

A new media object maybe a digital still, digitally composites film, virtual 3-D environment, computer games, self-contained hypermedia DVD, hypermedia Web site, or the Web as a hole p 14

New Media is Programmable Media

(1880 Phonograph) A cylinder was to hold 42,000 images, each so small (1/32 inch wide) that a viewer would have to look at them through a microscope. The storage capacity of this medium was twenty-eight minutes–twenty-eight minutes of continuous time taken apart, flattened on a surface, and mapped onto a two-dimensional gride. p.51

(William Mitchell)

“There is an indefinite amount of information in a continuous-tone photograph, so enlargement usually reveals more detail but yields a fuzzier and grainier picture... A digital image, on the other hand, has precisely limited spatial and tone resolution and contains a fixed amount of information” . p52-53

“There is actually much more degradation and loss of information between copies of digital images then between copies of traditional photographs” p 54 (compression)

If in “meatspace” we have to work to remember, in cyberspace we have to work to forget. p.63

In my view, the language of cultural interface is largely made up from elements of other, already familiar cultural forms. p.71

Text is unique among media types. It plays a privileged role in computer culture. On the hand, its is one media type among others. But, on the other hand, it is a metalanguage of computer media, a code in which all other media are represented. p.74

In the 1980s many critics described one of the key effects of “post-modernist” as that of specialization–privileging space over time, flattening historical time, refusing grand narratives. Computer media, which evolved during the same decade, accomplished this specialization quite literally. It replaced sequential storage with random-access storage. p78

The designer of a virtual world is thus ac cinematographer as well as an architect. p82

In short, the new media object is something that can exist in numerous versions ad numerous incarnations. P134

the visual culture of a computer age is cinematogprahic in its appearance, digital on the level of material and computational (i.e., software driven) in itrs logic. P.180 if medieval masters left after themselves material wonders of stone and glass inspired by religious faith, today our craftsmen leave only pixel sets to be projected on movie theatres screen or played on computer monitors p.201

Its hard to find a pure encyclopedia without any trace of a narrative in it and vice versa. p.234

In the 1990s, when the new role of the computer as a Universal Media Machines became apparent, already computerized societies went into a digitizing craze, All existing books and videotapes, photographs, and audio recodings started to be fed into computers and an ever-increasing rate. p.224

In 1996, the financial company T. Rowe Price stored eight hundred gigabtyes of data; by the fall of 1999 this number rose to ten terabytes. p.224