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The Language of New Media
a review by Ron Mader

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Lev Manovich
The Language of New Media, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002
>> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262632551/ecotravelsinlatiA/

About a century ago the early years of cinema witnessed the creation of veritable masterpieces. For more than a generation (1980s-1930s) filmmakers produced seminal works that defined the very language of the medium.

So at the turn of this century, how do we recognize the equivalent works in "new media" -- computers, the web and other digital compositions? A scientist and theoretician, Lev Manovich guides the way in his exceptional book.

New media links content and interface, providing an unlimited number of ways of accessing a work. This is the norm of the digital age. Manovich argues "modern media is the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative." (p. 234) But new media does not begin with the Web. In fact, there's no better place to begin than with the 1929 avant garde film classic, Dziga Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera," which serves as a guide in an innovative prologue.

Later Manovich sums up the achievement of this classic film: "Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers still have to learn -- how to merge database and narrative into a new form (p. 243).

The Language of New Media offers a rigorous theory of new media. The author discusses new media's reliance on traditions, such as the use of the rectangular frame. He also demonstrates how concepts from film theory and art history play a vital role in understanding where we stand today. This book is highly recommended.

Excerpts from Language of New Media:

What follows is an attempt at both a record and a theory of the present. Just as film historians traced the development of film language during cinema's first decades, I aim to describe and understand the logic driving the development of the language of new media. (p. 7)

In "The Myth of Total Cinema," [Andre] Bazin claims that the idea of cinema existed long before the medium actually appeared and that the development of cinema technology "little by little made a reality out of original myth." (p. 185)

The histories of media and computing became entwined when German engineer Konrad Zuse began building a computer in the living room of his parents' apartment in Berlin -- the same year that Turning wrote his seminal paper (1936). Zuse's computer was the first working digital computer. One of his innovations was using punched tape to control computer programs. The tape Zuse used was actually discarded 35mm movie film. (p. 25)

Proportions have not changed in five centuries; they are similar for a typical fifteenth-century painting, a film screen, and a computer screen. In this respect it is not accidental that the very names of the two main formats of computer displays point to two genres of painting: A horizontal format is referred to as "landscape mode," whereas the vertical format is referred to as "portrait mode." (pp. 95-96)

[George] Lucas follows the opposite logic: In his film [Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace], digital code "lies under" his images; that is, most images in the film were put together on computer workstations; during the postproduction process, they were pure digital data. (pp. 330-331)

Today we expect to hear about scandals involving our leaders, yet these scandals do not really diminish their credibility. Similarly, contemporary television commercials often make fun of themselves and of advertising in general; this does not prevent them from selling whatever they are designed to sell. Auto-critique, scandal and revelation of its machinery became new structural components of modern ideology: witness the 1998 episode when MTV created an illusion on its Web site that somebody hacked it. (p. 209)

If our civilization has any equivalent to medieval cathedrals, it is special effects Hollywood films. They are truly epic in their scale and attention to detail ... But 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 screens or played on computer monitors. They are immaterial cathedrals made of light. (p. 201)

The cultural technologies of an industrial society -- cinema and fashion -- asked us to identify with someone else's mental structure ... The computer user is asked to follow the mental trajectory of the new media designer. (p. 61)

The hypertext reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigational journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know; leaving imprints that, like computer hyperlinks, follow from one to another. (p. 78)

By the end of the twentieth century, the problem was no longer how to create a new media object such as an image; the new problem was how to find an object that exists somewhere. (p. 35)

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Ron Mader lives in Mexico and hosts the award-winning Planeta.com website -- www.planeta.com. Ron is the author of the Exploring Ecotourism Resource Guide and can be contracted for presentations and workshops.

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