Customer Reviews

The Language of New Media

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According to the back cover introduction, "Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media". He does this by describing the developing history of available media as a context for understanding the current digital electronics technology.

On the media of today he notes: "One general effect of the digital revolution is that the avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the command and interface metaphors of the computer software. The contemporary computer media are actually the past avant-garde materialized!"

As is perhaps clear from the book's title, "The Language of New Media" is primarily about the communication 'languages' that the various media make available through their existence. A language, in the sense that Mr. Manovich uses the term, is a collection of methods[in a media-tool/medium context] and their effect on that which may be communicated by a particular work. A wide range of examples, from published or exhibited creations, are cited to help describe the fruits of using a particular method/context that he details.

The strongest recurring theme in the book is how it deals with the history of cinematic language. Cinema is the media which brings under it's umbrella the greatest range of production methodology, so comes the closest to tying the whole text together into a coherent narrative. Otherwise, the book would tend to be more a kind of dictionary of available media methodologies/effects/attributes, each with their own implication towards constructing a sensual or conceptual experience.

Marshall Mcluhan's point, that "The medium is the message", may well serve as the best description of the contents of this book. For those seeking an analysis on the "meaning of the messages", that the media artists convey, it is probably best to seek additional books as a supplement to this one.

(Planeta.com Journal) -- 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.

Manovich's treatment of computer-media expressive forms is intelligent and entirely worthy of serious engagement. At crucial points, however, he makes leaps and grand assertions without proper demonstration.

For example, he speaks of the database as an expressive form, and as the key computer-mediated form of our time. So, why not explain how in the world a database is expressive, or how it makes meaning? He says it is naturally opposed to narrative--they are "natural enemies"--but how precisely does database accomplish anything for anyone without narrative (or interpretation, which is closely related)? What is a database without narrative? I just don't see how he has shown what he asserts. At the same time, i think much of the virtue of this book is through its suggestions rather than its water-tight argumentation. That can make it a fertile reading experience, but frustrating all the same. Books like this one get people talking, even if they are wrong on a lot of points. We need people to be speculative and a bit "loose" like much of this book is, but one must be prepared to read it critically and with some caution.

The Language of New Media takes on the interfaces, operations, illusions, and forms of new media. Unlike some of his predecessors in media theory, Manovich is careful to designate the object of his study, and to spell-out that which he does not consider new media. [....] Readers will find clearly-written definitions of the forms and functions of new media, from menus, filters, and plug-ins to database algorithms. Transitions in modes of representation and interpretation, reading and writing, from print to network culture are also explored, under the aegis of bringing classic theory to contemporary work. The [book] also breaks ground in piercing the semantics of new media's lexical accoutrements, positing a vocabulary with which to discuss new media. [...] Manovich's title becomes a double entendre when he exceeds this possibly banal charge by discussing the way in which new media is itself a language: a system of representation. Manovich [an admirer of soviet montage filmmakers] performs his own Kuleshov effect, the ultimate art historical feat, in making new media not only more understandable but arguably more valuable, by virtue of its relationship to the history of image-making. [....] It is strangely ironic that Lev Manovich learned computer programming the same way that the Soviet Montage filmmakers perfected their craft: on paper. Manovich's school lacked computers, so the artist hand-wrote code, whereas pupils at the famed VGIK film school lacked film stock and so "spliced" papyrus. Perhaps it is to this lack of physical resources that Manovich owes his copiously inside-out knowledge of digital media.

That Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media is a risk-taking and stimulating contribution to the discourse surrounding new media is evident even before page one. The book's prologue consists of short extracts indicating Manovich's central premises that will be fleshed out in the text. As short polemical notes, the quotations serve to engender argument as well as energize, performing the new thinking hinted at in Manovich's remarkable treatment of new media. By the time Manovich has thanked the various Internet mailing lists where he regularly shared excerpts of his text prior to its publication, and the hardware he used when writing The Language of New Media, the reader is attentive to the original way in which Manovich intends to deal with his vast subject. Given this book's title it bears asking what comprises the new media? Manovich enumerates them early on-"Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality (VR), multimedia, computer games, interactive installations, computer animation, digital video, cinema, and human-computer interfaces" (8-9). What, then, are the new media's "language"? By language, Manovich intends both the diverse conventions used by new media practitioners to organize data and structure the user's experience, and the various discourses that surround the new media. Grounded in an analysis of the ways in which new media have appropriated the forms and conventions of older art and communications media, Manovich's central concern, and that of his book's first five chapters, is the influence of cinema's language on the new media; the final chapter examines the inverse. (The link to cinema should not be over-stated however, as Manovich never fails to include other relevant precedents ranging from Renaissance oil painting to Marey's photographic gun to WWII radar technology.) Each chapter concludes with compelling case studies that serve to define and elaborate the theories advanced. The contribution this remarkable book makes to the existing literature on new media and related topics is a product of the author's wide-ranging expertise and intellectual rigor. (Manovich holds advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and visual culture and has been working with computer media for almost twenty years as an artist, designer, animator, computer programmer, and teacher.) In assessing "new media objects" (his term), their technologies, and their style, Manovich is always mindful of how social, economic and cultural considerations inform and are informed by the very technologies and styles which they consider. Manovich studiously avoids ahistorical generalizations by asking what is different between more recent technologies and those preceding them; fortunately he does not hesitate to frequently conclude "not much." Overall, it is hard to over-estimate the importance of The Language of New Media to the field of the same name, as it is the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject. Readers from expert to novice will almost certainly be thankful for Manovich's studious attention to definitions, both those commonly (mis)used and those coined by the author. The Language of New Media is required reading not only for those concerned with the discourses surrounding new media, but also for anyone critically engaged with contemporary art and culture.

(A longer version of this review was first published in CAA.Reviews, August 2001.)

EDIT of 11 Dec 07: the release by Steve Arnold of "Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator," has sent shock waves among analysts who are slowly begining to understand thatGoogle's programmable search patents are the first step toward Google determining what you see depending on who pays them what. Google is now evil. Look for my book review on the above, the book itself costs $675 or so.

All of the other reviewers are correct in the varied points, from praise for the substance to criticism for the tedious nature of some of the writing.

My take-away from this book is two-fold:

1) The author spends most of his time focused on a variation of "the medium is the message" and how important it is to understand not only the medium, but the totalitarian uses to which the medium can be put. The book is strongest over-all in bringing to bear real-world experience that contrasts sharply with the US view of the Internet as all flowers and love and freedom. He clearly articulates the totalitarian opportunities.

2) What he does not focus on, although this is alluded to in the preface by Mark Tribe, is the human cost of going online to the detriment of face-to-face. I have a 13-year-old who would, given a choice, spend 24/7 online, with his cell phone glued to his ear, watching a TV with one eye. As Mark Tribe notes, museums and other gathering places are essential for creating a focused kind of face to face interactivity that is not yet possible online.

An underlying sub-theme throughout the book is that reality and virtual reality are merging. We are moving toward a time when we will have a choice between opting for "authenticated" reality, or reveling in "constructed reality." One shudders to think of The Matrix, where all humans have become the ultimate couch potatoes, spending their lives immobile in a petri dish being fed "virtual reality" while their brainpower is sucked off for energy and other nefarious purposes.

This is not an easy book to absorb, especially if you are not obsessed with the merger of cinematography and computers, but on balance, I am quite happy to have taken this in for its unique perspective.

Overall, a good book with some interesting corrolations of past cultural traditions that are influencing today's "new media" which we may not have been aware of.

Having waded through masses of literature by theorists with no practical background and a tendency to make mistakes like attributing Star Wars to Steven Spielberg, it is a delight to read a text that is grounded in both experience and solid rhetoric. Lev Manovich writes with clarity, wit and provocative insight - a rare and enjoyable experience for anyone doing serious research in this area. This review is based on the MIT Press version of the text.

The language of the book is unneccessarilly opaque, and in it's attempts to tie the author's descriptive language with the language of current digital technology it is strained and often veers toward inaccuracy in desperation.

Ok, I said it. Sorry.

That said, the book offers a powerful theory of new media, and introduces a very useful vocabulary.

Bleah.

Lev Manovich claims to have been trained in computer science. If he had any respect for the field, he would not have filled his book with deliberate misstatements about the nature of digital media. He uses these misstatements to fill out his narrative about the development of new media, and in doing so misinforms the "new media artists" he purports to educate.

The writing is reflective of Manovich's speaking/lecturing style: factually lazy, fluffed up with pointlessly obtuse language, and above all else BORING.

If you are an artist looking to understand the development of new media, look elsewhere, as you will only be bored and misinformed by Manovich. If you are a computer scientist looking for media theory, you will also be bored, but also possibly offended by the lazy treatment of your area of expertise.