New Media - Modularity & Variability

For many people, the term "New Media" is used as an umbrella term to denote the technological progress which has occurred in society over the last few decades. For media theorist Lev Manovich, however, this popular consensus is "too limiting" (2001, pp. 19), so he decided to outline what exactly is meant by new media by determining five main principles to serve as a kind of check-list to which all new media forms should conform. These characteristics include "numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding" (2001, pp. 27-48), and for me two of these characteristics, modularity and variability, seem to be more closely linked than the others, and it is the relationship between these two that I will now try to explain.

As Manovich writes, modularity is the term used to describe the "fractal structure of new media" (2001, pp. 30). What he means by this is that a new media object consists of separate, independent elements, which are in turn made up of even smaller, independent elements and so on, right down to the smallest "atoms", for example the World Wide Web. As Manovich goes on to describe, it "consists of numerous Web pages, each in turn consisting of separate media elements (which can be) accessed on their own" (2001, pp. 31). We can therefore safely say that, because of the example given and the fact it coheres to the principle of modularity, the World Wide Web can be described as a new media object.

Bearing this in mind, we can understand what is meant when we are introduced to the term variability. As described by Manovich "a new media object is not something fixed, but something that can exist in potentially infinite versions" (2001, pp. 38). This potential for multiple different versions of a media object existing is down to the fact that, because media elements are independent and therefore maintain their own identities, they can be assembled into numerous sequences, allowing for such variability in multiplicity to occur.

Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass. : London MIT Press)