Going Down The River in a Cardboard Box

"In contrast to analog media where each successive copy loses quality, digitally encoded media can be copied endlessly without degradation" (Manovich, 2001, 69)

Manovich begins by looking at William J. Mitchell's 'The Reconfigured Eye' (1982), In which Mitchell talks about how analog media "cannot be transmitted or copied without degradation" (Mitchell, 1982: 6) At the time of writing, Mitchell was living in a world where digital media was a break through in technology and it was looking like it was about to completely revolutionise the way media artefacts where accessed, developed and broadcast. It looked like nothing could destroy digital media and that anything which was digitally accessed was safe from complete destruction.

Mitchell goes on to refer to his view of digital media and how he believes it is completely lossless, "a digital image that is a thousand generations away from the original is indistinguishable in quality from any one of its progenitors".

He believes that digital media is invincible through generations of being passed down. For example. An old photograph will stain of the years with age and use, but if a digital image is stored on a hard drive for the same amount of time, it will be in the same condition and quality as when it was taken.

However, Manovich, speaking nearly twenty years after Mitchell, and being in the middle of the digital revolution, knows how digital media can be just as short-termed as analog media. "A single digital image consists of millions of pixels. All this data requires considerable storage" (Manovich, 2001: 70)

Even another decade later and we still cannot say that we have confidence in how computers store our media files. With technologies like DropBox, GoogleDrive and SkyDrive, surely we are just bypassing the problem instead of eliminating the problem which we built. 


Bibliography
Mitchell, W.J., The Reconfigured Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982)
Manovich, L., The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001)

Variability in New Media

Lev Manovich (2002, p. 44) presents five principles that describe New Media. As with all descriptions of abstract concepts, this is just one way of looking at it. This presentation can definitely help people understand what New Media means, but so could a different description with for instance more or less categories. However, the five principles of Manovich give a clear description of the whole complexity of New Media.

His first three principles: numerical representation, modularity and automation are without doubt important requisites. However they might cover more than New Media alone and are therefore not its most important characteristics. cultural transcoding is definitely a key concept without which there would be no such thing as New Media, but it could be classified as a consequence of it. Therefore, it could be argued that the aspect that is really responsible for New Media is variability.

Variability means that media are not the same for everyone but change according to the user, making the usage of the 'same' media a different experience to everybody (Manovich, 2002, p.56). The reason variability could be viewed as the main aspect of New Media is that it does not just focus on how the content is made, but on how the user interacts with it. This interaction is what makes New Media new. A key feature in this is that variability enables to view media on a continuum of how New it is. An e-book is on a low level. You can change type size and fonts, but it remains similar to the traditional book. Further on the scale there might be DVDs. Their menu uses branching and they have extras, but it still is not as New as for instance Facebook, were you can personalize your profile and use it for many different purposes, enabling a much wider range of gratifications for its users.

Bibliography
Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. MIT Press.