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The Language of New Media

by Lev Manovich.
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001.
ISBN: 0-262-13374-1.
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand.
E-mail: seanc@waikato.ac.nz


First things first. Let's get this out in the open. One medium, many media. TV is a medium. TV and radio are media. We might agree to differ on whether 'multimedia' is a collective noun and therefore takes a singular verb. But if we are to mark an epochal shift in the media culture of the early 21st century we might do worse than observe a lucid, intelligent critic,creator and teacher writing in California, the very belly of the beast, in a book for one of the most respected lists of one of the most respected publishers in the media field, with a chapter heading enquiring 'What is New Media?'. Call me old fashioned -- you may have to -- but that would have been a grammatical error a matter of hours ago. Is there such a thing as convergence? I disbelieve in any such aesthetic entity, outwith the synergetic corporation, and misdoubt the value of pursuing it. That does not alter the fact: the language is changing. 'Media' is becoming singular, not just out of ignorance, but because 'new media' and 'multimedia' are being perceived as whole, discrete objects other than their constituent parts. Multimedia is now, in this English language, a medium.

For a brief moment, Manovich turns his attention to the modernist pursuit of medium specificity, intellectually and in creative practice. This is the nub of the change signalled by the grammatical shift from plural to singular. Is there a medium of multimedia, digital media, new media, and is it or are they possessed of a singular collocation of specificities? There is good reason to ask. Too many curricula are overburdened with literary theory, film history, televisual narratology and art history, and all of us involved in teaching new media are hungry for texts we can signal to our students as specific to the emergent discipline, authentic in their methods and direct in their applications to studio and laboratory practice. This book joins a select bunch of texts that are both quintessentially of the cyberculture, and at the same time lucid enough for a reasonably articulate undergraduate to read for fun and profit. It is, simply, the first textbook for the next generation of media makers.

The book has enough schematic structure to please the note-taker. Chapter One enumerates five distinctive qualities of new media -- numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. Readers of Leonardo will recognise the centrality of the concepts, but not the originality or the clarity of explanation that Manovich brings to them. Meticulously disentangling the old from the new, Manovich argues carefully for a distinctive newness, discounting among others the 'myth of interactivity'. Subsequent chapters address the interface, long a passion of Manovich's in discussion papers launched on and Rhizome, the operations that interfaces make most possible, the question of illusion and the characteristic forms of digital media, especially the database and the navigable 3D space. In each case, there is characteristic innovation in the analysis, and a freshness to the style of thought, that justifies the book's dedication to Norman Klein, Peter Lunenfeld and Vivian Sobchack, three charismatic figures of the new media 's best thinking.

Manovich is kind to his readers. He does not expect immense cultural reference, kindly explaining who Bertolt Brecht and AndrÚ Bazin were, as gently as he holds our hands while explicating the nature of algorithms and their centrality to vector graphics. At the same time, he is unforgiving in his pursuit of a genuinely new critical paradigm, one that does not spend all its time glancing back over its shoulder to compare and contrast new and old media. There is none of the 'computers aren't books' paranoia or triumphalism of narratologists and neo-luddites; no cheery or glum farewells to family television. Instead the book relentlessly pursues the distinctive qualities of digital media, archeologising their emergence from older forms, but recognising the moments at which butterflies emerge from chrysalises. The care for both accuracy and persuasion makes those distinctions sharp, historic.

That this is, without question, a vital work of new thinking in a new culture, should not however deter us from the necessity for further thinking: I suspect the author would be disappointed if it did. I cannot feel comfortable with the notion that essentialism might creep back into the media culture, just at the moment at which it has been banished from the halls of the world's art institutions. There are no mistakes in the argument to cling to: Manovich, typically, never asserts that new media are essentially binary, clearly alert to the possibility of a mass computing medium that no longer restricts itself to zeros and ones. Nor is he dismissive of the old media -- abstract painting's turn to philosophical issues is, he recognises, a noble ambition as yet undiscovered in the field of digital design. And yet, this nagging doubt: is new media, are new media, unified by an intrinsic quality or field of qualities? Or is it perhaps their very modularity, variability, transcoding, that marks them out as a loose aggregation without a single defining presence?

'Nuff said. Manovich has given us a book, the book, we had hoped for. We can disagree with it. We can and will find other examples, different to the wonderful range of games, net.art, installations and movies he works with. Cinema theorists and historians will enjoy the claims that all of this novelty is the flowering of a potentiality latent in film since its first steps, or before in the phantasmagorias and thaumatropes of the 18th and 19th centuries. The ravishing breadth of digital reference is one of the books strengths, and there's more than enough here to suggest to any instructor that the ideas can be debated in evolving contexts. If MIT Press relent in the usual practice of holding significant new titles in hardcover only for a year or two at a stretch, the book will be in every library, and students everywhere will be clutching it like Mao's Red Book, Diamat of the Immaterialist generation. Best of all, after 'Languages of the New Media', we can argue on our own terrain. The term 'languages' in the title should not mislead: Manovich clarifies in the introduction that language is not the paradigm, but a metaphor, and its plural form the consequence of the complexity of the subject. I will cling to my grammarian propriety, and believe these media are plural, but I will be using this book for myself as well as my students, because it makes that question, like so many others, urgent and productive.

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Updated 7 August 2001.




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