Manovich and New Media

Do you know your new media history? Well I certainly did not before reading Lev Manovich’s article titled, “New Media from Borges to HTML” in the New Media Reader. Manovich’s article is the opening to this anthology of new media that he also considers to be a radical new history of modern culture. Manovich writes, “a view from the future when people will recognize that the true cultural innovators of the last decades of the twentieth century were interface designers, computer game designers, music video directors and DJs – rather than painters, filmmakers, or fiction writers, whose fields remained relatively stable during this historical period.” He then breaks down the what exactly new media is into eight different propositions which include: New Media versus Cyberculture, New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform, New Media as a Digital Data Controlled by software, New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of software, and he elaborates on the New media and how it relates to four more subjects throughout his article.

 Rhizome is a content magnet and delivery system that exposes the entire site. (The content, structure, and metadata). So, instead of just creating a site with URL’s that correspond to a page of HTML, you can create URLs that represent just about anything, and this is what our internet has come to today. In other words, everything is intertwined with one another, and the New Media is growing faster than ever. I think it is amazing, especially how Manovich visions the future as people looking back at computer game designers and music video directors as the radical new history of modern culture. That puts the image in me that we are creating history now. In three hundred years, sure someone will still be teaching Picasso, but they also will be teaching Hype Williams.