I’m not quite finished with the Manovich yet, but thus far he’s presented two thoughts that I’m eager to discuss. The first is from his opening chapter: the idea that new media, than anything that came prior to it makes discrete representations “public knowledge” (50). The second comes from his discussion of database and narrative that is articulated in chapter five.

Indeed, the whole “What New Media Is Not” section in chapter one is interesting. Manovich starts by enumerating a nice, easily digestible list of differences between new media and old media. He then proceeds to undermine/deconstruct the entire thing. For instance, although “new media is interactive,” he points out that “all classical, and even moreso modern, art is ‘interactive’ in a number of ways” (56). We have always been forced to “interact;” even with more traditional texts, authors force us to “fill in the gaps” all the time.

He then suggests the cinema as the starting point for “interactivity” as we think of it today. He claims that as far back as the 1920s, filmmakers like Eistenstein “speculated that film could be used to externalize – and control – thinking” (58). Manovich seems to contend that this distinctly “modern” desire to “externalize the mind” did not become natural until cinema came into being. I have a feeling Stiegler would have taken issue with this. Stiegler argues that even the tools of premodern humans are a form of “externalization.” It is this externalization that actually drives our cognitive development, technology actually drives human evolution itself. For Stiegler, we can never be outside of this (inherently technological) exteriorization.

What Stiegler and Manovich both do hint at is this idea of control. For Stiegler, because technology comes first, we can never make decisions outside of it. For Manovich, mental processes have become “standardized” to the point where “we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations” (61).

Which brings me to my second point regarding the database and the narrative. Joe also brings up similar questions of aesthetics: Manovich seems focused on meaning-making activities. Does his work here allow us to explore knowledge that is not connected to meaning-making, say in aesthetic encounters with new media?

So how do we “make meaning” out of a database? Manovich initially seems to claim that the database cannot be narrativized: “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection” (219). But he then goes on to suggests that in order to make meaning, we have to move beyond narrativization, positing Greenaway and Verotov as examples of how this might be done. However, there’s still some work to be done here: How do we get out of our old ways of narrating? Will we always be compelled to “narrate” because that’s what we’ve always done? If we’ve always “made meaning” out of databases, what makes the specifically “new media” database so different? And doesn’t the database already contain the narratives we’re trying to move beyond, in other words, the meaning we’ve already made?