Class last Thursday was focused on the following questions:

  1. Aden asked, how does Manovich build off Benjamin?
  2. Todd asked, and Scott elaborated, are Smart TV’s old media? What is a Smart TV? Are digital TV’s old media? Are TV antenna’s new media when they get a digital signal?
  3. David asked, monetization as such → utopianism? + neoliberalism? And then Scott added, how do we mean this word? What present do we mean? What present does Manovich theorize?
  4. Diana asked, does Hodge mean writing can “capture” noise? Noah added, what does Hodge mean by his distinction of writing and language? What are the stakes of thinking about code as writing verse language? And then Todd finished with what does Hodge classify as noise?
  5. Joe then had us relook at Manovich and stated, Transcoding is “most consequential”: shades of Harraway in computer v. cultural layer?

Our class discussion can be separated into six parts, all which brought in blog posts and the questions above.

Part I: Modularity and Monetization

This part relates to question 3 and David’s issue with Manovich’s modularity concept, which he discussed in his blog post. David stated, “Data worth having is monetized” and Scott summarized that the promise of modularity as an ideal is total openness. API’s (Application Programming Interface) are supposed to allow modularity, but they are super restricted, supposed to be secure. Practices develop against modularity to preserve the monetary aspect of the data. For example, databases have limits, they aren’t shared widely; they are not freely and openly available. There is data that is in the world, and people want to make money off of it, so they put walls around it. They break the modularity of it and subject it to the concept of value. This brought up new questions for us regarding data, which brings us to our next part of the class discussion.

Part II: What is Data?

Scott posed the questions: What is the data? What counts as data? What data do we mean? In Manovich’s writing, data is substance out there in the world in databases. It has individual customization. “As I will show, new media follows, or actually runs ahead of, a quite different logic of post-industrial society – that of individual customization, rather than mass standardization” (30). Today this is made available through API or programming, and we can get whatever we want. To help conceptualize data and individual customization, we discussed the different uses of Facebook. We as consumers don’t use Facebook to get data, we use Facebook to make data. The data that Facebook has that is monetizable is not the stuff we consume. The data that matters, that is worth something, is our behavior. Facebook captures our behavior, our data, and then charges people for access to it. We make data through our activity. Manovich, in 2002, is not thinking about data as economically valuable. He still thought of media as distinct from ourselves; we are the client and the data serves us. Today however there is no boundary between us and our data.

Part III: Utopia, Neoliberalism, and Ideology

David thinks that Manovich has unrealistic expectations with his utopia of open communication. Todd counters that Manovich is not using utopia in an ideal sense. Scott brings up that new media, for Manovich, engenders an ideological rather than realistic vision of utopia. Manovich is approaching data as a “postcommunist subject” as Kelly explained in her blog. Diana brought up a quote showing how we can think of Manovich as engaging with neoliberalism, “In a postindustrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and ‘select’ her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects / information to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately. The logic of new media technology reflects this new social logic” (42). This discussion then led us to the concept of responsibility, choices, and ideology. Scott started it off with the following quote, “New media objects assure users that their choices – and therefore, their underlying thoughts and desires – are unique, rather than preprogrammed and shared with others” (42). New media is working in the service of ideology, what we might consider to be a neoliberal ideology (as in Wendy Brown’s version of neoliberalism that both Aden and Kelly brought up in class). David then asked, is this just ideology or culture as well, which Nathaniel countered with, can’t culture be ideological? This question moves us to our next section about the concept of culture and it’s relation to new media.

Part IV: Transcoding and Computer/Cultural Layers

Scott encouraged us to think of the role of the cultural in Manovich’s work. He directed our attention to the term “cultural interface,” which Manovich describes as “a human-computer-culture interface – the ways in which computers present and allow us to interact with cultural data” (70). Scott went on to helpfully describe this as the folding of culture (culture especially having to do with the way things are represented) into the computer, in other words, how the logic of representation is taken up by the computer. Joe brought us back to Manovich’s fifth and “most consequential” principle of “transcoding” (a concept that he, along with Todd, also mentions in his blog post). Joe described transcoding as computer data being layered with cultural data in order to create a new hybrid, recalling McLuhan’s theory of feedback loops, or Haraway’s cybourg. The word “hybrid” is an interesting one, especially since Manovich seems to suggest there is more of a “substitution” going on: “cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics” (47). Diana was especially interested in how the computer layer influences the cultural layer, in other words, how the existence of the computer might change the way we read a book. Scott responded that the very existence of the “dimension of the computational” profoundly affected not just how we read, but how we go about our daily lives. He cited the computer as a “tool for the organization and production of distraction.” In a brief aside, Scott also addressed our question #2, how Manovich builds off Benjamin. Benjamin wrote about how people were so worried about whether the photograph counted as art, they forgot to address how to the photograph changes art. Manovich, similarly, is thinking about how the computational affects the aesthetic (using examples like Man With the Movie Camera).

Part V: New Media vs. Old Media

But Man With the Movie Camera is a movie from 1929! This leads us to think about where the line is drawn between old media and new media. Diana brought up Manovich’s list, “What New Media is Not” (49). For instance, Manovich states that “new media is interactive” (49), but then goes on to say that “all classical, and even moreso modern, art is ‘interactive’ in a number of ways” (56). (Aden Jordan also mentions a kind of overdependence on interactivity in his blog post for the week). Scott’s interpretation of Manovich (and it should be noted that Scott insisted that this was purely his interpretation) is that new media should be thought about not in terms of its technology, but its relation to the political. New media is unique because it is subjected to (perhaps neoliberal) ideas of modification and control. In Benjamin’s words, a painting is no longer a painting. In Scott Richmond’s words, even “old media are become new” – that is, all media is “new media” when we encounter it in the context of our current political/economic system. The only “old media” is that which has disappeared or not made it into new media.

Part VI: Hodge

As Noah mentioned in his blog this week, the Hodge piece, “despite its apparent quality and helpful-as-fuck aspects, is a pretty difficult read in terms of clarity.” Fortunately, some of the questions that Noah (and Diana) had regarding Hodge/noise/language/writing were quickly answered by Scott’s thorough and accurate recollection of Claude Shannon’s theory of information. Shannon’s theory has five parts: 1) sender (author), 2) receiver (reader), 3) channel (meaning of discourse), 4) message (writing), and 5) noise (inscription/the materiality of writing/writing qua writing). According to Shannon, we can understand all of these things except for noise. While the channel demonstrates “ideality,” or the capacity to transmit, noise demonstrates “materiality” in its incapacity to transmit, in other words, noise captures the imperfections of technology. For Hodge, writing has noise. He is particularly concerned with the exteriority of writing, which Derrida would call “indexing the trace.” There is a further distinction here between language and writing: while language is a system of meaningfulness, writing is actually a (sometimes messy) practice. As Hassan eloquently wrtes in his blog, Hodge notes “a theoretical bifurcation [that] occurs within the study of media that differentiates the exteriorized topos of writing ala post-structuralism . . . from the newly emerged techno-philic, software-studies schism.” In other words, Manovich represents a shift in media theory, a shift from thinking about new media as writing to new media as language, a shift to thinking about media objects as ideal objects. For Hodge, media objects are not ideal objects; new media also has noise. Diana asked if writing could then also be considered to “have” noise. Scott closed the class by asking us to think about “noise” as an aural quality and “opacity” as a visual one. For Scott, noise is less about opacity and more about “finitude,” that is, a horizon in which we cannot see beyond. As a teaser, Scott hinted that “finitude” is a concept we’d be returning to in future readings.

Recommended Reading for the Scott Richmond Book Club:

“The Internet as the Anti-Television” by Christian Sandvig

New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader ed. Wendy Chung and Anna Fisher

“A Mathematical Theory of Information” by Claude Shannon

“‘Animated Pictures’, Tales of Cinema’s Forgotten Future” by Tom Gunning

Further questions:

Is the word “media” singular or plural?