Download
1 / 14
E N D
Walter Ong, from Orality and Literacy Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects... Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together. In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound... the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life.
Marshall McLuhan, from The Medium is the Message What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patters as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for.
Espen Aarseth, from Cybertext Hypertext, when regarded as a type of text, shares with a variety of other textual types a fundamental trait, which we defined as nonlinearity. It must immediately be pointed out that this concept refers only to the physiological form (or arrangement, appearance) of the texts, and not to any fictional meaning or external references they might have. Thus, it is not the plot, or the narrative, or any other well-known poetic unit that will be our definitive agency but the shape or structure of the text itself. Imagine a book in which some of the pages appear to be missing, or the print is unreadable every 16 pages, or some of the pages are repeated while an equal number omitted. Even if this copy is the only one we ever see, we automatically assume that it is not supposed to be this way and that a more correct version exists. It may never have been printed, but to us, who can imagine it perfectly...is still more real than the one we are holding. ... But what if the flawed version interferes so deeply with our sense of reception that it, in more than a manner of speaking, steals the show? ... In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.
Gregory Ulmer, from Networked . “Electracy” is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing: an apparatus, or social machine, partly technological, partly institutional. We take for granted now the skill set that orients literate people to the collective mnemonics that confront anyone entering a library or classroom today. Grammatology (the history and theory of writing) shows that the invention of literacy included also a new experience of thought that led to inventions of identity as well: individual selfhood and the democratic state. Thus there are three interrelated invention streams forming a matrix of possibilities for electracy, only one of which is technological. There is no technological determinism, other than the fundamental law of change: that everything is mutating together into something other, different, with major losses and gains. What is the skill set that someday may be assumed of electrate people native to an Internet institution?
Five Principles of New Media from Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge; London, MIT Press, 2001)
1. Numerical Representation All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations. This fact has two key consequences: 1. A new media object can be described formally (mathematically). For instance, an image or a shape can be described using a mathematical function. 2. A new media object is subject to algorithmic manipulation. For instance, by applying appropriate algorithms, we can automatically remove "noise" from a photograph, improve its contrast, locate the edges of the shapes, or change its proportions. In short, media becomes programmable. (p. 27)
2. Modularity This principle can be called the "fractal structure of new media." Just as a fractal has the same structure on different scales, a new media object has the same modular structure throughout. Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are represented as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities. These objects themselves can be combined into even larger objects -- again, without losing their independence. (p. 30)
3. Automation The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. (p.32) "low-level" automation = color variation in Photoshop, changing font in Word "high-level" automation = AI in video game, Google bots
4. Variability A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions. This is another consequence of the numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2). (p. 36) 1. Media elements are stored in a media database; a variety of end-user objects, which vary in resolution and in form and content, can be generated, either beforehand or on demand, from this database. 2. It becomes possible to separate the levels of "content" (data) and interface. A number of different interfaces can be created from the same data. A new media object can be defined as one or more interfaces to a multimedia database.
3. Information about the user can be used by a comptuer program to customize automatically the media composition as well as to create elements themselves. (p. 37) 4. A particular case of this customization is branching-type interactivity (sometimes also called "menu-based interactivity"). 5. Hypermedia is another popular new media structure, which is conceptually close to branching-type interactivity (because quite often the elements are connected using a branch tree structure). In hypermedia, the multimedia elements making a document are connected through hyperlinks. 6. Another way in which different versions of the same media objects are commonly generated in computer culture is through periodic updates. 7. One of the most basic cases of the variability principle is scalability, in which different versions of the same media object can be generated at various sizes or levels of detail. (p. 38)
5. Transcoding ...new media in general can be thought of as consisting of two distinct layers -- the "cultural layer" and the "computer layer." Examples of categories belonging to the cultural layer are the encyclopedia and the short story; story and plot; compostion and point of view; mimesis and catharsis, comedy and tragedy. Examples of categories in the computer layer are process and packet (as in data packets transmitted through the network); sorting and matching; function and variable; computer language and data structure.
Because new media is created on computers, distributed via computers, and stored and archived on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer. The ways in which the computer models the world, represents data, and allows us to operate on it; the key operations behind all computer progams (such as search, match, sort, and filter); the convetions of HCI [Human-Computer Interface] -- in short, what can be called the computer's ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics -- influence the cultural layer of new media, its organization, its emerging genres, its contents. (p. 46)
