You know my initial thoughts before reading Eyman’s take on “New Media” went along the lines of: “Damn I’m got to read him again? That sucks.” But after taking a deep dive into the text, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Hey good job Eyman, you didn’t blow my brains out today- no, that honor goes to Manovich. I’ll get to him later, let’s focus on the nitty gritty first. Some of the sentences in this piece are really captivating to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m just a sucker for powerful one-liners. There was one strong sentence that really hit me, and it came from Packer and Jordan. This was the sentence:
The definitions of today will inevitably be replaced tomorrow…
Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (2001)
Get Serious Bro
I don’t why I made notice of this, but I think that’s a kickass sentence- okay let’s really focus. The essential idea of this piece is that new media and multimedia share a great ability which is to allow people to engage in different literacies. So, when Manovich believes that what separates new media from the rest is how data is easily accessible to computers, I call bullshit. The issue with this idea is that new media doesn’t have this power, digital media does as well (cough cough remediation).
Moving on, Manovich presents five attributes that form as a framework (Principles) for new media. Those attributes being: Numerical Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability, and Transcoding. Meanwhile, Packer and Jordan provide five different aspects of observable features of new media which are: Integration, Interactivity, Hypermedia, Immersion, and Narrativity. But I don’t want to talk about any of those, rather I want to hit the spotlight on Anne Wysocki. Anne Wysocki has pointed out an excellent insight compared to the last two. Her idea is known as “New Media Texts”. As Eyman puts it,
One of the implications of this definition is that new media texts do not
have to be digital. Wysocki uses Manovich’s argument against using “interactivity” as a feature specific to new media.Eyman pg 54
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