Why do I read books like this? Any book about computers and culture is bound to be out of date by the time is printed. So why invest the time it takes to plow through 333 pages, not including the index? I guess I was looking for a framework for understanding and perhaps a few fresh ideas. Professor Manovich provides ideas in abundance, however, the framework he selects is flawed.

The construct Manovich proposes is cinema, in particular Vertov’s seminal 1929 film Man With a Movie Camera. In his prologue, Manovich uses Vertov’s film to illustrate his key ideas. Foremost among these is, “cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data.”

In some respects taking cinema as a model for the development of new media is a valid heuristic technique. Film conventions have clearly influenced the world of gaming and VR. Yet the model breaks down before too long. Cinema is primarily for entertainment; it tells a story to the viewer. The internet is primarily a communication tool; it facilitates the exchange of information. PCs may have become more like media players, but they are still computing machines whose key functions are generating text, processing numbers and tracking transactions. Lastly the net is a far larger medium than cinema ever was; it embraces commerce, communication, learning, construction and entertainment with billions of active participants.

If the big picture eludes Manovich, he is much better at outlining the methods and characteristics of new media. His definition of new media is succinct and flexible. Manovich posits five characteristics that define new media:
1. It’s digital (has numerical representation)
2. It’s modular
3. It’s automated
4. It’s variable
5. It is transcoded (the computer layer shapes the culture layer).

In his chapter on Form, Manovich, a professor of visual arts at the University of California San Diego, notes how computer tropes have been picked up by the popular culture and how well-known computer forms have influenced real-life. Twenty years ago computer designers looked to real-life to give form to their tools. They chose items like a desktop and a filing cabinet to represent computer space and function. Nowadays aspects of computer function and the GUI influence popular culture (see for example MTV or Alex Garland’s The Beach).

The chapter on the Database also spins out some interesting ideas but misses the point. Manovich proposes an opposition between database and narrative, between the nonlinear and the linear. He gives as an example here the way film editing constructs a narrative out of a database of images and sounds. Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera is cited as a manifesto of the then new medium of cinema because it catalogs film techniques and constructivist angles in much the same way a lexicographer would catalog the grammar and syntax of language. No such manifesto has appeared for the computer age. Although, one must note that almost 35 years elapsed between the time the Lumiere brothers screened The Arrival of a Train at the Station and Vertov’s cinema manifesto.

One of the interesting ideas in this chapter is that the computer has become a “universal media machine”. As all previous cultural artifacts are becoming digitized, the net has become a vast database of media. Or as Manovich says, “the Web gave millions of people a new hobby — data indexing.” The author says that the age of new media is an era of recycling old media — sifting through millions of recorded images and sounds to cut and paste them together in new ways. Pastiche and quotation form the database of the new culture.

What this chapter on databases misses is the real utility of the database. Unstructured data piles like the net are confusing (although indexing tools like Google have gone a long way toward making sense of the pile). Structured databases impose a grid on information. That grid allows us to measure time, track sessions, compare, contrast and evaluate information. That capability, while not as easily understood as a filmic narrative, is more powerful than narrative alone. The relational database contains many possible narratives, all tagged with vital information like who, what, when, and where. The only thing the grid cannot tell us, perhaps, is why.

At several points in this long book Manovich calls for a new information aesthetics — a narrative to make sense of the ebb and flow of information. A single narrative may be a limited way of understanding the whole. In The Myth of Total Cinema, Andre Bazin said that the idea of cinema existed long before the technology made it possible. One could say that about the net as well. The idea of an internetworked world of knowledge has probably been around as long as the idea of flight. With the system in constant state of becoming, a simple story could not encompass its totality. The narrative must transcend itself — a larger resonance is needed. Maybe this is why metaphors are so powerful in bringing ideas to fruition. Stories like Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash created metaphors that transcended their stories. They suggested a reality that would later come to pass.

In his introduction Manovich explains that this book is an attempt to write “a theory of the present” regarding the new media. Having worked in the field, he knows how quickly the medium is changing. Much of the material for the book first appeared as postings to Rhizome, the journal of digital arts. Most of The Language of New Media was written before 1999 — before XML, Google and the rise of the blogs — so some of the examples Manovich uses are bound to be a bit dated. But as far as presenting a theory of the present goes, Manovich has succeeded. As to what it all meant, that will be left to future scholars - with the grand perspective of time — to tell us.

It seems to me that in a how-to book prolixity is a cardinal sin, especially a how-to book about organizing information. Although the authors have organized their information well, they have failed to edit it. I could have cut this book in half — to 200 succinct pages — and made it a much better product. Still there are useful chunks of info in here about conceptualizing search systems and metadata, explaining the practice of IA, moving big orgs toward rational info sharing, and labeling. I’ll probably refer to it from time to time. BTW: there’s a pattern of winter web renovation here — as the days get short and the weather awful, I’m more inclined to sit at the computer and shuffle pixels and bytes about.

The guru of User Interface lays down the law. Should have read this when it was published in 2000. Here’s the synopsis:

• Separate design from content; separate presentation from meaning - use semantic coding, e.g.,
• Use style sheets with relative sizes and positions
• Design for speed. Maximum of one-second response time; over a 56K modem that’s about 34KB per page.
• Use descriptive link titles
• Use visited link color to show which pages have been viewed.
• Version 4x browsers were introduced in 1996. By standard rates of adoption, most users should have V5 or 6 browsers by now. Design for V4 or above.
• Use thumbnails and brief descriptions for video served from the web
• The homepage must explain WHAT THE SITE IS AND WHAT IT DOES. It must have simple navigation to main content areas, a summary of primary content, and a search feature.
• “Content is king.”
• “Design Darwinism” dictates that in the melee of web experimentation, bad design will die off for lack of users.
• Dense sites can be made navigable by: aggregation, summarization, filtering, truncation, and example-based representation.
• Read the search logs from your site along with the user traffic analyses. Frequently searched-for items are a key indicator of demand.
• Add common misspellings of keywords to meta tags to pull errant searches
• Intranets MUST have: a personnel directory with pics, projects, employee background, contact info and location; site directory with a hierarchical organization of info; a full-text search function; current company news, memos etc.
• Test early; test often. Get representative users and have them perform typical tasks on the site.
• Great websites are HOMERUNs: High in quality content; Often updated; Minimum time to load; Easy to use; Relevant to user’s purpose; Unique to the medium; Net-centric

Neilsen on modern tools: “… this is the first time humanity has lost mastery of its tools. … We have lost 2000 years of progress in rationalist thinking and reverted to superstitious and animist behavior (where these new tools are concerned).”

A 900-page disappointment. The jacket copy compared Stephensen’s tome to Gravity’s Rainbow, but the only thing Stephensen has in common with Pynchon is the relative heft of the book and that both authors used WWII as a starting point.

Stephensen is a writer with ideas, some of which are original and engaging. He’s able to tell a story too — in a shaggy dog sort of way. But while many of the set pieces in the book are very entertaining, Stephensen has failed to deliver the Big Idea.

Cryptonomicon is a brief history of cryptography that takes WWII as the point at which Everything Changed and it is a modern tale of a computer nerd who almost accidentally helps to build a data haven in a sultanate adjacent to Borneo. Stephensen attempts to tie it all together with a package of plot devices too clumsy to explain here, but by the end of this shaggy dog tale all he has successfully done is bring all the surviving characters to the same place.

The jacket copy puffs expectantly about a sequel (which is one way to excuse an irresolute ending), however this reader has better things to do with his time.

Also trying to plow through Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 screed Understanding Media. It’s a chore. He tosses out some bright, shiny ideas but develops few of them. And the style is annoying at best. McLuhan writes in a shorthand associative manner that might be described as academic-on-a-rip. He throws references, sub-references and tangential examples into the pot with no apparent regard for how they might fit together or advance his argument.

McLuhan, a professor of lit at the U. of Toronto c. 1967, is widely read without being well read. Or, he is affecting the antiacademic pose of an autodidact with a fondness for the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake (anybody care to guess what the topic of Prof. McLuhan’s doctorate was?). Or, maybe, his predilection for omnivorous reference is a calculated way to mimic the information onslaught that is his subject. Certainly, McLuhan’s rapid-fire associative style is an almost perfect analog for flipping around the TV dial.

Still, his ideas and phrases have gained a surprising currency in the language. That’s how I came to pick up this book: I made a reference to the Global Village in my never-ending essay and stopped to ask myself if I really understood what was meant by the phrase. A few days later, I saw McLuhan’s book on the library sale table–for 25¢, who could refuse?

The Global Village, it turns out, is M’s utopic vision of what will happen when all of mankind sees that other men are just like him through the medium of television. “In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin,” McLuhan declaims. He contrasts the all-encompassing, all-involving electric media with the linear divisiveness of print. Print, he declares at one point, led to the rise of nationalism. Whereas TV’s total immersion will lead to a postliterate society where humans of earth all feel a part of the same tribe. It’s a lovely idea, but one that has not come to pass.

Why not? First, I suppose that the same forces that controlled print — law as manipulated by capital, and market forces — also control TV. Secondly, I think man’s sense of group identity is rooted in something more concrete than sound and image, it is attached to land and language. Presumably the Serbs and the Croats who have returned to slaughtering one another have equal access to MTV. They may share the same favorite videos, come away humming the same tunes, yet they pick up arms every day to voice a blood hatred that goes back centuries, to land and language. Why, exactly, McLuhan’s vision has failed is the topic of another essay.

I gave this treatise much too much time. It was, after all, an op-ed piece that was inflated into a book. That’s unfortunate, because Mr. McLuhan had just enough sound ideas to make a good essay. The padding here is gratuitous.

McLuhan includes incoherent chapters on Housing, Money, Clocks, Motorcars, Ads, Games, Telegraph, Phonograph, etc. Each of these chapters contains only the kernel of an idea that could have been given adequate play in a single paragraph.

His best chapter was on Television. McLuhan may have been the first to really show the perceptual differences between pre- and post-TV generations. “It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. … The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”

Earlier in the book, McLuhan discussed the Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960 and how radio listeners thought Nixon had won decisively, while TV viewers thought Kennedy was the victor. McLuhan closed his chapter on TV with Kennedy’s assassination. The televised funeral “revealed the unrivaled power of TV to achieve the involvement of the audience in a complex process.”

“Most of all, the Kennedy event provides an opportunity for noting a paradoxical feature of the “cool” TV medium. It involves us in moving depth, but it does not excite, agitate or arouse. Presumably this is a feature of all depth experience.” Actually, the most basic depth experiences, i.e., in real life are very moving. It’s only when TV is accepted as a surrogate for primary experience that our passions fail to engage. So it’s not surprising that the post-TV generations are without passion.