Mckenzie's Blog #1

Manovich is able to sum up new media into five parts while establishing the boundaries and definitions for this new concept. In doing so, he opens our eyes to the layers behind the bright screens we stare at every day and makes us think deeper about the innovations of art and science.

The first part is about numerical representation, or the ability to take a type of media (song, painting, literature) and digitize it using zeroes and ones to represent pixels, sounds, or letters. A simple example of this is what I do at my work Fold3.com. We take old military documents and scan them into a computer where they then become converted into binary code. This binary code is read through our programs and converted to an online image. This is definitely the first step in making old media new and has revolutionized our world.

The second part is about modularity and how the binary is then compiled on top of itself until it becomes a full-sized image, movie, or mp3. There is no human alive who could see one byte of binary as a pixel and know it was an image of the Mona Lisa. It takes many, many strings of bytes in order to compile into an image, a layering effect.

The third theory is one of automation, or the ability to search through the different information that is compiled in order to find a specific piece of media. Keeping with my theme of what I do for a living, I have been to the big vaults out at the National Archives and have seen first hand the vast floors and floors they have of documents--all boxed together and labeled. There is so much information there that it would be impossible to go through it all in one lifetime. In fact, one of our current projects with them is slated to finish in 50 years. I will most likely be dead before this project can be finished. The ability for computers to make these previously unsearchable, daunting stacks of paper easily sorted through in a convenient search bar is amazing and truly groundbreaking.

The fourth concept deals with variability, or the non-permanent reality of digital data and coding. A great example of this is the ability to scan a document, and if the document is blurry or skewed, we have the ability to retake the photo and replace the old one with the new. Keeping backups, multiple copies, and a history of changes becomes essential in digital media where there is no historical past as with old media. Our website has gone through multiple iterations and this distorts our recollection of time without the past documentation.

The final idea centers around the layers beneath the outward facade of new media--transcoding. Just as there are layers within the binary code, there are layers beneath the film we are watching or the image we see. This seems so instinctive in the other four principles that I believe this is a redundant idea. Unless Manovich is trying to point out the obvious underlying subtext in the other four concepts, but it seems so obvious that pointing this out seems like a waste.