Reading the essay on New Media from Lee Manovitch raised a few questions in my mind, but proved to be a rather interesting read. In his essay, Manovitch presents eight propositions for “What Is New Media?”
The term “New Media” has been tossed around quite a lot, in fact, it just so happens to be the title of the textbook. With that being said, I’m glad Manovitch has so painstakingly laid out several definitions of the term for us to use.
Typically, when I think of media, I have trouble discriminating what should, and should not fall within the definition of the term. As far as I’m concerned, everything is media. The clothes we wear, with their emblems and labels, the shows we watch on television, the websites we visit. When media is a term used to describe something that communicates thought, I consider everything to be media. Therefore, when Manovitch starts describing what should be categorized as “New Media” (dvd’s, cd-roms, computer games) I find the categorical distinction to be unnecessary, and arbitrary. While I understand the desire to take the term “Media” and break it into smaller subcategories, “New Media” and “Old Media”, outside of this class I will continue to think of all media as just that, “Media.” Humankind generally appreciates when things are grouped in smaller, more “easy-to-swallow” tablets, but since the term “New Media” takes eight different definitions to be accurately described, I’m thinking it is an unnecessary distinction within the land of media.
Another thing that I thought interesting came in Proposition four. Manovitch was talking about how, in cinema, humans are typically the ones acting, and they are always the ones writing, or working on the creative side of a motion picture. It seemed as if, at this point, Manovitch was making the case for Computer A.I. to begin writing screenplays, and constructing movies. He mentioned how, in videogames, stuff like this already happens. He states that in many new video games, the computer decides what music will play, and where the storyline will go! While this is interesting, and it is an exciting new frontier of technology, I find one major caveat. Sure, a computer may design the gameplay of a video game, but in the end, a human has to program the computer.
