Repost from Interaction Culture.
Manovich - Interaction CultureManovich draws heavily from Russian literary theory and Marxism. A focus on modes of production and consumption.”Digital materialism … principles of computer hardware and software and the operations involved in creating cultural objects on a computer to uncover a new cultural logic at work.” (p.7) [means of production]
However, he may draw on some structuralist theory.
- “The Language of New Media.”
- “Montage”
- “I use ‘language’ as an umbrella term to refer to a number of various conventions used by designers of NM objects to organize data and structure the user’s experience.” (p.7)
Structure tends to trump content. Meaning comes from the structure of a sentence and not individual words.
Information Culture - “includes the ways in which information is presented in different cultural sites and objects .. Includes historical methods for organizing and retrieving information..”
Language - “it was important for me to use the word language to signal the different focus of this work: the emergent conventions, recurrent design patterns nd key forms of new media.”
Gene is a unit of the physical and biological. Meme is a unit of the cultural.
Object - “may be a digital still, digitally composited film, virtual 3-D environment..” (p.12)
- Modularity of media
- CS object
- Russian constructivist notion of art that pointed toward factory production of art, rather than studio
Avant garde artist approach to scientific like experimentation of cultural forms.
Advocates a novel approach to analyzing new media with regard to previous media.
“New media objects are cultural objects .. thus … can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent: a physically existing object, historical information..” (p.15)
What does a YouTube video represent? A piece of culture? Vessel for content? The video stands in a as proxy for the subject whose likeness is transmitted through the video to the viewer. Different vessels (media) offer different and/or better representations of the original.
Construction may be the meaning that the author puts into the film, perhaps at the request of viewers. Alternatively, it may be the meaning that viewers construct based on their unique life experiences.
“Structure tends to trump content. Meaning comes from the structure of a sentence and not individual words.”
I would tend to disagree with this statement. Sentence structure is completely different then say the structure of the Internet. Additionally, I would not necessarily consider one word content. On a medium such as the Internet content trumps structure since content can be made portable and presented through many different structures. Therefore the structure become irrelevant and up to the user to decide how the content is “structured” for them. On the other hand, elements such as video can be used in a story and have a profound effect on the content, in this regard that ability to embed content in other content would support the above statement.
Matt-
I’m interested how you could say that structure is less important, but then you go on to say that one word is not content. It’s not content because it must be put into a sentence for it to make it content. In effect what the structuralists are saying is (if I’ve understood it correctly) that all meaning (& content) flows from the structure it is placed/arranged in. So you are right in saying that the structure of the internet is different than a sentence, but it’s still structure and without a structure then it would simply be jibberish, just words on a page, let’s say it was sentences on a page, again if the structures connecting them weren’t there it would be jibberish.
Of course the original post we are commenting on is just a liveblog, not a complete discussion, but some snapshots of what was said in a class.