W6-Group 3, "Principles of New Media"

“Principles of New Media” from The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich

The identity of media has changed even more dramatically than that of the computer.
The last three principles are independent on the first two.
Not every new media object obeys these principles. They should be considered not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of culture undergoing computation. As computerization affects deeper and deeper layers of culture, these tendencies will increasingly manifest themselves.

There are five principles of new media:
1. Numerical Representation
All new media objects, whether created from scratch on computer or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representation. This fact has two key consequences:
a) A new media object can be described formally (mathematically).
b) A new media object is subject to algorithmic manipulation.
2. Modularity
This principle can be called the “fractal structure of new media.
Media elements, be they images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are represented as collections of discrete samples. These elements are assembled into large-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities.
In short, a new media objects consists of independent parts, each of which consists of smaller independent parts.
3. Automation
Principle 1 and principle 2 allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. Thus human being intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part.
There are two levels of automation:
“Low-level” automation of media creation: The computer user modifies or creates from scratch a media object using templates or simple algorithms.
“High-level” automation of new media creation: it requires a computer to understand, to a certain degree, the meaning embedded in the objects being generated, that is, their semantics. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) is well known of a high-level automation of new media.
4. Variability
A new media objects is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions.
Variability would also not be possible without modularity.
Here are some particular cases of the variability principle:
a) Media elements are stored in a media database.
b) It becomes possible to separate the levels of “content” (data) and interface.
c) Information about the user can be used by a computer program to customize automatically the media composition as well as to create elements themselves.
d) A particular case of this customize is branch-type interactivity (sometimes also called “menu-based interactivity”).
The term refers to programs in which all the possible objects the users can visit form a branching tree structure.
e) Hypermedia is another popular new media structure, which is conceptually close to branching-type interactive (because quite often the elements are connected using a branch tree structure).
f) Another way in which different versions of the same media objects are commonly generated in computer culture is through periodic updates.
g) One of the most basis cases of the variability principle is scalability, in which different versions of the same media object can be generated at various sizes or levels of detail.
New media always allow us to create versions of the same object that differ from each other in more substantial ways.
The principle of variability exemplifies how, historically, changes in media technologies are correlated with social change.
This principle can also be seen as a consequence of the computer’s way of representing data—and modeling the world itself—as variables rather than constants.
5. Transcoding
New media in general can be thought of as consisting of two distinct layers—the “cultural layer” and the “computer layer”.
Examples of categories belonging to the cultural layer are the encyclopedia and the short shot story; story and plot; composition and point of view; mimesis and catharsis, comedy and tragedy. Examples of categories in the computer layers are process and packer; sorting and matching; function and variable; computer language and date structure.
The computer layer and the cultural layer influence each other.
In new media lingo, to “transcode” something is to translate it into another format.
The principle of transcoding is one way to start thinking about software theory; another way is to use concepts from computer sciences as categories of new media theory. Examples here are “interface” and “database.”
Along with analyzing “material” and logical principles of computer hardware and software, we can also look at the human-computer interface and the interfaces of software applications used to author and access new media objects.

Principles of New Media (1)
http://www.mediamatic.net/article-5971-en.html
Principles of New Media (2)
http://www.mediamatic.net/article-5972-en.html