note 3 to Hypertext [part 3 of 5]

[anna balint]

For sure the Language of New Media is more complex and offers a deep analysis,
but summed up in points, it looks very superficial.

First of all it strikes to eyes a typical self-grounding attitude, the will to state the characteristics of new media
without contrasting it to deeper understanding of older media - though Manovich originally relies on the movie 
aesthetics. 
Whereas there is a whole school of media archeology, a lot of research is going on in this direction,
there is the Dead Media project of Bruce Sterling, just to mention one.

One thing one can learn from opposing the manuscript and book culture, and the digital appeance of the same culture 
- is that digital culture so far is very ephemeral. 

Starting from my own experience - but which seem hardly to be unique - I got another idea about the material aspect of 
digital culture for the first time when I bought a box of double sided high density 5 ,25"  Bulgarian no logo floppy in 
1991, and everything i saved on it disappeared in one minute. Later i got a lesson from friends about how to transform 
a DD 3,5" floppy into HD floppy wth one movement [they are the same, sold for different price]. I can continue with the 
incompatibility of my old computer [and all my old work] with my new computer. [if i would manage, i could provide you 
a text about the accumulatonist side of digital culture]. Information disappears from the video tapes in 10-20 years, and 
i succeded already to destroy some CD's too. I started a magazine on the web in 1996, and the first numbers got 
erased and disappered in 1997, we could never restore it. 

Approximatively 99% of the books [the material object] disappeared in the last 400 years, 
but due to the fact that texts were largerly distributed in multiple material form, one can esteem that
most texts and images (90%) survived the material decay.
Nowadays the distribution of texts and culture is solved without the material multiplication of the works.
hunderd thousands of people have acces to a text, image or sound at one single server - and due to this - a lot of 
work is already gone. Maybe individual works can be restored, but common efforts to build a context and a culture,
such as the ora archive was - is very difficult, i would say impossible, to remake.

The five characteristics of new media enumerated by Manovich might be correct, but still remain somehow superficial 
when it comes about the content, realation of form and content on the web. I think it is wrong to speak about a new 
cultural logic, withouth considering similarities with 'old logic'. [I suppose a continuity in cultural logic: maybe the net is 
new, but we are the same...] 
According to Manovich's non-essential formal classification I could easily perceive opera as a new media object, i can 
discover the synergy of a 3-D environment, audio objects, game, images as objects on the stage, and meanwhile i can 
also see the edibility of the 'granular' musical, or visual elements.  I could frame the stage with a Microsoft Windows 
business statement or/and an embedding technology manifesto - and, here is the new media work.
Generally I think it is a methodological mistake to see software - and especially corporations - as initators of a new 
culture, and not see that they are submitted to the subjectivity of the software writers and the comissoners, and to 
neglect that they do nothing else but to adapt existing practices, knowledge, and needs of an already existing culture.
It is terrible to acknowledge any innovation specially to Microsoft, on the contary it is one of the best examples to show 
the commercial push of a macho business environment.
    

Numerical representation - which in first place is in this context a detournement of the notion when one thinks to 
mathematics and numerical culture - is again a correct formal aspect of digital culture, but transcoding is an everyday 
cultural phenomena existing in all old media forms. Musical notes, dance codes and dance notation on paper are 
example of it, language is a code... it is ridiculous to present cultural influences such as the windows like redesign of tv-
news - to an impact of the computer culture. Or examine cultural codes, why is that Hollywood remakes and resets in 
american  context movies made in other culture, for example the Seven Samurai, or why there is need of remake and 
recontextualisation of classic movies?

Bakhtin grabbed the the epic world as finished thing in the context of epic as a genre, opposed to poetry and drama,
it don't how quoting him could support an argument to contrats the opennes of digital culture.
Why not quote the Opera Aperta of Umberto Eco?

DJ autorhip? 
We can describe academic culture as database culture as well, quotation in paragraph 3 of chapter II. a).  
Or better, what is a non-database culture? What is non-composite?
I would look for the characteristics of the digital culture in classical temporality-space relationship, and in 
communication as its essence. 


greetings,
anna balint