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If we want to understand the effects of computerization on culture as a whole, the concept in

itself is limited. There is no reason to privilege the computer as a machine for the exhibition and
distribution of media over the computer as a tool for media production or as a media storage
device. Today we are in the middle of a new media revolution—the shift of all culture to
computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication. In contrast to
photography, the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including
acquisition, manipulation storage, and distribution; it also affects all types of media—texts, still
images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions.

New media is a relative term, and has been used since the 1990s to distinguish interactive media
technologies based on computing from ‘old media’ forms – namely print media such as
newspapers, radio and television, which were traditionally consisted of one way broadcasts to
mass populations. The distinction between old and new media is somewhat artificial, as ‘old
media’ technologies have today reinvented themselves so they are now also forms of ‘new
media: newspapers are online and allow comments, and radio and T.V. are similar online and
allow for greater levels of interactivity with the audience. According to Professor Lev Manovich,
examples of new media include: websites, virtual worlds and virtual reality, multimedia and
computer games.

For Manovich, new media is the result of the “translation of all existing media into numerical
data accessible through computers.” In other words, what is new about new media is that it is a
form of media that has been digitised, turned into numbers, and is therefore be subject to
computation i.e. can be processed by computer programs. There are some curious consequences
of this. For example, a film that is shot on a digital camera but otherwise has the same stylistic
and aesthetic properties as one from the early 20th Century still counts as “new media”. What
matters here is the possibilities of types of manipulation that only become feasible by means of
the convergence of media and computer technology.

Manovich emphasises the importance of this convergence repeatedly and situates his analysis
historically by describing how new media evolved by means of two difference trajectories of
innovation. The first one is the development of modern media forms (photography, film etc.).
This starts with Daguerre in 1839 and is fundamentally about the development of techniques for
media storage. This trajectory of course also encompasses the reproduction and transmission of
imagery and the consequent establishment of the ‘mass media’. The second trajectory is the
development of computer technology which starts with Babbage around the same time and really
takes off in the middle of the 20th Century with the innovations of Alan Turing among others.
So, media and computing develop in parallel, and Manovich suggests, in a somewhat Foucaldian
way, that both were necessary for the functioning of a modern society.

In the chapter entitled "What Is New Media?" Manovich offers a number of defining principles
for digital technology and simultaneously debunks several of the myths surrounding it. The five
principles—numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding—are
not to be understood as universal laws of new media. Rather, they describe some of the aesthetic
properties of data and the basic ways in which information is created, stored, and rendered
intelligible.

Because all new media objects are composed of digital code, they are essentially numerical
representations. That is, all new media objects can be described mathematically and can be
manipulated via algorithms. According to Manovich, the key difference between old and new
media is that new media is programmable. In new media compositions, the opposition between
visual and verbal is bridged in the sense that both are code—both image and text are
programmed and programmable. In the case of natural languages we have sentences, words,
letters, morphemes and other linguistic elements. In the case of visual language we might turn to
semiotics and talk about the presence of various signs within the image and so on. New media is
discrete through and through, as the computing technology upon which it is based has no means
of handling the continuous at all. 

Pixels, images, text, sounds, frames, code—independent elements like these combine to form a
new media object. These elements can be independently modified and reused in other works. The
modularity of new media is related to the modular character of structural computer
programming, such as we find in Java and C++, in which independent functions or subroutines
are brought together in larger programs. In Flash, modularity is evident in frames, layers, scenes,
and symbols, each of which has certain independence and yet is an integral part of the Flash
movie. The entire Web, Manovich notes, has a modular structure, composed of independent sites
and pages, and each webpage itself is composed of elements and code that can be independently
modified.

Automation is seen in computer programs that allow users to create or modify media objects
using templates or algorithms. Because of powerful automated functions built in to the software,
Manovich notes, “human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in
part.” This leads Manovich into a discussion of technologies such as AI and Automated Search
but perhaps what is also worth exploring further here is the philosophical implications of
removing, or at least de-centering, human subjectivity from the discourse around new media. In
Flash, automated tweening allows users to specify the beginning and end of an animation, and
Flash automatically draws all of the frames in between.

Manovich writes, “a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something
that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions.” Unlike old media, new media does not
“hardwire” structure and content together. One example of variability is found in hypertextual
or interactive media that allow users to take different paths through a text and therefore access
different content. An obvious example is how a website like Amazon customizes the view it
presents to the user based on their previous browsing or purchasing history.

Transcoding designates the blend of computer and culture, of "traditional ways in which human
culture modeled the world and the computer's own means of representing it" (46). Technically,
transcoding refers to the translation of a new media object from one format to another (for
example, text to sound) or the adaptation of new media for display on different devices. The
computerization of culture is a process of transcoding, as “cultural categories or concepts are
substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that derive from the
computers ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics.”

In summary, new media represents a convergence of two separate histories. It is a convergence

of media technologies and of digital computing. Manovich's works’ most important argument is
the careful development of a record of the present state of new media which focuses on the
complex relationship between cinema and new media.