Media Theory
Walter Ong, from Orality and
Literacy
Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer
outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer.
Vision dissects... Vision comes to a human being from one direction at
a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around
from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound
simultaneously from every direction at once; I am at the center of my
auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core
of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in
sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying
sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart.
The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in
sound... the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human
beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the
way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic
life.
Marshall McLuhan, from The
Medium is the Message
What we are considering here, however, are the psychic
and social consequences of the designs or patters as they
amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the
"message" of any medium or technology is the change of
scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human
affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or
transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it
accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human
functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds
of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway
functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is
quite independent of the freight or content of the railway
medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by accelerating
the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form
of city, politics and association, quite independently of what
the airplane is used for.
Espen Aarseth, from Cybertext
Hypertext, when regarded as a type of text, shares with a variety of other
textual types a fundamental trait, which we defined as nonlinearity. It must
immediately be pointed out that this concept refers only to the physiological
form (or arrangement, appearance) of the texts, and not to any fictional
meaning or external references they might have. Thus, it is not the plot, or
the narrative, or any other well-known poetic unit that will be our definitive
agency but the shape or structure of the text itself.
Imagine a book in which some of the pages appear to be missing, or the print is
unreadable every 16 pages, or some of the pages are repeated while an
equal number omitted. Even if this copy is the only one we ever see, we
automatically assume that it is not supposed to be this way and that a more
correct version exists. It may never have been printed, but to us, who can
imagine it perfectly...is still more real than the one we are holding. ... But
what if the flawed version interferes so deeply with our sense of reception
that it, in more than a manner of speaking, steals the show?
...
In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse
the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also
be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with
no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example)
eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.
Gregory Ulmer, from Networked
. “Electracy” is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic
writing: an apparatus, or social machine, partly
technological, partly institutional. We take for granted
now the skill set that orients literate people to the
collective mnemonics that confront anyone entering a
library or classroom today. Grammatology (the history
and theory of writing) shows that the invention of literacy
included also a new experience of thought that led to
inventions of identity as well: individual selfhood and the
democratic state. Thus there are three interrelated
invention streams forming a matrix of possibilities for
electracy, only one of which is technological. There is no
technological determinism, other than the fundamental
law of change: that everything is mutating together into
something other, different, with major losses and gains.
What is the skill set that someday may be assumed of
electrate people native to an Internet institution?
Five Principles of New Media
from Lev Manovich, The Language of New
Media (Cambridge; London, MIT Press,
2001)
1. Numerical Representation
All new media objects, whether created from scratch on
computers or converted from analog media sources, are
composed of digital code; they are numerical
representations. This fact has two key consequences:
1. A new media object can be described formally
(mathematically). For instance, an image or a shape can
be described using a mathematical function.
2. A new media object is subject to algorithmic
manipulation. For instance, by applying appropriate
algorithms, we can automatically remove "noise" from a
photograph, improve its contrast, locate the edges of the
shapes, or change its proportions. In short, media
becomes programmable. (p. 27)
2. Modularity
This principle can be called the "fractal structure of new
media." Just as a fractal has the same structure on
different scales, a new media object has the same
modular structure throughout. Media elements, be they
images, sounds, shapes, or behaviors, are represented
as collections of discrete samples (pixels, polygons,
voxels, characters, scripts). These elements are
assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to
maintain their separate identities. These objects
themselves can be combined into even larger objects -again, without losing their independence. (p. 30)
3. Automation
The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and
the modular structure of a media object
(principle 2) allow for the automation of many
operations involved in media creation,
manipulation, and access. (p.32)
"low-level" automation = color variation in
Photoshop, changing font in Word
"high-level" automation = AI in video game, Google
bots
4. Variability
A new media object is not something fixed once and for all,
but something that can exist in different, potentially
infinite versions. This is another consequence of the
numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular
structure of a media object (principle 2). (p. 36)
1. Media elements are stored in a media database; a
variety of end-user objects, which vary in resolution and
in form and content, can be generated, either
beforehand or on demand, from this database.
2. It becomes possible to separate the levels of "content"
(data) and interface. A number of different interfaces can
be created from the same data. A new media object can
be defined as one or more interfaces to a multimedia
database.
3. Information about the user can be used by a comptuer program to
customize automatically the media composition as well as to create
elements themselves. (p. 37)
4. A particular case of this customization is branching-type interactivity
(sometimes also called "menu-based interactivity").
5. Hypermedia is another popular new media structure, which is
conceptually close to branching-type interactivity (because quite
often the elements are connected using a branch tree structure). In
hypermedia, the multimedia elements making a document are
connected through hyperlinks.
6. Another way in which different versions of the same media objects
are commonly generated in computer culture is through periodic
updates.
7. One of the most basic 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. (p. 38)
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
story; story and plot; compostion and point of view;
mimesis and catharsis, comedy and tragedy. Examples
of categories in the computer layer are process and
packet (as in data packets transmitted through the
network); sorting and matching; function and variable;
computer language and data structure.
Because new media is created on computers, distributed
via computers, and stored and archived on computers,
the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly
influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is,
we may expect that the computer layer will affect the
cultural layer. The ways in which the computer models
the world, represents data, and allows us to operate on
it; the key operations behind all computer progams (such
as search, match, sort, and filter); the convetions of HCI
[Human-Computer Interface] -- in short, what can be
called the computer's ontology, epistemology, and
pragmatics -- influence the cultural layer of new media,
its organization, its emerging genres, its contents. (p. 46)