The Language Of New Media

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1. igraviousFeb 2018
   Certainly does.

   Here is where I overlap with you. I've watched the documentary version of manufacturing consent but not read the book. (Don't tell anyone.) I watched The Century of the Self and Hypernormalisation plus a couple of others by Curtis. McLuhan is on my radar but I've never done a deep dive though of course I'm aware of him. I've read The Master Switch by Wu but not Attention Merchants, this man obviously is someone to keep an eye on.

   So that leaves McChesney and Toffler. They are now on my radar, thank you. Under general media scholars you mention: H.L. Mencken, I.F. Stone, and perhaps Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. I thought Mencken a critic, Dewey a pragmatist–Rorty rates Dewey very highly, Lippmann I seem to recall to coming across…, Stone, don't think so. Interesting list.

   And if I may be so bold. Have you considered The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset? A prescient work. Somewhat more obscure is The Reality of the Mass Media by Niklas Luhmann, Curtis mentions nearly every cyberneticist and cybernetic theorist bar Luhmann, probably for good reason come to think of it. New media theorists: Walter Benjamin obviously for his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (but maybe others?), The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich, and finally anything by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Wendy Chun).

   I gather that media-philosophie is an actual research programme in German-land whereas here we'd call it media studies or communication studies or new media studies and it's looked down upon to the same extent as cultural studies programmes are or courses on semiotics. I'd like to see media-philosophy (what you use to communicate your message) become an actual branch of philosophy like aesthetics/rhetoric (how you communicate your message).

   It's been stimulating, ciao!

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2. jccalhounMar 2018
   I am always reminded of the first chapter of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media where is writes about growing up in the Soviet Union and he took two years of computer programming without ever touching a computer. At the end of the course he got to use a computer once where he put his program into the computer and it doesn't work because he typed Os instead of 0s.
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3. beerbajaySep 2015
   I was a student of Manovich at UCSD with high hopes for both his book, The Language of New Media, and the course I was taking, but I was incredibly disappointed in both.

   TLONM became an sort of "instant classic" in digital media circles mostly because there was very little written on the subject and because TLONM came out of MIT press. Just last week, I saw TLONM referenced in a Swedish article written for digital archivists.

   Unfortunately, people in digital media circles don't usually have a background in computer technology or in any kind of formalized theory/philosophy, so they're easily hoodwinked by misstatements about the nature of computers, databases, file formats, etc. Manovich uses misstatements of this kind to make his "theory of new media" sound plausible, while ignoring critical issues with the examples on which he bases his reasoning.

   I don't buy in to the (usually) right-wing claim that academics are trying to trick people with overly complicated language; different disciplines require their own terminology and the ability to take knowledge of the terminology for granted when writing. But Manovich is the rare case where a writer does actually use language as a way of obfuscating their own faults. TLONM is a slog; it's dull, the language is needlessly obtuse, and many of the facts are wrong. I say this as a person with degrees in both computer science and art.

   I read his book over 10 years ago and I'm still annoyed every time someone references TLONM because it means they have been misinformed by Manovich and unfortunately don't have the background/tools to understand why.

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