The Language of New Media - Review

Lev Manovich

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001)

As far as introductory guides to new languages go, this is not one of those booklets with phonetic jargons that allow you to simulate a foreign tongue with a ventriloquistic twist. The Language of New Media takes an intelligent and detailed look at how computer technologies are structured with an aim to establish a dialogue about how they communicate. It offers a major contribution to our critical vocabulary, and what amounts to slight oversights in its explicit structure will only serve to elaborate on the language of new media that it already advocates.

In his chapter on the interface, Manovich is absorbed by the GUI, but largely neglects to address the central U in this configuration. You are the ubiquitous "user" on the receiving end of his screen analysis, yet your character takes on the sketchiest shape as it morphs along with the narrative like the molten metal new media frequently assigns the human figure. Where theoretical terminology used to operate with a "viewer" to approach cultural representations, there is now a "user" that Manovich only illuminates with the dimmest flicker of a cold cathode tube. An ignored parallel in this genealogy belongs to Michel Foucault's conception of "Man." The pivotal "viewer" Foucault posited in The Order of Things served as the difficult object and sovereign subject of an entire representational scheme that defined a moment when what it meant to be human first entered a collective consciousness and being became discourse. When Manovich consistently applies a female pronoun to the "user," it appears that the male "vi ewer" has acquired a companion, and just like "he" once initiated a search for human nature in the sciences, "she" implicitly opens up a crucial dialogue about the nature of being post-human in an age of technology.

Manovich recognizes that the instrumentality of the gaze, as an embodiment of the "viewer," has been supplemented by the operations of computer hardware to secure a new discursive space for the "user," but the primary mechanism of this being--the algorithm--is repeatedly only approached in passing. Tabular and repetitious in structure, an algorithm is essentially a finite blend of mathematical calculations and logical statements that process data according to preordained formats. Any action or procedure undertaken by a computer follows this path. Significantly, the "user" is most closely aligned with the algorithmic structure of new media in a gaming environment where simple commands usually take on a complex 3D frenzy of flight simulation or mortal combat. In order to maintain a lively number of lives in the score, the "user" is feverishly trying to build a mental model of the computer model to predict the outcome of different scenarios. Survival in bytes, then, ultimately depends on how well this "user" can learn or assimilate the operations of the computer and then act flawlessly according to its set patterns. Whether you, the "user," operate in Doom or MS Office, the principle remains the same--mastery of the algorithm comes with surrender to an inescapable logic of behavior and thought.

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group