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| Module 2 | | Five Principles of New Media Production |
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Lev Manovich (2001) posits that the new media operate under five basic principles: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding involved in creating new media texts, principles that make these texts quite different to produce than was the case with print, drawing, or analogue texts. The following is a summary of these five principles:
| Numerical representation. Because they are based on digital codes, new media texts are numerical: |
Converting continuous data into a numerical representation is called digitalization. Digitalization consists of two steps: sampling and quantization. First, data is sampled, most often at regular intervals, such as the grid of pixels used to represent a digital image. The frequency of sampling is referred to as resolution. Sampling turns continuous data into discrete data, that is, data occurring in discrete units: people, the pages of a book, pixels. Second, each sample is quantified, that is, it is assigned a numerical value drawn from a defined range (such as 0-255 in the case of an 8-bit greyscale image). (p. 28)
This means that the components of new media texts (Websites, video clips, images, etc.)
consists of bits of data that can be readily be stored as named files for use in combining with other data bits.
| Modularity. These different media samples or data bits - stills, QuickTime video clips, sounds, etc. - can function as separate objects or modules that can be combined together in different ways without losing their independence. A website consists of different objects that can be stored independently on a site or network as independent parts that are then combined in different ways. They can then be readily added, deleted, or revised without having to totally redo the overall website. All of this makes production of digital texts different than production of traditional texts, for example, a painting.
| Automation. The production and combination of the modular parts is often completed through the use of highly automated systems. Digital photos can be automatically edited to improve their quality through editing programs. Hollywood filmmakers can employ computer graphic or 3-D systems to create animation images, such as the use of thousands of soldiers in the Lord of the Rings film series. A "smart camera" has been developed at the MIT Media lab that automatically takes pictures according to a script. http://www-white.media.mit.edu/vismod/demos/smartcam/
Websites automatically adjust to specific users, providing them with information based on their previous visits.
| Variability. The same new media texts can also be automatically be created in different versions to suit individual users' needs. Again, due to the modularity principle, the different components of the same texts can be varied to create new texts. For example, hypermedia texts, which are created through linking together disparate texts, can be varied according to the different combination of links or pathways, resulting in different texts. Texts are also continually updated, creating new, more recent versions of texts. The size or scale of a text can be varied using zoom/close-up features on Mapquest maps or images. And, different versions of the same media content can be varied as when films are made into computer games or games such as Tomb Raider are made into films.
| Transcoding. Transcoding refers to translating something into another format. Manovich notes that new media exists on two different layers-a "cultural layer" and a "computer layer." The "cultural layer" includes categories associated with types of literary texts, genres, encyclopedia topics, narrative patterns, etc. The "computer layer" are the processes by which the computer organizes data into packets or databases. The ways in which the "computer layer" organizes data is now influencing how the "cultural layer" is organized. The cultural categories are now being transcoded into computer categories so that media content or cultural texts is being redefined in new ways as evident in the ways in which Websites, DVD's, or computer games employ new ways of organizing experience and engaging users.
| Central to the new media for Manovich is the role of the computer interface or the "cut and paste" Graphical User Interface. This interface allowed users to store, save, and open up files on the computer screen, as well as click on images and files. The same interface code operates across different computer and worlds (workplace versus school versus home) as a means of organizing, inputting, searching for, or viewing text. "Cultural interfaces" combine together texts from three different ways of organizing text - the printed word, the cinematic presentation of moving images, and the computer interface. For example, central to the experience of printed text is the concept of the page as found in books. Computer interfaces transformed the concept of the page into scrolling down different pages to the created on web pages, into which multiple specific "pages" are all present on one initial page.
| The cinema camera developed to create 3-D computer graphics for such things as flight training influenced the computer interface in terms of providing users with 3-D perspectives on the same object and users with ways of creating computer animation objects. Computer games employ cinematic techniques to created 3-D narrative introductions to game worlds, as well as the use of camera-like control buttons on the control hardware. Manovich summarizes the ways in which the computer interfaces have incorporated the cinema:
| Cinema, the major cultural form of the twentieth century, has found a new life as the toolbox of the computer user. Cinematic means of perception of connecting space and time, of representing human memory, thinking, and emotion have become a way of work and a way of life for jillions in the computer age. Cinema's aesthetic strategies have become basic organizational principles of computer software. The window into a fictional world of a cinematic narrative has become a window into a dataspace. In short, what was cinema is now the human-computer interface. (p. 86)
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The development and comprehension of multimedia texts. Manovich's principles are evident in the increased use of multimedia text production in schools in which students rely on a range of different modalities to represent their ideas as well as reading strategies for interpreting multimedia texts, all of which entails a different set of literacies than those associated with traditional notions of "reading comprehension." Gunther Kress (2003) cites the example of a young reader reading a online video game magazine such as Playstation Magazine.
| In reading this text as organization as disparate bits of information in a visual space, the traditional strategy of linear comprehension with a printed text is now less important than the ability to interpret the various visual cues constituted by color, shape, font size, location on the page, configuration, and function in order to define a reading path related to where to go next. Making these decisions requires a clear sense of relevance regarding what information is most important for accomplishing certain purposes, for example, to know how to successfully play a certain game. Given the large amount of optional information provided on a page, a reader needs to apply a sense of relevance to determine which information is most relevant to fulfilling certain purposes for reading. Reading a print text required:
| . . . interpretation and transformation of that which was clearly there and clearly organized. The new task is that of applying principles of relevant to a page which is (relatively) open in its organization, and consequently offers a range of possible reading paths, perhaps
infinitely many. The task of the reader in the first case is to observe and follow a given order, and within that order to engage in interpretation . . . . The task of the reader of the new page, and of the screens which are its models, is to establish the order through principles of relevance of the reader's making, and to construct meaning from that. (p. 162)
As students acquire these literacies, they are more open to and engaged with producing and reading multimedia texts. At the same time, from a media education perspective, it is important that they recognize the multimedia productions have a long history, as documented on the hypertextual site on the historical development of multimedia that accompanies the book, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, 2002).
| Further information on multimedia in art:
www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/Teachers.html
| Michelle Kendrik (The Web and New Media Literacy: Hypertext is Dead and There is Nothing New About New Media Anymore) argues that any study of new media needs to recognize the ways in which these new ways of reading and writing entails new forms of semiotic processing of the combinations of the visual, textual, tactile and spatial. One of the major requirements for media educators is to help students critically analyze the ways in which the computer interface itself functions rhetorically to engage or persuade users through digital media. She illustrates her position by discussing her evaluation of students' web sites developed in her course according to the following rubric:
| Architecture/Navigation: The structure of the site - how information is connected, organized and crafted and how navigation works within the site to guide users/readers and to aid them in finding content relevant to their purposes.
Design: This is the "look and feel" of the site - how colors, layout, images, icons, work within the site to create an emotional, affective experience. Does the design work with or against the written content and purpose of the site?
Content: Usually the text of the site but can include, or consist solely of, images or diagrams or animations. Whatever information is needed to convey the purpose of the site and to enable users/readers to experience the site and emerge with knowledge relevant to their needs.
Code: The HTML (hypertext markup language) and other relevant coding (JAVA, Flash) needed to structure and enable the site to function in an efficient manner and hold each of the other three elements (architecture, design, content).
In response to one student's plagiarizing of content material from other sites, she was concerned that she had taught students to consider imitating or borrowing from other well-designed sites. This dilemma for her pointed to the fact that the development of sites is not a matter of individual production, but the use of materials developed by others.
| She also notes that users typically read only a small amount of all of the text on a Web site, focusing on only specific parts of a site. She argues that users construct meaning through "environmental interaction — a specific moment of code, content and visualization — this interaction is local and situated — but nonetheless not arbitrary or relative." These readings are highly situated in specific contexts. Her analysis of several white supremacists sites demonstrate the ways in which these interactions operate in convincing young users to identity with a white privilege appeal in opposition to civil liberties. This suggests the need to provide students with critical tools to analyze digitial media, tools that recognize changes in the ways in which the new media are constructed.
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