NEW MEDIA - AN INTERACTIVE MEDIUM OF CULTURAL EXPRESSION

Research Paper
AEC 3179H – FALL 2005
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Written by: Mark Greenspan (mark@markgreenspan.com)

Abstract
This paper is an exploration of new media through its theoretical roots. It defines new media as a medium of cultural expression and assesses the impacts of the interactive nature of the medium. This paper also explores the current stage of development of this medium and makes recommendations on furthering its development.


Just by its title new media appears to be a nebulous, dynamic and wide-ranging field of study. The term ‘new’ is tied to progress while the term ‘media’ reflects the wide scope of disciplines it embodies. This paper begins with a contextualization of my role in the new media industry and how this has affected me to frame my perception of the field. After recent career and academic developments and a survey of the leading new media theorists I have reframed my perception of the field. In this paper you will join me on my exploratory research of leading new media theorists Lev Manovich and Janet Murray. I also briefly touch upon the writings of game theorists Eric Zimmerman, Katie Salen and Brenda Laurel. Not to mention the media theory incantations of Marshall McLuhan. In this paper I will illustrate that new media is a medium of cultural expression of great importance due to its interactive and widespread nature. I believe that this medium is currently being misused and we must step back and take a more theoretical approach to its possible applications to realize its full potential. I now look to experimental new media art, theory and research as a fertile ground for ideas that could see this medium realize its full potential.

For the better part of the past ten years I’ve identified myself as a new media producer. Almost invariably it’s greeted with confused looks and subsequent questions. What is new media? What do you produce? Over the past ten years the slue of pre-prepared answers I have to choose from has changed considerably. I’d like to think that these changing answers have more to do with the ever-evolving field of new media rather then a tendency towards misrepresentation. In the span of ten years I have produced countless number of new media projects and upon reflection the only aspects they have in common are the following; they combined various forms of media such as images, text and audio. A computer was used to create them and in most of the cases I was producing them for commercial reasons. I am a new media producer who is predominately situated in the commercial realm of the industry, producing projects for the purpose of marketing products or services. This is much different than experimental and research driven new media art projects. As Lev Manovich (2003) points out there is a rich tradition of new media art dating back to the 1970’s with SIGGRAPH in the United States and Ars Electornic in Austria acting as annual gathering places of artists working with computers (pg. 13). It has not been until the past year that I have discovered the rich tradition of new media theory, art and experimentation. This discovery has reframed my view of the field of new media and this paper attempts to express this reframing.

In the past I had always defined new media through two related terms ‘interactive’ and ‘multimedia’. Multimedia, I explained, represented the combination of various different types of media primarily text, audio, and images, much like any standard advertisement on television. If we look to Manovich (2001) we can see that the roots of multimedia extend back much further than the development of television.

Before computer multimedia became commonplace around 1990, filmmakers were already combining moving images, sound and text (be it inter-titles of the silent era or the title sequences of the later period) for a whole century. Cinema thus was the original modern "multimedia." We can also much earlier? examples of multiple-media displays, such as medieval illuminated manuscripts, which combined text, graphics and representational images (pg. 67)

What occurs to me now is that in my definition of multimedia I would neglect to touch on the representational nature of the medium. It is more obvious to me now that by combining text, graphics and images you are putting together a particular representation of the world. Janet Murrary (2003) does a wonderful job of summarizing why the computer and new media is an effective medium for cultural representation.
The awe-inspiring representation power of the computer derives from its four defining qualities: its procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial properties(pg. 6).

Manovich (2001) describes the rise of new-media based arts as follows:
The fact that aspects of sensible reality can be recorded and that these recordings can be later combined, re-shaped and manipulated — in short, edited — made possible the new media-based arts which were soon to dominate the twentieth century: fiction films, radio concerts and music programs, television serials and news programs (pg. 151).

It is evident that new media is a compelling form of representation because of its incredible capacity to store, deliver and create representations of reality.

However, multimedia alone did not adequately fulfill my description of new media. I would have to follow with the term ‘interactivity’. Interactivity, I would go on, allowed someone to manipulate the combinations of media that were presented. Again, this straightforward technical description might work well at cocktail parties but it does not serve to speak to the type of interaction, its quality or its impact. I should have heeded Manovich’s (2001) warning when he wrote:

When we use the concept of “interactive media” exclusively in relation to computer-based media, there is danger that we interpret "interaction" literally, equating it with physical interaction between a user and a media object (pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body), at the sake of psychological interaction. The psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all, are mistakenly identified with an objectively existing structure of interactive links (pg. 71).

There is a rich theoretical framework for the definition of ‘interactivity’ that I will draw on below. In his book, ‘Rules of Play’ gaming theorists Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen (2003) position interaction with the creation of meaning. ‘The careful crafting of player experience through a system of interaction is critical to the design of meaningful play’(pg. 58). Although Zimmerman and Salen’s definition stems from a design perspective it illustrates the agency inherent in interactivity. That interacting with a system can act to create meaning. Media theorist Brenda Laurel (1993) continues with the notion of agency and brings the concept of representation to the understanding of the term interactivity when she states ”…..something is interactive when people can participate as agents within a representational context. An agent is ‘one who initiates actions’” (pg. 112). Laurel’s model emphasizes the interpretive component of interactive experiences, framing an interactive system as a representational. My take on interactivity is that it involves the ability to make choices and with choices comes agency, responsibility and morality. Choice can be equated to participation and participation can be equated with democracy. Therefore the interactive quality of the medium of new media characterizes it as a participatory medium and potentially democratic medium. New media can also be characterized as a digital medium of expression, a representational space. It is in Janet Murray’s words (2003), ‘how we see the world and how we communicate the world to the rest of the world’ (pg. 6). As a medium, new media is ‘a means to convey ideas or information’. (Encarta, 1999). Renowned media theorist, Marshall McLuhan (1964) would agree with the importance of this focus as he notably argues, ‘The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’ (pg. 203). Murray (2003) would agree with McLuhan when she states ‘The right instruments organize not just the outer world but consciousness itself’ (pg. 6). Murray (2003) goes on to say:
We are drawn to a new medium of representation because we are pattern makers who are thinking beyond our old tools. We cannot rewind our collective cognitive effort, since the digital medium is as much a pattern of thinking and perceiving as it is a pattern of making things. We are drawn to this medium because we need it to understand the world and our place in it (pg. 8).

In her description Murray eloquently illustrates the relationship between our patterns of thinking, perceiving and new media. As a digital medium of expression the main tools and instruments of new media are the computer, the computer interface and the Internet. These tools are of vast significance because they shape the manner in which we interact with the cultural forms of expression that are delivered to us. It is also important to consider the proliferation of these tools in order to effectively consider their current and potential impacts. Manovich (2001) does an incredible job of summarizing these impacts in the following paragraph.

What had also come by 1995 was Internet—the most material and visible sign of globalization. And, by the end of the decade, it has also become clear that the gradual computerization of culture will eventually transform all of it. So, to invoke the old Marxist model of base and superstructure, if the economic base of modern society from the 1950s onward started to shift toward a service and information economy, becoming by the 1970s a so-called “post-industrial society” (Daniel Bell), and then later a “network society” (Manual Castells), by the 1990s the superstructure started to feel the full impact of this change. If the “postmodernism” of the 1980s was the first, preliminary echo of this shift still to come—still weak, still possible to ignore—the 1990s’ rapid transformation of culture into e-culture, of computers into universal culture carriers, of media into new media, demanded that we rethink our categories and models (pg. 32).

The models and categories? that I would like to consider are: what are the implications of the notion that computers are not only culture carriers but also tools that can interact with culture on a global scale. At first thought you would think that radical new forms of cultural expression and participation would be produced. Also, given the current rates of proliferation of computers and the Internet it also would seem to offer great promises in shaping not only the representations of our world but our world itself. A highly democratic tool which would enable everyone to participate in cultural expression on a global scale. However, upon reflection and researching of the social trends and cultural developments of the past ten years, I am convinced that on a societal level new media has not delivered on this lofty potential. We have seen very few original creative movements in the 90’s and 00’s, primarily just the repurposing of existing material and ideas. We have also seen the rapid and extensive proliferation of western European ideologies across the globe. The global resurgence of the eighties movement, the remixing and re-sampling involved in the hip-hop culture, the rise of the DJ as a master sampler. It’s as if we are so pre-occupied with using the capabilities of this new digital medium to re-sort and re-combine everything that has been created before and distributing it widely across the globe. Manovich (2001) suggests we look to the fundamental forms and operations of a computer to explain this phenomenon, the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

It is not accidental that the development of GUI which legitimized “cut and paste” logic as well as media manipulation software such as Photoshop, which popularized plug-in architecture, took place during the 1980s — the same decade when contemporary culture became “post-modern.” In evoking this term I follow Fredric Jameson’s usage of post-modernism as “a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order.” As it became apparent by the early 1980s for critics such as Jameson, culture no longer tried to “make it new.” Rather, endless recycling and quoting of the past media content, artistic styles and forms became the new “international style” and the new cultural logic of modern society (pg. 126).

Manovich (2001) goes on to say.

Rather than assembling more media recordings of reality, culture is now busy re-working, recombining and analyzing the already accumulated media material. Invoking the metaphor of Plato’s cave, Jameson writes that post-modern cultural production “can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real word but must, as in Plato’s cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls.” In my view, this new cultural condition found its perfect reflection in the emerging computer software of the 1980s which privileged the selection from already existing media elements over creating them from scratch. And at the same time, to a large extent it is this software which made post-modernism possible (pg. 126).

While Manovich privileges the basic structures of the medium such as the software I would go further to suggest that it is because of the rapid pace of adoption of technology combined with the lack of wide spread theoretical training we find ourselves in this stage of development. To Manovich’s (2001) credit he would agree with this assumption and writes, ‘the speed with which new technologies are assimilated in the United States makes them ‘invisible’ almost overnight: they become an assumed part of the everyday existence, something which does not seem to require much reflection’ (pg. 13). Apart from being a new media producer I’m also a new media educator and I have developed and taught new media curriculum in both developed and non-developed countries at the college level. These courses have all been skill-based courses and have contained minimal amounts of theoretical training. What I’ve noticed is that when it comes to technology training there is a focus on skill transfer. I would consider this to be because it provides easily quantifiable results. However, it is extremely important, especially a this stage of the development of new media that we take a step back and consider not only the impacts of this medium but how to best approach it. Perhaps, Marshal McLuhan (1964) would answer my call with the following quote.
Our conventional response to all media, namely that is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’ (pg. 207)

However he does go on to say that ‘the serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. (McLuhan, pg. 208, 1964) What I’m calling for is that all users of new media approach it like the serious artist that McLuhan describes. If we are to participate fully in shaping this new medium it is essential that we become experts in our approach to it.


References

Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Laurel, Brenda. (1993). Computers as Theatre. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

McLuhan, Marhsall. (1964). The Medium is the Message. In Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (pp. 203 – 209). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev. (2003). New Media from Borges to HTML. In Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (pp. 13 – 25). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Murray, Janet. H. (2003). Inventing the Medium. In Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (pp. 3 – 11). Cambridge, MIT Press.

Salen, Katie & Zimmerman, Eric. (2003). Rules of Play. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.