Manovich seeks to investigate the effects of digital media (what he calls “the computer revolution”) on visual culture at large. Manovich draws from art history, literary criticism, photography, design, and most importantly film studies to ask the question: what is actually new about new media? To answer this question, Manovich engages a set of sub-questions: 1) How does the shift to computer-media based media redefine the nature of static and moving images? 2) What is the effect of computerization on the visual language used by our culture? 3) What new aesthetic possibilities are available to us? In The Language of New Media, Manovich drives home the telling fact that “today’s digital designers and artists use only a small set of action grammars and metaphors out of a much larger set of all possibilities” (Manovich 71).

Developing the possibilities of a new language for new media, Manovich develops the idea of a newly fashioned cinematic language, which builds on the aesthetic strategies of previous cinematic languages. These previous aesthetic strategies exhibited: “a particular configuration of space, time, and surface articulated in the work; a particular sequence of the user’s activities over time in interacting with the work; a formal, material, and phenomenological use experience” (66). Working toward building a new cinematic language, Manovich suggests: “If there is a new rhetoric or aesthetic here, it may have less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or orator, and more with spatial wandering” (78).

Manovich observes that communication or telecommunication as social, cultural activity can drastically change the “paradigm of the aesthetic object.” He asks the following questions of the aesthetic:” Is it necessary for the concept of the aesthetic to assume representation? Does art necessarily involve a finite object? Can telecommunication between users by itself be the subject of an aesthetic? Similarly, can the user’s search for information be understood aesthetically? In short, if a user accessing information and a user telecommunicating with other(s) are as common in computer culture as a user interacting with a representation, can we expand out aesthetic theories to include these two new situations?” (164).

While Manovich never answers these questions outright, he does develop several elements of the “new cinematic language” which can help point toward answers–elements which can cope with our data-rich, data-demanding lives. These elements include hypertext reading, montage, simultaneity, and the aesthetics of density. According to Manovich, the aesthetics of density is about representation of “contemporary information displays such as web portals, which may contain a few dozen hyper-linked elements or the interfaces of popular software packages, which similarly present the user with dozens of commands at once Manovich ends by with more questions: “Can contemporary information designers learn from information displays of the past–particularly films, paintings, and other visual forms that follow the aesthetics of density? “ (327).

Extremely dense, and somewhat obtuse, this book takes the reader through some of the most fundamental New Media art projects and software applications.

Translation into Lithuanian: ISBN 978-9955-834-03-8

Manovich discusses the language through which we engage digital technologies (New Media). The way we interact in a digital environment is inherited through language. For example, we read web pages and bookmark them, all the while exploring them through windows. The digital world that has been created could not have been created from nothing, but needed to use the structure that existed in culture. This culture is not limited to language, but includes the visual as well. Currently you are looking at this on a screen, it may be a portrait or a landscape setting, even the ideas of portrait and landscape are artistic terms for types of paintings. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in technology, as his work requires you to deconstruct the ways in which you interact with “New Media.”

Lev Manovich does have a heavy vocabulary so this book is not for novices, but he does seem to know a lot about the topicm which of course is very broad and constantlz changing.

As I read this book, I honestly felt like I was getting stupider. Reccommended for pseudo-intellectual wannabes with no tech-savvy. If you know anything, you would probably know better than to read this book, which for some reason is still required reading in some circles...

The trouble with writing about new media is that everyone has their own ideas. Manovich lays down historical connections on which to base his theory. I did enjoy the trip back to Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera and early cinema, though honestly I wasn't expecting this kind of entrenching content. The book is beautiful, and that physical aspect makes it more readable, despite some difficult passages where the words just didn't flow.

In summary, today strategies used by social media companies often look more like tactics in the original formulation by de Certeau while tactics look like strategies. Since the companies that create social media platforms make money from having as many users as possible visit them (they do so by serving ads, by selling data about usage to other companies, by selling add-on services, and so on), they have a direct interest in having users pour as much of their lives into these platforms as possible. Consequently, they give users unlimited storage space for all their media and the ability to customize their online lives (for instance, by controlling what is seen by whom) by expanding the functionality of the platforms themselves.

This, however, does not mean strategies and tactics have completely exchanged places. If we look at the actual media content produced by users, here the relationship between strategies and tactics is different. As I already mentioned, for many decades companies have been systematically turning the elements of various subcultures into commercial products. But these subcultures themselves rarely develop completely from scratch; rather, they are the result of the cultural appropriation and/or remix of earlier commercial culture.

Really useful in helping me wrap my head around both changes and continuities between new media and traditional media like print and (especially) cinema.

Manovich makes a good argument for the understanding of interfaces as cultural artifacts, but the book is often a little dry. I've found his other texts to be more useful, this book seems to much like a basic introduction and didn't go as much into detail as I had hoped. Nevertheless, it's great for an introduction for readers new to the field of media art.

Lev Manovich is my hero since I read this. it inspired 3 independent studies my last year in college. and it's helped shape a lot of my in progress plans to revolutionize the world ;-)
it'll (probably) change the way you see and analyze what goes on in the increasingly technologized world.

but just so i don't sound like *too* much of a fanboy, it has a definite idealistic slant to it, and I highly recommend reading it along with "Control and Freedom" because the two books complement each other well.