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.

Brilliant observations on the role of art and design in digital media. Interesting examples, fascinating conclusions, and a very clear method of writing. Loved every page.

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

What started out very, very tediously eventually built to an interesting discussion, then receded again into tedium only to stop suddenly without a rewarding or insightful conclusion.

The author's fixation on cinema was obsessive to the point of distraction: I often felt that the book's title should more appropriately have been "Manovich's New Language of Cinema"; however, this predication was out of necessity for his argument. Manovich suggests that the way we've viewed, analyzed, and critiqued film (and the creation/digestion/exhibition/reproduction thereof) is relevant to new media, as well.

With painstaking detail and thoroughness, this text catalogues the ways in which we can study and interpret new media, providing context, category, and connotation for the various terms used in discussing it.

While this was an extremely difficult (as in dull, tedious, and repetitive) read, it provides a foundation of vocabulary for a field of study. As such, I suppose it serves a purpose. Do I think that makes it good? :-) No, not really.

Wanna get the idea of new media? Go for it. What in the first few pages might seem abstract, might also just be a preview of knowledge available to one who reads it all. The rest of the book is then surprisingly concise, as he breaks down all of his theoretical stands, several times for each one. I was often like "Okay man, that's enough, I got you". My teacher lecturing a subject called Media Practice in Contemporary Art said this book should be one of my number one choices. He was right. Manovich, ma man!

It's the book that all media theory classes teach when it comes to new media. Its permanent status on syllabi is clearly deserved but in rereading this book a few times, it's way too cinema-biased, which I think is still an issue in contemporary media theory. Nevertheless, this is a serious book.

I shouldn't technically get to add this to my Goodreads because I didn't read the whole thing. So I note that here--and now it's okay to add it. Interesting read and some unique observations about what makes for new media.

Using Vertov's silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera as his starting point Manovich draws a convincing history of the evolution of media.

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.

Non leggete questo libro per nessun motivo al mondo!Scritto male e tradotto anche peggio!

Muy bueno, una lectura que marcará mis próximos trabajos.

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.