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).

Chapter 6: What is Cinema?
A guide to understanding the last three years of my professional life.

Amazing book.

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

I read it for academic reasons.
Interesting, but not so easy to understand.

Manovich presents very fascinating ideas, in a style not so compelling.

though some opinions have been out of date ,it's still worthy of reading
A helpful book in writing the review for the new media art in current China

It’s certainly interesting to read a book-length exploration of such an idiosyncratic and hyper-personal theory of media art (clearly largely built off of Manovich’s coming of age in the Cold War-era Soviet Union), but what was “new media” in 2001 is no longer remotely new, and Manovich seems primarily interested in its novelty, to the exclusion of tons of relevant information. Jurassic Park is certainly a milestone work in combining animated creatures with live action actors, but Windsor McKay interacted with an animated dinosaur named Gertie 60 years earlier, which gets no mention, presumably because it doesn’t approach photorealism or Manovich’s pet idea of virtual reality. Stan VanDerBeek is briefly complimented for his skill at cinematic montage, but his groundbreaking computer animation isn’t mentioned at all, and Lillian Schwartz doesn’t get any reference whatsoever. David Blair’s Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees is discussed as an early example of internet-based cinema (it was presented in hyperlink form and streamed over the internet over a decade before that was “a thing”), but its commentary on virtual reality and military simulators is completely ignored, making it fairly clear that Manovich has only read about it and never actually engaged with it directly. How do you constantly cite Benjamin and talk about the flâneur as someone who assembles a database and analyzes a space through experiencing its usage without discussing his Arcades Project???? He starts this book by claiming he doesn’t plan on predicting the future, so it’s not like I can really judge this book for being immediately dated (“street view” both negates and supports several claims in this book, but it didn’t exist yet!), but he seems to be here primarily to prognosticate all the same - this is a book about “the future aesthetics of the macrocinema” that claims that one day we will all have high resolution VR chips implanted in our retinas. Factual errors abound, too, to the point where I wondered if I was reading an advance copy that hadn’t gone through a final round of editing, but nope - Tomb Raider isn’t a first person shooter, Karel Zeman wasn’t named Konrad and Stan didn’t spell his last name Brackhage, but you wouldn’t know any of these things from reading this book! As a critic, Manovich can be fairly sharp - when Peter Greenaway’s career is over, I can’t think of anyone better to write the retrospective book on his work - but as a theoretician I’m far less convinced of his insight.

All of this would be a lot easier to deal with if Manovich had tolerable prose, but unfortunately, he is the most annoying stylist I have ever encountered. Within 3 pages of the intro I could instantly clock that 25 years later Manovich was a hardcore NFT/AI guy, and all of his loving references to Gibson may have done irreversible damage to my estimation of that author. He fancies himself a super cool cyberpunk data cowboy, but he’s primarily engaged with high end, expensive mainstream culture, analyzing the films of James Cameron or haute couture and leaving vast swaths of (frankly, better, more enduring AND more relevant) art behind in a rush to write an important, groundbreaking work that’s first to formalize “the language.” If only he wrote a valuable or continually-relevant one instead!

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.

In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich draws on the history of cinema, photography, art, design, and telecommunications to theorize about new media. Primary to my concerns are his five "principles of new media," which he characterizes as what makes new media different from "old media":

1. Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data (27)
2. Modularity: the different elements of new media are discrete samples (30)
3. Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically; there is less human intentionality necessary for the creation and modification of media (32)
4. Variability: new media can be copied and created into a wide variety of versions (36)
5. Transcoding: new media can be converted into other formats (47). This he sees as "the most substantial consequence of the computerization of media" (45).

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...

i'm in the wrong field. i want to be thinking along with this man and making stuff.

A bit dated in its examples, Manovich's descriptions and even conjecture about society's transition to a digital basis is prescient and persuasive for even contemporary readers. Some of his verbiage gets to be a bit much and things that he emphasizes turn out to be not as important today as he thinks they will be, but Manovich really can't be blamed for such shortcomings. What does become somewhat frustrating is his relatively consistent reference to works that few readers then and even fewer now will ever be able to access. Using these for examples may be quite accurate in illustrating his points, but I'll never know, unfortunately.

All around an excellent examination of some rather pressing topics regarding how the digital influences our thinking and our daily lives. While maybe not quite as applicable to today in some respects, there's still certainly a lot in here to chew on and think about: the problems he addresses and identifies aren't going away anytime soon.