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.

confusing!

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.”

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.

I have finally found it....the most painful theory reading I have ever been assigned in any class ever. While conceptually, the ideas about new media presented were interesting and give interesting lens of analysis this was...so just so inaccessibly dull.

A simultaneously inspiring and depressing read. This book is full of wonderful theoretical frameworks, as well as several near-misses that are still interesting and instructive, and a very few full misses that aren't any fun at all. (Also a few blind spots due to the author's fully disclosed visual media bias.)

The author spent the first five chapters building an argument as well as a useful theory of new media, piece by piece. A lot of it worked very well; even when I disagreed with the argument, I often found the theory sound.

It all completely fell apart for me in the final chapter, so it was quite a bummer to end on that note.

The author approaches the creation of a theory of new media from the angle of the visual arts in general, and film theory in particular. This produces many solid ideas with accessible examples. Still, one can't help thinking of the many other disciplines that could provide alternative theoretical models for some of the ideas with which the author engages.

In his defense, the author says as much several times in the text. He presents absolutely no illusion of the production of the definitive theoretical model for new media. He's very clear that he's presenting a single theoretical framework, and that others are very much possible.

And that is a major weakness of this book, if one can call it weakness: it is good enough, complete enough, and smart enough to give an inkling of how much better a more interdisciplinary framework might be. It reveals its limitations and shares them freely. It helps you form a clear articulation of what it lacks, leading you to want exactly that.

Warning: Liberal usage of, and references to: hypermedia, QuickTime, VR, and VRML. Also occasionally refers to computer games as "CD-ROMs". Gotta give him a break, it was ten years ago.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in media studies.

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

My boss once said: "Manovich is like the Rolling Stones of media studies. His older work is better, but he's still the Stones." Now, I'm not exactly familiar with his older work (yet), but I do have to agree on the "Stones" part of the sentiment. Must read.

Good stuff but very entry-level in terms of what it analyzes. Manovich only brings up the topic of new media distribution in the final section, and as far as I'm concerned, this is the dominant issue in contemporary visual culture, new media studies, and film studies. I did think it was interesting how he predicted that the loop would become dominant, and it has; I don't see how the spatialization of images has become a dominant form in cinematic language, which is another prediction he makes towards the end. Despite how all books on new media become dated almost as soon as they are published, this one isn't: the constant references to Myst, Doom, Quake, Titanic and CD-ROMs is a little dated, but the analysis occurs at a level abstract enough that the book, by-and-large, is still entirely relevant. It just doesn't address the question of distribution, because in 2003 the web was still a wild, open zone.

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.

Lev Manovich's 'The Language of New Media' is one of 2 main texts we're using in The Dynamic Media Institute's coursework, research and discussion for Design Seminar 1. Fantastic read, great insight into the field and history of new media art. I have owned the book since 2004, read bits and pieces, but now I have a fantastic excuse to dig in and really live in the subject matter.

A great place to start. Well-written.