Blog prompt numero uno.

I'm not sure I fully understood all five of Manovich's principles of new media. Actually the Manovich's dense theoretical writing threw me off guard at first, so I found myself re-reading this chapter tonight before I went to make this post. His first principle, Numerical Representation appears to me to be stating that new media is divided to it's absolute base to numbers, or mathematical code. He seems to be drawing a parallel between new media and language in the sense that in language the very base of language is composed of morphemes, new media can too be divided into numbers, or binary code. Manovich goes on to use a digital image as an example of the underlying mathematical base of new media. He tells us how an image can be divided into a grid, divided numerically, and that as users we can alter this image merely by altering it mathematically, but necessarily by altering the visible image we ourselves see. At least this is how I understood it. I suppose the best example I can think of this is playing the guitar. A guitarist plays music that we hear, that sound that we hear could be likened to new media. But that new media (the music) also has a numerical representation (tablature) where the guitarist is reading a series of numbers assigned to a certain line that constitute that music. My comparison my fall short in the fact that tablature cannot really be manipulated with mathematical equations. However, it does have a numerical representation.

The next principle is modularity this one was especially confusing to me mainly because it talks about fractals and I really suck at math, so I had to look up what a fractal is. And to be perfectly honest I'm not quite sure what a fractal is still. But from what I can gather a fractal is an object that is composed of many different smaller irregular objects. He uses HTML as an example, for a website is composed of HTML, which can be reduced to independent lines of code, jpegs, gifs, etc. This sort of modularity Manovich asserts is a principle of new media. I would liken this idea to a digital recording--in a sense this example is very similar to Manovich's photoshop example. But a digital recording of say a band is composed of multiple tracks, or layers. When we play these layer simultaneously we get a full and complete song, but we may also add or delete tracks to this complete song. Like a drum track, or a bass line, or even sound effects. I think this ability to be moved and added to anything else while retaining it's initial properties is what Manovich is getting at with modularity. 

The third principle is automation. I think this idea can be summed up rather quickly by simply saying that new media has the ability to operate on many levels automatically without actual human manipulation. I think this is something very unique to new media, and really can't be found anywhere else in human history. Up to the advent of computerization any sort of mechanized action had to be human caused. The fact that new media is doing millions of things automatically makes it extremely unique. Manovich uses the example of AI players in a game that oppose a human player in a game automatically. A good example of this that I can think of is are those creepy little ads you get on google for mentioning something similar in one of your messages. I hope (at least) that no human is going through me emails looking for ways to advertise specifically to me, instead I'm sure that an automated system scans through the words makes a match and then throws an ad my way to specifically target me. 

Variability, a new media text can by duplicated, manipulated, altered, in any way instantaneously. In this regard a new media text is vastly different than an old media text. Manovich ties this concept closely with his principle of modularity, where independent bits compose the whole. In this principle I would say that Manovich is saying that these independent bits are capable of undergoing any sort of imaginable simply by being a new media item. For example the whole hide your kids hide your wives thing. It started out as a simple news interview, but it took on new life as it gained popularity, and took on new life as users took artistic liberties to it. here are some links if you're not sure what I'm talking about the first one is the original, the second is an example of the infinite variability of a new media text.
Original-

Variable-

I'm a little ashamed that I thought of that as an example. 

The fifth principle is transcoding, and in this principle Manovich starts to get really heavy, almost too heavy. He basically asserts that new media is functioning on two planes one being on a cultural plane that we see and understand as humans, and the other being on a computer plane. He seems to be suggesting that this dialog going on between computers in our world does have an effect on our cultural plane. Which is interesting, and I do not fully understand his argument for it. But he calls the merge a new computer culture, which I'm pretty sure we are living in right now. I guess we can see this most plainly in our current methods of communication. Text messaging is a good example (I think) where our human interactions are influenced by computers. Instead of speaking as we usually would we have altered our language to better suit the computer technology, so I would argue that there is a direct influence on our human culture in that regard. 

The most important principle I would have to say is automation. I think automation has some rather detrimental effects on humanity as a whole. I believe that it makes us lazy, allows us to better exploit each other, and results in an overall dumbing of the masses.