Media, Technology & Culture 05 (3rd Edition): Computational Technologies

Most people know very well that social and cultural transformations are complex. And yet, we often seem prepared to think of individual media as bringing change. We believe that there was a situation before this or that media, and then another situation after. Sometimes there are worries about this subsequent situation; or nostalgia for how things were before. In other instances, people wager hope that novel media might bring positive or empowering changes. When media technologies are seen as transformative, they have often been described as ‘new media’. The term ‘new media’ began to acquire some currency in the 1960s, in the age of television. But its use exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Why? Many used the term around this time to refer to a broad range of emerging media, often without giving its precise meaning. It was used to encompass the internet, interactivity, multimedia, mobile devices, user-generated content, and more. Some scholars observed, however, that all of these various new media had something in common: their relationship with the longer-term and more general development of the computer as a media technology. The computer was not just another individual media technology. Rather, it embodied the emerging backbone for potentially all mediated communication and experience. In this episode, we look at how this argument is exemplified by the work of digital media theorist Lev Manovich, who suggests that what makes new media ‘new’ is its creation, storage, distribution and display via the language (i.e. software code) and hardware of digital computation. On a basic level, computational media all share a basic metabolism of binary code: ultimately describable with nothing more than 1s and 0s. The question, however, is broader than this: beyond previous media formats becoming absorbed into the medium of the computer, are we seeing the rise of a specifically ‘computational’ culture?

Thinkers Discussed: Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media / Software Takes Command); Mark B.N. Hansen (New Philosophy for New Media); Alexander Galloway (The Interface Effect); Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Remediation: Understanding New Media); Jonathan Sterne (Analog); Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Magaudda (A History of Digital Media: An Intermedia and Global Perspective); Lewis Mumford (Authoritarian and Democratic Technics); Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism); Laine Nooney (The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal); Jennifer Light (When Computers Were Women); Mar Hicks (Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing); Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (Personal Dynamic Media); David Berry (Against Remediation).