First things first. Let's get this out in the open. One medium, many media.
TV is a medium. TV and radio are media. We might agree to differ on whether
'multimedia' is a collective noun and therefore takes a singular verb. But
if we are to mark an epochal shift in the media culture of the early 21st
century we might do worse than observe a lucid, intelligent critic,creator
and teacher writing in California, the very belly of the beast, in a book
for one of the most respected lists of one of the most respected publishers
in the media field, with a chapter heading enquiring 'What is New Media?'.
Call me old fashioned -- you may have to -- but that would have been a
grammatical error a matter of hours ago. Is there such a thing as
convergence? I disbelieve in any such aesthetic entity, outwith the
synergetic corporation, and misdoubt the value of pursuing it. That does
not alter the fact: the language is changing. 'Media' is becoming singular,
not just out of ignorance, but because 'new media' and 'multimedia' are
being perceived as whole, discrete objects other than their constituent
parts. Multimedia is now, in this English language, a medium.

For a brief moment, Manovich turns his attention to the modernist pursuit
of medium specificity, intellectually and in creative practice. This is the
nub of the change signalled by the grammatical shift from plural to
singular. Is there a medium of multimedia, digital media, new media, and is
it or are they possessed of a singular collocation of specificities? There
is good reason to ask. Too many curricula are overburdened with literary
theory, film history, televisual narratology and art history, and all of us
involved in teaching new media are hungry for texts we can signal to our
students as specific to the emergent discipline, authentic in their methods
and direct in their applications to studio and laboratory practice. This
book joins a select bunch of texts that are both quintessentially of the
cyberculture, and at the same time lucid enough for a reasonably articulate
undergraduate to read for fun and profit. It is, simply, the first textbook
for the next generation of media makers.

The book has enough schematic structure to please the note-taker. Chapter
One enumerates five distinctive qualities of new media -- numerical
representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding.
Readers of Leonardo will recognise the centrality of the concepts, but not
the originality or the clarity of explanation that Manovich brings to them.
Meticulously disentangling the old from the new, Manovich argues carefully
for a distinctive newness, discounting among others the 'myth of
interactivity'. Subsequent chapters address the interface, long a passion
of Manovich's in discussion papers launched on <nettime> and Rhizome, the
operations that interfaces make most possible, the question of illusion and
the characteristic forms of digital media, especially the database and the
navigable 3D space. In each case, there is characteristic innovation in the
analysis, and a freshness to the style of thought, that justifies the
book's dedication to Norman Klein, Peter Lunenfeld and Vivian Sobchack,
three charismatic figures of the new media 's best thinking.

Manovich is kind to his readers. He does not expect immense cultural
reference, kindly explaining who Bertolt Brecht and André Bazin were, as
gently as he holds our hands while explicating the nature of algorithms and
their centrality to vector graphics. At the same time, he is unforgiving in
his pursuit of a genuinely new critical paradigm, one that does not spend
all its time glancing back over its shoulder to compare and contrast new
and old media. There is none of the 'computers aren't books' paranoia or
triumphalism of narratologists and neo-luddites; no cheery or glum
farewells to family television. Instead the book relentlessly pursues the
distinctive qualities of digital media, archeologising their emergence from
older forms, but recognising the moments at which butterflies emerge from
chrysalises. The care for both accuracy and persuasion makes those
distinctions sharp, historic.

That this is, without question, a vital work of new thinking in a new
culture, should not however deter us from the necessity for further
thinking: I suspect the author would be disappointed if it did. I cannot
feel comfortable with the notion that essentialism might creep back into
the media culture, just at the moment at which it has been banished from
the halls of the world's art institutions. There are no mistakes in the
argument to cling to: Manovich, typically, never asserts that new media are
essentially binary, clearly alert to the possibility of a mass computing
medium that no longer restricts itself to zeros and ones. Nor is he
dismissive of the old media -- abstract painting's turn to philosophical
issues is, he recognises, a noble ambition as yet undiscovered in the field
of digital design. And yet, this nagging doubt: is new media, are new
media, unified by an intrinsic quality or field of qualities? Or is it
perhaps their very modularity, variability, transcoding, that marks them
out as a loose aggregation without a single defining presence?

'Nuff said. Manovich has given us a book, the book, we had hoped for. We
can disagree with it. We can and will find other examples, different to the
wonderful range of games, net.art, installations and movies he works with.
Cinema theorists and historians will enjoy the claims that all of this
novelty is the flowering of a potentiality latent in film since its first
steps, or before in the phantasmagorias and thaumatropes of the 18th and
19th centuries. The ravishing breadth of digital reference is one of the
books strengths, and there's more than enough here to suggest to any
instructor that the ideas can be debated in evolving contexts. If MIT Press
relent in the usual practice of holding significant new titles in hardcover
only for a year or two at a stretch, the book will be in every library, and
students everywhere will be clutching it like Mao's Red Book, Diamat of the
Immaterialist generation. Best of all, after 'Languages of the New Media',
we can argue on our own terrain. The term 'languages' in the title should
not mislead: Manovich clarifies in the introduction that language is not
the paradigm, but a metaphor, and its plural form the consequence of the
complexity of the subject. I will cling to my grammarian propriety, and
believe these media are plural, but I will be using this book for myself as
well as my students, because it makes that question, like so many others,
urgent and productive.

Sean Cubitt
Screen and Media Studies
Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
seanc@waikato.ac.nz
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/