Response to “What is New Media? Eight Propositions” by Lev Manovich

In this reading Lev Manovich proposes that there are eight specific ways to categorize New Media. The first one is distinguishing between New media and cyberculture. He defines cyberculture as the study of various social phenomena associated with Internet and other new forms of network communication. While new media is concerned with cultural objects and paradigms enabled by all forms of computing and not just by networking. The next is  New Media as Computer Technology used as a Distribution Platform. He defines that television programs, feature films, magazines, books and other paper-based publications, and the like are not new media. He explains that the meaning and context of new media is ever changing and we have to keep up with it and have to constantly define it. Next he talks about New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software. New media is reduced to digital data that can be manipulated by software as any other data. This allows automating many media operations, to generate multiple versions of the same object. For instance, once an image is represented as a matrix of numbers, it can be manipulated or even generated automatically by running various algorithms, such as sharpen, blue, colorize, change contrast. Then New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software. New media today can be understood as the mix between older cultural conventions for data representation, access and manipulation and newer conventions of data representation, access and manipulation. The “old” data are representations of visual reality and human experience.” The “new” data is numerical data. He goes on to explain four more propositions which talk about how every modern media and telecommunication technology passes through its “new media stage”, how new computers are programmable algorithm executers, the avant-garde techniques of software and how artists like to manipulate the media given, and finally New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post WWII Art and Modern Computing.