Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook: Volume: 5 | Issue: 1

3 7–24

Introduction Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald Mixed media: from digital aesthetics towards general communication theory Klaus Bruhn Jensen

25–38

Remediation and the language of new media Jay David Bolter

39–56

Alan Kay’s universal media machine Lev Manovich

57–74

Convergence by means of globalized remediation Arild Fetveit

75–88

The website as unit of analysis? Bolter and Manovich revisited Niels Brügger

89–104

Gameplay as design: uses of computer players’ immaterial labour Adam Arvidsson and Kjetil Sandvik

105–118

On transdiegetic sounds in computer games Kristine Jørgensen

119–140

Power and personality: politicians on the World Wide Web Ib Bondebjerg

141–158

Online debate on digital aesthetics and communication Lev Manovich, Jay David Bolter, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald

159

Film & Media Studies Yearbook 2007

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Volume 5

Northern Lights

Contributors

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Volume Five

Volume 5 – 2007

Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook | Volume Five

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Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook Volume 5, 2007 Digital Aesthetics and Communication Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook is a peer-reviewed international yearbook started in 2002 and dedicated to studies of film and media. Each yearbook is devoted to a specific theme. In addition, every volume may include articles on other topics as well as review articles. The yearbook wants to further interdisciplinary studies of media with a special emphasis on film, television and new media. Since the yearbook was founded in Scandinavia, the editors feel a special obligation towards Scandinavian and European perspectives. But in a global media world it is important to have a global perspective on media culture. The yearbook is therefore open to all relevant aspects of film and media culture: we want to publish articles of excellent quality that are worth reading and have direct relevance for both academics in the broad, interdisciplinary field of media studies in both humanities and social sciences and for students in that area. But we also want to appeal to a broader public interested in thorough and well-written articles on film and other media.

Editorial Board: Ib Bondebjerg, Editor-in-chief (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, Section of Film and Media Studies, University of Copenhagen), e-mail: [email protected] Torben Kragh Grodal (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Section of Film and Media Studies) Stig Hjarvard (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Section of Film and Media Studies) Anne Jerslev (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Section of Film and Media Studies) Gunhild Agger (Department of Communication, University of Aalborg) Jens Hoff (Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen)

Journal Editors Ib Bondebjerg Department of Media, Cognition and Communication Section of Film and Media Studies University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 80, 2300 Copenhagen S Phone: +45 35328102 Fax: +45 35328110 Mobile: +4524421168 Email: [email protected] Web: www.mef.ku.dk

Guest Editors Arild Fetveit, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Email: [email protected] Gitte Bang Stand, IT-university of Copenhagen, Email: [email protected]

Corresponding Editors: Daniel Biltereyst (Ghent University, Belgium), Edward Branigan (University of California – Santa Barbara, USA), Carol Clover (University of California – Berkeley, USA), John Corner (University of Liverpool, UK), John Ellis (Royal Holloway University of London, UK), Johan Fornäs (Linköping University, Sweden), Jostein Gripsrud (University of Bergen, Norway), Andrew Higson (University of East Anglia, UK), Mette Hjort (Lignan University, Hong Kong), Dina Iordanova (University of St Andrews, Scotland), Steve Jones (University of Illinois, USA), Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics, UK), Ulrike Meinhof (University of Southampton, UK), Guliano Muscio (University of Palermo, Italy), Janet Murray (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA), Horace Newcomb (University of Georgia, USA), Roger Odin (l’Université de Paris 3., France), Dominique Pasquier (CEMS, France), Murray Smith (University of Kent, UK), Trine Syvertsen (University of Oslo, Norway), William Uricchio (MIT, USA), Lennart Weibull (Göteborg University, Sweden), Espen Aarseth (Copenhagen, Denmark), Eva Warth (University of Bochum, Germany)

Northern Lights is published once a year by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 1JG, UK. The current subscription rates are £30 (personal) and £140 (institutional). A postage charge of £8 is made for subscriptions outside of Europe. Enquiries and bookings for advertising should be addressed to: [email protected] © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Authorisation to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd to libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in the UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA, provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organisation.

ISSN 1601-829X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge Ltd. Hockley. www.4edge.co.uk

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Notes for Contributors Editorial process All articles submitted for NL must be original works not published or considered for publication elsewhere. The journal is a refereed, international journal, and the editors and two anonymous referees will evaluate all articles submitted for the journal. Anonymity is also accorded to authors. Format Articles must not exceed 8000 words (50,000 characters, including space), including notes and references – but introduction, keywords, abstract not included. Author-name, Institutional affiliation, address, and e-mail of the author(s) on a separate title page only. Author-CV: On same page: short cv of author, max 150 words All articles should be made in Word. Font: Times New Roman size 12. Top of article: authors name in italics. Before article: short introduction, in italics, max. 75 words. Keywords – six words, or two-word phrases, that are at the core of what is being discussed. There is a serious reduction in an article’s ability to be searched for if the keywords are missing. Insert abstract after notes and references, in italics, max 150 words. Format specifications Headings, Paragraphs and sections Bold is used for title of article (bold, size 14). Bold is also used for headings (size 12) in the article. By sub-headings, use italics (size 12). If further level is needed, use normal (size 12). A new paragraph is indicated by a carriage return and one tabulator indent. A new section is indicated by two carriage returns (a blank line). Orthography The Journal follows standard British English. But standard American spelling may be used. Word language checking for UK-English or American can be used. Use ‘ize’ endings in stead of ‘ise’, when there is an option for that. References All references in the text should be according to the Harvard system, e.g., (Bordwell, 1989: 9). Book titles are italicized, with the main words capitalized. The titles of articles are placed in double quotation marks, with the main words capitalized, e.g., Gunning introduces these ideas in an article from 1983, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space.” See also the sample references below. Works mentioned Titles of films, TV-program, literary works etc. must be italicized. Works like this must be followed by year. Original title in other language than English must be given, title in English after year in italics, if original title in English exists, otherwise translation to English in double quotation marks, e.g. Italiensk for begyndere (2000, Italian for Beginners), or Barnet (1940, “The Child”). Quotations NL’s style for quotations embedded into a paragraph is single quote marks, with double quote marks for a second quotation contained within the first. All long quotations (i.e. over four lines or 40 words long) should be ‘displayed’ – i.e. set into a separate indented paragraph with an additional one-line space above and below, and without quote marks at the beginning or end. Brief quotations within the main text are indicated by double quotation marks. Quotations of more than 50 words are treated as a separate section (blank line before and after, no quotation marks, no indent). ‘Scare quotes,’ highlighting or questioning the use of a term, are indicated by single quotation marks, also within an actual quotation, e.g: As Bordwell states, “To speak of ‘interpretation’ invites misunderstanding from the outset” (Bordwell 1989: 1).

Punctuation marks should always be placed within quotation marks. All omissions in a quotation are indicated thus: (...) Italics may be used (sparingly) to indicate key concepts. Images, Tables and Diagrams All illustrations, photographs, diagrams, maps, etc. should follow the same numerical sequence and be shown as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. The source has to be indicated below. Copyright clearance should be indicated by the contributor and is always the responsibility of the contributor. When they are on a separate sheet or file, an indication must be given as to where they should be placed in the text. Reproduction will be in greyscale (sometimes referred to as ‘black-and-white’). If you are supplying any article images as hard copy, these should be prints between 10–20 cms wide if possible, and preferably greyscale if being submitted as illustrations for articles. However, colour prints, transparencies and small images can be submitted if you need to supply these. Photocopies are never advisable, but may be okay for diagrams. They are never acceptable for photographs. Line drawings, maps, diagrams, etc. should be crisp, clear and in a camera-ready state, capable of scanning and reduction. Although not ideal, slides are certainly acceptable. If images are supplied electronically, all images need to have a resolution of at least 12 dpm (dots per millimetre) – or 300 dpi (dots per inch). The figure showing the number of pixels across the width of the image, a figure independent of millimetres, centimetres or inches, is reached by multiplying the width of the image in millimetres required for reproduction in the journal by 12, or in inches by 300. This is the actual information available that allows the production team to offset resolution (dpm or dpi) against width. Images sent in as e-mail attachments should be greyscale to save time uploading and downloading. Tables should be supplied either within the Word document of the main text or as separate Word documents. These can then be extracted and reproduced. Reproducing text within images supplied separately is difficult: they need a high final resolution – around 48 dpm. An additional Acrobat PDF document is encouraged. The PDF is a good proof copy that can also be used for reproduction if the table is exactly as it should be, but if editing is necessary, this can be done in Word if there is a small spelling error or if a statistical error is identified later. Diagrams are difficult to construct in Word. Diagrams are best constructed in an object-oriented computer program rather than a text-oriented one. Diagrams can be supplied to us as JPEG, TIFF or Acrobat PDF documents. If a mistake is identified in a diagram, make the amendments and re-supply. Bullets and numbered lists NL prefer that you use bullet points when listing is necessary. If a numbered list is used they should be formatted as 1. 2. 3. Etc. Notes Notes may be used for comments and additional information only. Do not use footnotes for simple reference-purposes. Use the Word-program for footnotes, and please do not use endnotes. Notes should be used only in very special cases and only as footnotes. Footnotes must not exceed 30 words. Dates 21 March 1978 1970s, 1980s 1964–67; 1897–1901 nineteenth century, twentieth century, twenty-first century Numbers one to twenty (words); 21–99 (figures); 100, 200 thirty, forty, fifty (if expressed as an approximation) 15 years old 3 per cent, 4.7 per cent, 10 per cent, 25 per cent pp. 10–19, 19–21; 102–07, 347–49 16mm, 35mm

Abbreviations ibid., op. cit., Ph.D., BBC, UN, MA, PAR (practice as research) Foreign names Capitalized proper names of organizations, institutions, political parties, trade unions, etc. should be kept in roman type, not in italics. Specific Names Names of art exhibitions, film festivals, etc. should be in roman type enclosed in single quote marks. References All references are listed at the end of the article, alphabetically and beginning on a separate page. A blank line is entered between references. The reference list must follow the Harvard style of reference, more specifically the APA-standard (http://www.apastyle.org) that should comply with End Note and other electronic standard reference programs. The following samples indicate conventions for the most common types of reference: Anon (1931). Les films de la semaine. Tribune de Genéve, p. 15 (January 28). Cabrera, D. (1998a). Table Ronde de l’APA. La Faute á Rousseau: ‘Le secret’, 18 (1), pp. 28-29. Cabrera, D. (1998b). Une chambre á soi. Trafic, 26 (1), 28-35. Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990). To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema. Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grande, M. (1998). Les Images non-dérivées. In Fahle, O (ed.), Le Cinéma selon Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 284302. Gibson, R., Nixon, P. & Ward, S. (eds.) (2003). Political Parties and the Internet: Net Gain?. London: Routledge. Hayward, S. (1993). French National Cinema. 2nd edn. New York and Paris: Routledge. Hottel, R. (1999). Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnés Varda’s ‘Le bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas. Cinema Journal, 38(2), 52-72. Roussel, R. (1996), Locus Solus, Paris: Gallimard. (Originally published 1914). Stroöter-Bender, J. (1995). L’Art contemporain dans les pays du ‘Tiers Monde’. (trans. O. Barlet). Paris: L’Harmattan. Mendoza, A. (1994). Las communicaciones en ingles y espanol [Communications in English and Spanish]. Madrid: Universidad de Madrid.? (So this is for titles in other languages you want to translate to English, and where an official English version doesn’t exist, list title in roman and in square brackets). Website references are similar to other references. There is no need to decipher any place of publication or a specific publisher, but the reference must have an author, and the author must be referenced Harvard-style within the text. Unlike paper references, however, web pages can change, so there needs to be a date of access as well as the full web reference. In the list of references at the end of your article, the item should read something like this: Bondebjerg. (2005). Web Communication and the Public Sphere in a European Perspective. At www.media.ku.dk, accessed February 15, 2005.

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Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/nl.5.1.3/2

Introduction Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald Media proliferate and migrate across new technological devices in an ongoing digital revolution. This involves changing aesthetics, refigured communication and distribution patterns, challenges to copyright holders, and a new surge for audience creativity and sociality. The development raises a number of questions for scholars as well as for media practitioners and cultural commentators. Are ‘new media’ new in a more fundamental way than previous media? To what extent and in which ways are media converging? What happens to other media when the computer is positioned as a metamedium, one that can handle and display most previous media? How does design and creativity develop in the game industry and to what extent is user-driven innovation becoming a factor in the assessment of productivity? Are players increasingly coming to produce the computer games they play, and in that case, how does this phenomenon relate to a new economic logic characteristic of Web 2.0? How are statesmen and -women dressing up their websites, and do these sites add to our democracies? And, to what extent do classics like Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), and The Language of New Media (2001) still hold up, and how could they be updated to address current developments? This volume aims at addressing such questions, and it also hopes to raise even more that can be productive for further research in the field. But to what extent is there a field, and how should it be conceived? From early attempts to view ‘new’ and ‘digital’ media as entirely different from ‘old media’, new-media studies, to the extent that such a field exists, has come of age through being able to historicize and to see how earlier media forms in various ways revisit the new. Such an approach seems productive in a number of areas, whether it be the study of computer games, political discourse, websites, or other matters of interest in the realm of digital aesthetics and communication. One of the merits of an historicizing and comparative approach is also that it may gradually help overcome the tendency to treat ‘new media’ as a separate field of inquiry deserving its own special methods and theories secluded from other approaches employed in the study of aesthetics, culture, technology, and social life. Besides, as most media in some way are coming to employ digital technologies in some aspect of their production, distribution and reception processes, an erosion of the concepts ‘digital media’, and ‘new media’ is about to take place. This may create an opening for a further integration between established research fields and the field of ‘new media’. Two of the classics, mentioned earlier, of the study of ‘new media’, which both incidentally use this concept in their titles, are Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), by Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin, and The Language of New Media (2001), by Lev Manovich. Both books, in

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However, it is not always evident that the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy is vital to the way remediation takes place. This suggests that the concept of remediation has wider relevance than what the terms immediacy and hypermediacy would initially suggest. According to their preface, the origin of the book was a seminar on multimediacy (which later became hypermediacy) offered by Grusin, in which Bolter visited discussing immediacy. The concept of remediation was then developed later. This decent explains the central position that immediacy and hypermediacy have been granted. In fact, a theory of remediation itself could work well also by allocating a less prominent role to these terms, although the distinction remains a powerful one, as well as the related distinction between looking at and looking through (see Bolter and Grusin 1999: iii, 41).

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their particular ways, take a historical and comparative approach, exploring continuities and relations between past and present rather than complete breaks. Thus, they position themselves against an early tendency to dismiss the importance of historical precedents for digital media in the interest of emphasizing their revolutionary newness. Bolter and Grusin, as well as Manovich, counter such tendencies in their own particular ways, and seek to position ‘new media’ in an aesthetic and cultural history of western visual culture spanning all the way back to the Renaissance, in the case of Bolter and Grusin, and with a major interest in how cinematic language is continued in digital media, in the case of Manovich. In the beginning of his book, Manovich (2001: xv) proposes an examination of the idea that ‘cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data’. Critics have generally taken this to indicate that Manovich has a skewed view of the importance of cinema, rather than realizing the potential usefulness of pushing such an idea for its explorative purposes, understanding that the cinematic paradigm is first of all prominent in the opening and the closing of the book, as Manovich points out in the discussion ending this volume. Bolter and Grusin pursue a comparative perspective, not by opting for one particular medium and exploring how it informs ‘new media’, but through historicizing mediation across any previous divide between the art world and the world of popular culture. Within this general perspective, they develop a tool for examining the ways in which media histories revisit new media in the concept of ‘remediation’. Remediation entails ‘the representation of one medium in another’, they claim, and is ‘a defining characteristic of the new digital media’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45). Through this definition, the concept structurally sets up a comparative project of assessing ways in which the past revisits the present, well aware that this is a two-way street, so that, for example, televisual features not only reappear in various ways in websites but television itself also adopts elements from the newer media. Bolter and Grusin further define the concept of remediation as being based on a double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy. Where the former represents an effort to escape mediation and access reality or whatever is mediated directly, the latter represents an opposite logic. In this case, the experience of mediation is sought, and multiplied, in ways that bring attention to the process of mediation itself.1 Bolter and Grusin’s concept also involves remediation in the sense of repairing, improving, and making something better. The works of Bolter and Grusin, and that of Manovich, have been productive for the field, not only in offering concepts and insights, but also in raising issues in need of further consideration. The following volume is therefore conceived in part as a dialogue with these books, and with the work of Bolter and Manovich in general. By naming the volume ‘Digital Aesthetics and Communication’, by adding two concepts to that of the digital, the multiplicity of the field is acknowledged. But perhaps even more important, a possible tension between an aesthetic approach and an approach focusing on communication is suggested. Invoking such a tension, Klaus Bruhn Jensen opens this volume by offering an article in which he finds Remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999), 4

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and The Language of New Media (Manovich 2001) to represent a limiting tradition of ‘digital aesthetics’. He finds this tradition useful for researching the interface and assessing modes of representing reality. But, he argues, it fails to assess interactivity in terms of the different social meanings it generates, and to understand how digital media ‘enter into social interaction beyond the interface’. Bruhn Jensen proposes instead to place digital media within the larger framework of a general communication theory, which allows greater attention to the social uses of media. A key challenge for Bruhn Jensen’s paradigm, as for most paradigms addressing digital media, is to explain how digital media are different from earlier media. In order to address this challenge, he proposes to replace the distinction between unmediated and mediated communication with a more refined three-layer concept which distinguishes between media of first, second, and third degree. Jay David Bolter is also preoccupied with historicizing digital media, but from within a computer-science perspective informed by crossdisciplinary aesthetics. His contribution reviews the way in which the concept of remediation took shape, as well as how his and Grusin’s work relate to that of Manovich. In his current contribution, Manovich locates an effort to activate and use earlier medial forms directly in the stated aspirations of computer pioneers like Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay. In this context, Kay is the most interesting because he conceives of the computer as a metamedium capable of handling ‘already-existing and not-yet-invented media’. But Manovich also emphasizes how these media get new properties with new functionalities in their digital remediations. Arild Fetveit also seeks to address this addition of properties in his interrogation of media convergence. The manipulability of digital data has been taken to facilitate convergence and to effect an erosion of differences between media. Fetveit questions these assumptions by showing how there are considerable obstacles against such manipulability as well as against a convergence that will erase the differences between media, one of them being our affection for a variety of specific media aesthetics. He proposes a conception of convergence not so much as resulting from an erasure of differences among media, as resulting instead from an addition of new properties and affordances that tend to be similar. This tendency, he claims, promotes convergence by means of a globalized remediation. The character of digital media and how they develop can also be studied more specifically by looking at a single phenomenon like the website. This is what Niels Brügger offers in an article which reviews Bolter’s and Manovich’s contributions to understanding the website. He finds that an important tension in discussions of the website revolve around whether it is embedded in a coherent structure, or subject to fragmentation. He makes a case for coherence. One of the ways in which websites have developed over the last decade is by facilitating new forms of sociality and productive cooperation. Online games have been among the major vehicles to promote such developments. Adam Arvidsson and Kjetil Sandvik investigate game design fuelled by immaterial labour, and argue that the creative activity of computer players is being put to work by the game industry. Their argument feeds into larger issues concerning the way in which the Web is

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developing, and the much talked about shift to a Web 2.0 logic, in which users become producers, exemplified by Wikipedia, and in part by YouTube, MySpace and other sites based on social software. In spite of these interesting developments in the social area, there is still a need to understand how digital media like games draw upon and employ elements of previously developed audio-visual language like that of the cinema, in new and different ways. Kristine Jørgensen explores the case of sound. She identifies what she calls a transdiegetic sound space in computer games, sounds that neither stem from a source within the story (diegetic), nor are quite external to the story (extradiegetic). These sounds may seem extradiegetic, but the fact that they communicate actively about the story events to the player who then comes to act upon them, allows Jørgensen to label them transdiegetic. The stakes in digital media are not merely aesthetic, social, economic or technological; they are also political. And this aspect is most explicitly brought out in Ib Bondebjerg’s analysis of websites serving state leaders. As politics and politicians are increasingly remediated onto the Web, it is important to explore how these new media are used, and what bearing they may have on the functioning of democracy. The many questions concerning digital aesthetics and communication prompted the editors to arrange a debate addressing challenges relating to Web 2.0, the issue of remediation, how ‘old media’ now tend to fill up ‘new media’, and how the concept of media itself is affected by the instalment of the computer as a metamedium. The debate also addressed the relevance of Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation (1999) and that of Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001), especially in light of the Web 2.0 paradigm in which social software gain increased prominence. An interesting aspect in this debate proved also to be a bridging of the possible tension between digital aesthetics and a general communication theory, prompted by the recent developments on the Web. The move towards social software, Web 2.0, and the number of sites aiming to generate sociality, as well as the social move within the art world itself, makes for a situation where researchers coming from an aesthetics and a communication-theory paradigm are challenged to explore new forms of sociality and communication, and where perspectives interrogating immaterial labour might well be considered more closely. The dynamism in the chat format made the discussion touch on a number of questions. We hope that the discussion will prove to be all the more valuable for inspiring future debates.

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Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/nl.5.1.7/1

Mixed media: from digital aesthetics towards general communication theory Klaus Bruhn Jensen Abstract

Keywords

During the last decade, many studies have reconsidered the definition of ‘media’, frequently emphasizing how ‘new’digital media may be reproducing or reformulating ‘old’ analogue media. Through a critical examination of two key contributions – Bolter and Grusin (1999) on remediation and Manovich (2001) on the language of new media – this article suggests that much current work under a heading of ‘digital aesthetics’, approaching media as modes of representing reality, rather than as resources for acting in and on reality, is missing not one, but two opportunities – one of exploring interactivity at the level of meaning as received and interpreted, the other of specifying how the discourses of digital media enter into social interaction beyond the interface. Digital media should be understood in the wider context of general communication theory, including issues of ‘mediated’ and ‘unmediated’ social interaction.

Action Communication theory Digital media History of communication Modality

Introduction In 1996, one of the world’s main professional organizations for communication research changed its name. The abbreviation, IAMCR, which used to denote the International Association for Mass Communication Research, came to refer to the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Founded in 1957, at a time when the ‘old’ mass media, with television at the forefront, were consolidating themselves as social institutions, the IAMCR, like communication research at large, was coming to terms with another major shift in its object of analysis. New media of the digital and interactive variety had challenged the field of research to reconsider the very definition of (mass) communication and (mass) media. During the ten years since 1996, a wide variety of studies have addressed this foundational issue, frequently emphasizing the question of how ‘new’ media may be reproducing or reformulating ‘old’ media. This article reviews some of the answers, identifying disciplinary as well as ideological fault lines, and proposing an agenda for continued interdisciplinary theory development. In his important history of the idea of communication, John Durham Peters showed how communication as a general category, including faceto-face interaction, ‘became thinkable only in the shadow of mediated communication. Mass communication came first’ (Peters 1999: 6). During the past few decades, the ongoing differentiation of mediated forms of communication appears to have made a general category of media

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thinkable, as well. As in the case of communication, the reconceptualization of ‘media’ involves reconsideration, not just of information and communication technologies, but of the very distinctions and interrelations between humans, technological artefacts, and social contexts. The mass media, arguably, came first. At present, research is struggling to explain what comes after mass media. Following a brief genealogy of the concept of media, this article departs from two key contributions to recent media theory – Bolter and Grusin (1999) on remediation and Manovich (2001) on the language of new media – which provided some of the first comprehensive and most widely influential accounts of how the discursive forms of new media differ from those of old media. A critical analysis of the two volumes serves to identify a premise that is commonly shared in much current work under a heading of ‘digital aesthetics’, approaching media as modes of representing reality, rather than as resources for acting in and on reality. This article suggests that such a premise may lead the broadly humanistic, text-oriented stream of media and communication research to miss not one, but two opportunities in the face of new media – one of exploring interactivity at the level of meaning as received and interpreted, the other of specifying how the discourses of digital media enter into social interaction beyond the interface. The last part of this article outlines an approach to reinserting digital aesthetics into general communication theory, drawing on a wider repertoire of (new) media studies. First, while media show and tell, they also enable their users to do things in the world. All media, new and old, are vehicles of information, channels of communication, and means of both interpersonal and institutionally organized action. Second, no medium is created equal to any other in all of these respects, having been shaped in an interplay of the modalities of human experience, the historically available technologies, and the institutional conditions of communication. In order to locate new media within contemporary culture, the final section distinguishes three prototypes of media, each of which is programmable to different degrees and in different respects, including a very old medium – humans communicating in the flesh (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

The means in the middle The Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED) (accessed 5 January 2006) notes that while classical Latin ‘medium’ referred to some middle entity or state, in post-classical Latin and in British sources from the twelfth century onwards, ‘medium’ and ‘media’ also came to denote the means of doing something. On the one hand, a medium can be understood as a more or less incidental presence, linking natural phenomena or, for the spiritually inclined, this world and the hereafter. On the other hand, a medium can serve as an intentional instrument of human action in a modern sense. In the latter respect, the OED distinguishes two conceptions – medium as an artistic modality, material, or technique; and medium as a channel of mass communication – both of them from the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of communication took hold (Peters 1999). By the mid-twentieth century, medium in the sense of ‘any physical material (as tape, disk, paper, etc.) used for recording or reproducing data, images, or sound’ became common, presumably accelerated by digital media with diverse input and 8

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output options. All three senses – mode of expression, material of recording, and means of transmission – can be retraced in the media-studies literature. In order to understand what are increasingly hybrid or mixed media, it is helpful to begin to unmix definitions of media. In his Keywords (1983), Raymond Williams reminded researchers that the changing meanings of, for instance, ‘media’ bear witness to the cultures using (and studying) them. Williams himself noted three senses of medium, including a middle entity and a technical means of transmission, adding ‘the specialized capitalist sense’ in which it is ‘a medium for something else, such as advertising’ (Williams 1983: 203). With or without the critical twist, the term has remained not just contested, but ambiguous. In a recent overview, Ryan (2004: 16) noted the persistence in parallel of the two midnineteenth-century senses – mode of expression and means of transmission. Whereas social scientists commonly give priority to media as technological and institutional infrastructures (means of transmission), scholars originating from the arts and humanities still tend to privilege media discourses as aesthetic forms (modes of expression). Digital media provide one more opportunity for research to consider the potential of an interdisciplinary, integrative ‘third culture’ (Brockman 1995) of media studies. One of the first movers behind the personal computer, Alan Kay, early on compared computing to music-making (Kay 1999: 129). Comparing phenomena such as media is the business of scholarship. According to Beniger (1992: 35), ‘all social science research is comparative’ because it compares across time, space, cultures, individuals – and media. Scholarly comparisons, in turn, depend on the available concepts and theories for the job, which vary with historical context. It was not until the early 1960s that ‘the media’ presented themselves as one phenomenon (Scannell 2002: 194), the elements of which called for comparative analyses. Since the seminal contributions of Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964), research has been expected to account for different media in terms of their distinctive and complementary contributions to contemporary culture. Also outside academia, it is a common assumption that the media make up a networked cultural environment that conditions and frames social interaction as well as individual existence. As such, the media constitute the publicly accessible components of the contemporary control society (Beniger 1986), which is increasingly dependent on information and communication technologies to regulate and reproduce itself. Regardless of terminology – control, information, media, or network society (Castells 1996) – social and cultural theory is asking how material networks of communication afford and constrain imagined networks (Anderson 1991). The material channels of communication set the terms for who knows what and when (Rogers 1962); the prevalent modes of expression shape how people come to know. While research on who, what, and when in the ‘social shaping and social consequences’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2002) of new media still predominates, the how of communication has preoccupied a great deal of new-media theory, yielding findings with an audience far beyond the arts and humanities, and into engineering circles and boardrooms. The ongoing differentiation of media formats is challenging traditional transmission models of communication – corporate

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research entities can no longer depend on old-style development processes, from lab to launch, in the attempt to generate context-sensitive and, hence, viable products and services. Enter ordinary users, creative artists, and digital aesthetics.

Remediation revisited Situated within a historical perspective of medium theory (Meyrowitz 1994), emphasizing the implications of shifting media forms for human consciousness and culture, the volume by Bolter and Grusin (1999) offered a vocabulary in which to examine new media discourses. Citing McLuhan’s famous quip, that ‘the “content” of any medium is always another medium’, the authors set out to specify ‘a more complex process of borrowing’, rejecting any ‘simple repurposing’ of one medium in another. To Bolter and Grusin, instead, ‘one medium is incorporated or represented in another’. As it turns out, this terminology provides a key to the theoretical argument – small discursive differences make a difference, in metatheory as in media discourse. A few lines on, representation is preferred over incorporation in a central definition: ‘we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media’ [original emphasis] (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45). Whereas incorporation might suggest functional integration, representation rather privileges formal simulation – surface versus substance. Remediation manifests itself, according to Bolter and Grusin, as a dual logic involving two general forms of representation, namely, immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the transparency of media as windows on the world, informed by ‘the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 30), and exemplified by linear perspective as well as photorealist computer graphics. Hypermediacy, in contrast, interferes with the subject’s line of sight, as in modernist art seeking to defamiliarize the spectator’s comprehension of what is being represented, not least through the form of the artwork. In an art-historical perspective, the authors note, ‘the logic of immediacy has perhaps been dominant in Western representation’, and at the end of the twentieth century, hypermediacy still was in a subordinate position, even if it ‘has never been suppressed fully or for long periods of time’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 34). The central accomplishment of the volume was the application of this dual logic in a series of close analyses of new media genres and discourses – from digital photography to virtual worlds – through a non-sectarian postmodernist lens of study. In subsequent publications, Bolter has extended some of the points to design practices (Bolter and Gromala 2003), as well as reconceiving his ‘history of writing’ (Bolter 1991) in a second edition with a subtitle referring to ‘the remediation of print’ (Bolter 2001). Acknowledging that ‘the computational device’ only became a medium when it acquired aesthetic forms and ‘social and cultural functions’, Bolter and Grusin (1999: 66) were early contributors to that growing body of research that has challenged commercial as well as scientific hype assuming the technological determination of culture and society, what Carey and Quirk (1988) referred to as a fascination with the technological 10

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sublime. As a theory for interpreting and explaining such social and cultural functions, however, for ‘understanding new media’ – the subtitle of the book – Remediation presented several ambiguities. The first issue concerns the systematics of the theoretical framework. Elaborating on the relationship between media and remediation, Bolter and Grusin (1999: 65) offer ‘this simple definition: a medium is that which remediates’. But, media do not merely or primarily represent each other. And, if remediation is, indeed, the defining characteristic of new media, it is not clear what old media used to do. In some passages, the authors seem hard pressed to defend an immanent analysis of media representations, for example, when they assert that ‘there is nothing prior to or outside the act of mediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 58). A few sections do consider material, economic, and other social aspects of media, in part to claim a parallel space for aesthetic and formal studies: The social dimension of immediacy and hypermediacy is as important as their formal and technical dimensions. However, there is no need to deny the importance of the latter in order to appreciate the former, no need to reduce the technical and psychological dimensions to the social. (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 73)

Still, the theory of remediation tends to choose sides, inviting an analytical gaze at the surface of the interface, bracketing technologies, users, and social contexts. Second, the place of history – the history of media, but also the history of explanatory concepts – is in question. In support of the previous argument, that media are essentially remediators, it is said that ‘a medium in our culture can never operate in isolation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 70). Yet, the analytical examples in the volume cover much of the history of western arts, raising questions of whether it might not be necessary to consider several different kinds of remediation – discursive, technological, and institutional – in order to capture the processes by which human experience has been shaped and cumulated through shifting media forms. Bolter and Grusin do recognize the historical contingency of their approach, to such a degree, in fact, that readers may wonder what kind of explanatory value is being assigned to the framework. Having emphatically subordinated objects to representations as the field of study, the authors next relativize the concepts that serve as their lens of study. What remains, appears to be a set of ad hoc analytical surfaces or terms – with immediacy and hypermediacy as the central nodes – regarding the things people do with media: ‘we see ourselves today in and through our available media’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 231). Importantly, we are meant to include researchers trying to make sense of the media and signs of our times. Today amounts to a rather brief window of opportunity through which contemporary media provide access to cultural history: ‘at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and […] remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 55). Surely, the framework of Remediation, elaborating insights from Russian formalism onwards concerning the (de)familiarizing functions of media, has more lasting relevance; the

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question is how its internalist perspective may be complemented to substantiate conclusions beyond the discourses of the media that are new here and now. A final, related ambiguity has to do with the pragmatics of remediation – what are the claims being made regarding the effects or implications of new media? Bolter and Grusin go on to draw quite far-reaching inferences about the impact of new media on users in terms of a ‘remediated self’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 230). They further identify a ‘psychological economy of remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 236), which is grounded in the processes and stages of Lacanian psychoanalysis. While this is in keeping with the tradition of textual media studies spanning art history, film theory, and digital aesthetics, which infers from media representations to audience responses, the line of argument appears problematic if one seeks to account for the distinctive features of specific historical media forms. In some sections, the authors briefly consider other positions, including what amounts to an alternative hypothesis, namely, that immediacy and hypermediacy might constitute different aspects or moments of one reception process. This is suggested by evidence presented by, for example, Messaris (1994: 73), that non-western spectators quickly learn to interpret and ‘see through’ unfamiliar, hypermediated images. The relative merits of this and other approaches, however, are not pursued. In an additional reference to the psychological experiments by Reeves and Nass (1996), showing that people relate to media in the same way that they relate to other people, Bolter and Grusin (1999: 58) find that this ‘supports and complements our contention that media and reality are inseparable’. Given the radically different epistemologies and methodologies of the two approaches, it remains to be seen in which senses media and reality might be inseparable. On the dustjacket of Remediation (1999), the reader learns that the volume challenges ‘the modernist myth of the new’ assuming that new media require ‘a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles’. Cover texts are not necessarily penned by authors; ‘modernist’ is a contested term. In reference to modernity, the text nicely captures the historically reflexive perspective of the volume on media as open-ended cultural forms. In reference to modernism, however, the premise concerning the dual logic of immediacy and hypermediacy, operative since at least the Renaissance (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 21), embraces rather than challenges the modernist mainstream of contemporary art history and (digital) media aesthetics, seeking new insights and, perhaps, new forms of social organization in the cracks and crevices of aesthetic artefacts. Remediation, similarly, depends on internalist perspectives on media in order to substantiate conclusions about cultural history as well as audience psychology. New-media studies need perspectives gazing through the interface in both directions – into machines and humans in context.

The functionalities of new media Approaching the machine architecture behind the computer interface, Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) offered another important contribution to new-media theory. Preparing his agenda for computer aesthetics, Manovich identifies five principles of new, digital media. First, 12

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regardless of their immediate appearance, they are the product of numerical representation or digital code. Second, new media are subject to modularity on a different scale than analogue media, being recomposable at the site of production as well as in the context of use. Third, these first two principles allow for ‘the automation of many operations’, be it ‘creation, manipulation, or access’ [emphasis added] (Manovich 2001: 32). Fourth, a further consequence of numerical and modular computing is variability, for example, interactivity as a form of user-driven variability. Fifth, new media enable cultural transcoding, or a translation back and forth between ‘a cultural layer’ of familiar objects in recognizable forms and ‘a computer layer’ processing these according to a digital common denominator (Manovich 2001: 46). To Manovich (2001: 45), this is ‘what is in my view the most substantial consequence of the computerization of media’. It is also where his position has the strongest affinities to that of Bolter and Grusin: transcoding and remediation have a family resemblance, even if they do not share all the same theoretical ancestors. Manovich cites Bolter and Grusin approvingly when he, too, seeks to distance his position from ‘a modernist view that aims to define the essential properties of every medium’ and from ‘old metaphors’ concerning interfaces in traditional human-computer interaction research (Manovich 2001: 89). Manovich’s argument joins two components ‘that today can be found in most areas of new media’. On the one hand, both the Internet and computers as such constitute a database, ‘a collection of documents’, that has been taken to a different, digital degree. On the other hand, access to the database takes place through ‘a navigable space’, specified as ‘a virtual interactive 3D space, employed in computer games, motion rides, VR, computer animation, and human-computer interfaces’ (Manovich 2001: 214). One of Manovich’s main points is that display and narrative are becoming less central in new media, compared to their role in classical arts and traditional mass media. In Manovich’s strong formulation (2001: 225), ‘database and narrative are natural enemies’, even if he recognizes that digital narratives result from the user’s interaction with games or interactive fiction. Perhaps database and narrative were cultural enemies in some previous media. Digital media facilitate links between databases and interfaces, which further enable users to communicate and act. The links between the two constituents of new media, however, are understood less as means of doing than as ways of showing. From Manovich’s perspective, cinema is experiencing a second coming as a model of digital representation: ‘To summarize, the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on the level of its material, and computational (i.e., software driven) in its logic’ [original emphasis] (Manovich 2001: 180). Even intuitively, however, it is questionable whether cinema, in some definition, can account for the range of representations in computer interfaces. The GUI (graphic user interface) is clearly home to variants of cinema, television, and video; it is also a point of access to other virtual 3D spaces. But, cinematography is hardly a sufficient principle when it comes to matters of, for example, the layout or navigation of a database. In the last part of the volume, Manovich elaborates on his conception of cinematography and film theory, as informed by aesthetics and semiotics.

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With reference to the basic semiotic matrix of paradigms and syntagms, he argues that even if interactive interfaces present users with several simultaneous paradigms from which to choose, ‘the end result is a linear sequence of screens that […] unfolds along a syntagmatic dimension’. The resulting syntagms are described, further, as a ‘language-like sequencing’ which, to Manovich, suggests that new media ‘follow the dominant semiological order of the twentieth century – that of cinema’ (Manovich 2001: 232). Leaving aside the issue of whether cinema might qualify as the dominant cultural order of the last century, again it is intuitively far from clear that the common experience of watching several screen images, interstitched by paradigmatic choices, resembles anything like cinema, or television, or animation, for that matter. In theoretical terms, moreover, it is quite a stretch to batch verbal language and computer interfaces with cinema as sequential vehicles of meaning under a heading of ‘languagelike’ characteristics. Especially against the background of film theory, which has had notorious struggles with the metaphor of film as language (Metz 1974), it is surprising to find the metaphor reinstated at this level of generality for the field of new-media studies. In specific analyses of interactive genres, especially games, the volume does recognize the various communicative interchanges linking system and users, beyond their cinematic identity as spectators gazing at silver and other screens. In a key section examining the ways in which database and interface map onto each other during an interchange, Manovich begins to focus the performative aspect of using new media. Having noted the potential conflict between efficient access to information and the users’ psychological involvement, he generalizes the point in italics: ‘Along with surface versus depth, the opposition between information and “immersion” can be thought of as a particular expression of the more general opposition characteristic of new media – between action and representation’ (Manovich 2001: 216). The implication seems to be that the category of action is associated with immersion or engagement – virtual action. Action in the sense of interactivity with a database of content, with other users, or with the system of communication itself, is not theorized explicitly and on a par with the other pole of ‘the more general opposition’ of new media – representation. And, the everyday actions that people perform with computers – from social networking and netbanking, to cultural engagement and political mobilization – fall outside the perspective of this cinematographic theory of new media. Compared to the approach of Bolter and Grusin, Manovich appears relatively more cautious in inferring from media formats to their consequences for users and historical contexts. Still, in addition to conceiving of cinema as the dominant cultural code of the last century, he also assumes that cinema holds the key to understanding twenty-firstcentury media, returning in his last chapter to André Bazin’s question, ‘What is cinema?’ Manovich’s answer is that what we used to think of as ‘cinema’s defining characteristics are now just default options, with many others available’ (Manovich 2001: 293). More ambitiously, cinema is taken to provide both the default option and the source code for other options. Having reviewed how cinema was born from animation, which then became marginalized, the author restates the question, ‘What is digital 14

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cinema?’: ‘Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses liveaction footage as one of its many elements’ [original emphasis] (Manovich 2001: 302), a notion that Manovich has explored in a creative project on ‘soft cinema’ (Manovich and Kratky 2005). Most important perhaps, a particular subset of cinema is said to triumph with the computer: One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer […] collage reemerged as the ‘cut-and-paste’ command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. (Manovich 2001: 306f)

Modernism is back, not just as aesthetic logic, but as technological form. On the very last page of the book, Manovich adds that ‘cinema, along with other established cultural forms, indeed becomes precisely a code. It is now used to communicate all types of data and experiences, and its language is encoded in the interfaces and defaults of software programs and in the hardware itself’ (Manovich 2001: 333). Leaving aside again the strong and surprising claim that cinema is already encoded in the hardware of computers, the present discussion has suggested that cinema will account for only certain dimensions of how digital media articulate information, enable communication, and facilitate action. Cinema, undoubtedly, is the source of some subset of the codes that are currently being reworked in the software of digital media. Cinema may, or may not, have a language. But, it is the functionalities and practices that link databases and users via interfaces that a theory of new media, above all, must account for. Manovich and Bolter and Grusin, in related ways, have begun to explore how new media show and tell at the interface. Media also do things beyond the interface.

Media showing, telling, and doing The position of digital aesthetics, as informed by cinematography and art history in the works of Manovich and of Bolter and Grusin, can be summarized with reference to recent interdisciplinary research that focuses, not on visuals, but on sound (Bull and Back 2003). Sound serves as a reminder concerning the multimodal nature of new media and human communication as such. Examining sound in cinema and other screen media, Chion (1994) identified three modes of listening. Causal listening seeks the source of a sound, for example, a human voice. Semantic listening interprets its message in terms of a code, i.e. a particular verbal statement. And, reduced listening, a term coined by Pierre Schaeffer, focuses on ‘the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning […] its own qualities of timbre and texture’ (Chion 1994: 29–31). In real-life settings, causal and semantic listening can be expected to predominate; people listen in order to orient themselves and understand events in context. In arts settings, and in the meta-analysis of sound by musicologists or acousticians, reduced listening is the defining practice. Digital aesthetics has given priority to reduced listening and viewing.

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Over the last decade, much other research has sought to establish links between the social, technological, and aesthetic aspects of new media (e.g. Bell and Kennedy 2000; Lister et al. 2003), notably studies arising from the Association of Internet Researchers, as reported in the Internet Research Annual (2004ff). In order to advance an interdisciplinary dialogue on the several necessary constituents of a theory of new media, it is helpful to return to some of the basics of communication theory. Media are vehicles of information; they are channels of communication; and they are means of both interpersonal and macrosocial action (Jensen, 2006). While all of these remain contested – as terms, concepts, and phenomena – together they offer a set of what Blumer (1954) called ‘sensitizing concepts’ in configuring the domain of inquiry. The conceptual pair of ‘information’ and ‘communication’, first of all, is familiar from several fields of research in various terminological guises. Philosophy traditionally distinguishes between proposition and modality, i.e. a potential reference and the reality status being assigned to it in an assertion (Audi 1996). In structuralist literary and film theory, enoncé covers a work as a statement or message, whereas enonciation refers to the act of enunciation (Stam et al. 1992: 105). And, in speech-act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), a distinction was introduced between locution (propositional components), illocution (a social act being performed, for example, a promise or a threat), and perlocution (the received implications of the act). In combination, information and communication enable socially coordinated actions – from discussion and voting, to consumer purchases and investments, to political and aesthetic involvement. Each of the three constitutive concepts can be exemplified with reference to sound: • Information: Sound serves as an explicit and regularized vehicle of delimited items of information. This is the case in oral narratives, with fire alarms (no warning without an implied object of attention), as well as for jingles and other ‘program music’ that seeks to generate ideas or values in the listener. • Communication: Sound supports intersubjective relations of communication. An oral narrative engages its listeners, young and old. A fire alarm, when activated by a person or by smoke, addresses a warning to the inhabitants of a building. And, program music produces, however tendentially and momentarily, some level of understanding and orientation in the audience. • Action: Sound accomplishes physical as well symbolic actions, over and above the (speech) act being performed in and of communication – sound becomes action as it is embedded in established social practices and institutions. Storytelling is a classic part of primary socialization; fire alarms accomplish evacuations; and program music reactivates imagined communities (Anderson 1991), ranging from nationalism to consumerism. Media, new and old, enable and constrain these uses, functions, or characteristics in different ways and shifting configurations. Information can be thought of as the potential articulation of insights and ideas, lending 16

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itself to externalization and dissemination, through the modalities of human experience and communication technologies of human making; in more formal terms, ‘information is data that have been organized and communicated’ (Porat 1977: 2). Artworks, digital and otherwise, may be understood as information waiting to make its mark on the world through some medium. Communication, next, minimally requires a mode of expression and a channel of transmission, as noted, both of which are programmable in different respects and to varying degrees. The act of communication produces some more or less stable tokens to which two parties make themselves available and, to a degree, internalize. Finally, through informational representation and communicative interaction, the communicators engage in action, cumulatively enacting themselves, their significant others, and the social system of which both are components. This potential widening of the field of media studies next suggests the question: what is not a medium? Anthropology, sociology, and other adjoining fields note that people continuously ascribe significance to natural objects, cultural artefacts, and social institutions. Even the boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is negotiated from a position within culture through the historically available media. As pinpointed by Watzlawick et al. (1967), humans cannot not communicate – the body shows itself, and it sounds. Equally, social arrangements from business transactions to interior decorating have, or are given, meanings. The media that form the objects of analysis for media and communication research are distinguished by their ‘programmability’, being flexible resources for the articulation of information and communicative interaction as part of social structuration (Giddens 1984). The definition of media in terms of programmability can be specified in three respects. First, media comprise modalities that make possible the rendering of and interaction with worlds, past and present, real and imagined. Modalities amount to semiotic registers of verbal language, music, still and moving images, etc. enabling an immensely varied repertoire of discourses and genres, and engaging the human senses in selective and culturally conventional ways. Second, media depend on a material substratum for articulating and presenting information, as commonly associated with modern technologies of communication. (The next section considers the human body in context as a medium.) Like modalities, technologies lend themselves to diverse aesthetic and social adjustments – across time, space, and possible worlds. Third, media communicate to, about, and on behalf of social institutions. Media and societies mutually shape – programme – each other in the course of prevalent communicative and cultural practices (Meyrowitz 1994). The agenda of new-media studies may be clarified with reference to these three aspects, particularly how the modalities, technologies, and institutions of digital media relate to those of earlier (mediated) communication.

Media of three degrees The traditional dichotomy of ‘mediated’ and ‘unmediated’ communication, as mentioned in the introduction, assumes that the human body does not qualify as a medium of contact and exchange, but somehow communicates directly. As argued by Peters (1999: 264), neither messages nor people have NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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a simple, immediate presence in the world – even face-to-face ‘dialogue may simply be two people taking turns broadcasting at each other’. With the rise of many more differentiated types of communicative interaction, the dichotomy is increasingly in question. At the present stage of research, it is helpful to distinguish conceptually and analytically between three degrees of media (see further Jensen 2002a, 2006). Media of the first degree can be defined, briefly, as the biologically based, socially formed resources that enable humans to articulate an understanding of reality, for a particular purpose, and to engage in communication about it with others. The central example is verbal language, or speech, as constitutive of oral cultures and subcultures (e.g. Scribner and Cole 1981) – additional examples include song and other musical expression, dance, drama, painting, and creative arts generally, often relying on comparatively simple, mechanical techniques such as musical instruments and artistic or writing utensils as necessary elements. Importantly, such media depend on the presence of the human body in local time-space. While one might identify (spoken) language, or the human voice, as the medium, it seems helpful to differentiate between, for example, speech and song as media with reference to their different modalities, sharing the same material substratum, but commonly addressing different social institutions, contexts, and practices. Frequent references to the ongoing ‘mediatization’ of politics and culture tend to obscure the fact that embodied speech, music, and other sounds remain constitutive of everyday life. As noted by one standard textbook of media studies (McQuail 2005: 18), the total number of face-toface interactions that occur within the micro-coordination of daily life by far outnumber those communicative events that are technologically mediated. Moreover, speech became an integral part of the modern mass media, notably radio and television, further stimulating conversations about and around media (Gumpert and Cathcart 1986; Scannell 1991). Indeed, Ong (1982) argued that the technological re-embedding of speech had produced a new form of ‘secondary orality’. Speech delivers not just the contents, but also many of the forms that have been remodelled as media genres – the town crier as news announcer, the court jester as talkshow host. Theorizing digital media, it is essential to consider not just the reworking of analogue into digital media, whether in the sense of ‘remediation’ or ‘new languages’, but equally the human body as a source and medium of representation and interaction. Compared to a tendency in some cybercultural and digital aesthetics (e.g. Haraway 1997; Hayles 1999; Stone 1991) to discursify the body, it seems time for new-media studies to examine users as historical and biological individuals, not just as abstractions and represented surfaces. Media of the second degree come under the heading of Benjamin’s technically reproduced and enhanced forms of representation and interaction (1977) which support communication across space and time, irrespective of the presence and number of participants. Whereas Benjamin placed the emphasis on photography, film, and radio, media of the second degree range from early modern examples including the standardized reproduction of religious and political texts by the printing press (Eisenstein 1979), to television and video. The common features are, first, 18

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one-to-one reproduction, storage, and presentation of a particular content and, second, radically extended possibilities for dissemination across time and space. In this regard, the technologies were key to a re-embedding, both of media of the first degree and of people in relation to distant others, issues, and arenas. At the same time, the specific adaptability or programmability of these media had important consequences for major social institutions – from the Catholic Church to the nation state. And, modalities from media of the first degree were reworked – remediated: in radio talk shows, conversation took on new conventions, just as acting styles were adapted from the theatre stage to cinema and television. (A further question is whether handwriting, fixing, for instance, speech and music in comparatively stable forms, should be understood as a separate category of media. In the present context, handwriting is considered within media of the first degree: the production of manuscripts is embodied and local, laborious and error-prone, and their distribution is selective, commonly within established institutions, as supported by oral commentary.) Media of the third degree are the digitally processed forms of representation and interaction and, accordingly, of particular interest here. Digital technology enables reproduction and recombination of all media of the second degree on a single platform – computers, thus, can be understood as metamedia (Kay and Goldberg 1999) with an unprecedented degree of technical programmability, between as well as within previous media. The central current example is the networked personal computer,

Media of first degree

Media of third degree

Media of second degree

Figure 1: Media of three degrees.

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although this interface, as well as that of mobile telephones, is likely to change substantially as technologies are adapted further to the human senses, and integrated into both common objects and social arrangements. Whereas classic mass media, such as illustrated magazines and television, combined modalities to a considerable degree, the scale and speed with which digitalization facilitates the incorporation and reconfiguration of second-order modalities, supports the view that already the personal computer may represent a qualitative shift from media of the second degree that is comparable to the shift from first-degree to second-degree media. The interrelations of digital technology and multimodality with the institutions of contemporary society are still in the making, with implications to be determined through empirical research and in historical perspective. One characteristic of media of the third degree is their re-enactment or simulation of face-to-face interaction. Computer networks enable forms of interaction that are more similar to interpersonal than to mass communication, as exemplified by the informality of e-mail, chat, and gaming. In certain respects, humans are media; in certain respects, digital media can substitute for the social roles of humans. Figure 1 seeks to illustrate the interrelations of the media of three different degrees as a wheel of culture. The media types do not replace each other – they recirculate the forms and contents of shifting cultural traditions, and they remain elements of the same historical media environment. They do, however, constitute different and ascending degrees of combined programmability in terms of adaptable technologies, differentiated modalities, and institutions transcending time, space, and social actors. While communication has always been pervasive, digital technologies are making information and interaction more accessible and applicable across contexts. Why communicate so much? As noted by Aristotle (Clarke 1990: 11), words allow humans to consider that which is at least temporarily absent – in space, in time, and from one’s immediate experience – through thought experiments and dialogue. Media can represent what is absent from, but imagined within, face-to-face encounters, opening up universes of what is not yet, what might be, as well as what ought never to come to pass. Why not communicate less? We cannot not communicate (Watzlawick et al. 1967), because we are copresent with others in the real world, and necessarily share a culture. In a discussion of communication and culture in relation to music, Meyer (2001: 348f) noted that we keep social complexity manageable through culture: ‘what most significantly shaped human behaviour and gave rise to human cultures was not the presence, but the absence of adequate innate constraints. It is because evolution resulted in such an animal that human cultures became indispensable.’ Culture is not icing on the layercake of evolution and history; it is the preliminary outcome of communication in managing extreme social and cognitive complexities for endless practical purposes. We need all the media we can get, occasionally to appreciate their aesthetics, but mostly to get by and go on.

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Conclusion Media and communication research is positioned to renew its theory development, having been challenged by digital technologies to reconsider its core concepts of ‘media’ and ‘communication’. This article has argued for an inclusive agenda, incorporating interdisciplinary concepts and concerns from several decades of humanistic as well as social-scientific research, as well as addressing humans as media. The traditional divides between interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication studies are increasingly counterproductive. Media content itself – from Frankenstein (1818) via Blade Runner (1982) to current massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMPORPG) – provides a cultural laboratory regarding the status of humans and the realities about which they communicate. As a second-order laboratory or institution-to-think-with (Jensen 2002b), research – from hard-nosed artificial intelligence (e.g. Boden 1996) via semi-soft actor-network theory (e.g. Latour 1993) to postmodern philosophy dissolving the category of being human (e.g. Hayles 1999) – equally is at pains to define who or what communicates. ‘Mixed media’ that combine materials in more or less innovative ways are a familiar format in artistic practice and criticism. The aesthetic gaze and the camera eye, as developed by Bolter and Grusin (1999) and by Manovich (2001), are valid perspectives on new, mixed media, as well. Appearing half a decade after the popular breakthrough of the Internet, the two volumes offered some of the first elaborate theories regarding digital technologies as media, and have contributed to digital aesthetics as a separate sub-speciality of study. In order to account for the wider implications of mixed media today, however, as they reconfigure modalities, materials, as well as institutions, digital aesthetics need to reconsider their interfaces with other explanatory models. From within the art domain, the tradition of contemplative appreciation of media and culture has recently been countered, for example, by Summers (2003) in a ‘post-formalist art history’, which examines the arts as thoroughly practical enterprises in a material environment of really existing media and humans. The larger field of media and communication research itself is ripe with approaches to the texts and contexts of new media, from their role in everyday life (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002) and sociocultural communities (Baym 2000) to their place in the infrastructures of economy and politics (Castells 1996). In conjunction, these approaches may begin to address the key question regarding any new medium for policy-makers, business leaders, cultural activists, little boys and, increasingly, little girls: what does it do? If the idea of communication has been a century and a half in the making (Peters 1999), it is not surprising that the definition of media has continued to pose significant challenges for research since the 1960s, as restated by digital media during the 1990s. The media of three degrees provide a framework in which to approach the distinctive affordances (Gibson 1979; Hutchby 2001) of different media, with implications for human communication and action over the longues durées of history. Mixed media fill up art museums; metamedia saturate the everyday across platforms and contexts. In order to focus historical and empirical studies of the social uses and implications of new media, further research is needed to unmix theoretical definitions of media. NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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References Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn., London: Verso. Audi, R. (ed.) (1996), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Reprinted edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, J.L. (1962), How To Do Things With Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baym, N.K. (2000), Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bell, D. and Kennedy, B.M. (eds) (2000), The Cybercultures Reader, London: Routledge. Beniger, J. (1986) The Control Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———— (1992), ‘Comparison, yes, but – the case of technological and cultural change’, in J.G. Blumler, J.M. McLeod and K.E. Rosengren (eds), Comparatively Speaking: Communication and Culture Across Space and Time, Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Benjamin, W. (1977 [1936]), ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold. Blumer, H. (1954), ‘What is wrong with social theory?’ American Sociological Review, 19, pp. 3–10. Boden, M.A. (ed.) (1996), Artifical Intelligence, San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Bolter, J.D. (1991), Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. ———— (2001), Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd edn., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bolter, J.D. and Gromala, D. (2003), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brockman, J. (ed.) (1995), The Third Culture, New York: Simon & Schuster. Bull, M. and Back, L. (eds) (2003), The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg. Carey, J.W. and Quirk, J.J. (1988), ‘The mythos of the electronic revolution’, in J.W. Carey (ed.), Communication as Culture, New York: Unwin Hyman. Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Chion, M. (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press. Clarke, D.S. (1990), Sources of Semiotic: Readings with Commentary from Antiquity to the Present. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Eisenstein, E.L. (1979), The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, J.J. (1979), The Ecological Approach to Perception, London: HoughtonMifflin. Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gumpert, G. and Cathcart, R. (eds) (1986), Inter/media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, New York: Oxford University Press. Haraway, D.J. (1997), Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. Femaleman_Meets_ Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge.

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Hayles, N.K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutchby, I. (2001), Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet, Cambridge: Polity. Jensen, K.B. (2002a), ‘Introduction: The state of convergence in media and communication research’, in K.B. Jensen (ed.), A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, London: Routledge. ———— (2002b), ‘The social origins and uses of media and communication research’, in K. B. Jensen (ed.), A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, London: Routledge. Jensen, K.B. (2006), ‘Sounding the media: An interdisciplinary review and a research agenda for digital sound studies’, Nordicom Review, 27(2), 7-33. Kay, A. (1999 [1984]), ‘Computer software’, in P.A. Mayer (ed.), Computer Media and Communication: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129-138. Kay, A. and Goldberg, A. (1999 [1977]), ‘Personal dynamic media’, in P.A. Mayer (ed.), Computer Media and Communication: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111–19. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lievrouw, L. and Livingstone, S. (eds) (2002), Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Social Consequences, London: Sage. Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I. and Kelly, K. (2003), New Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Manovich, L. (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manovich, L. and Kratky, A. (2005), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McLuhan, M. (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———— (1964), Understanding Media, New York: McGraw-Hill. McQuail, D. (2005), McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, 5th edn., London: Sage. Messaris, P. (1994), Visual ‘Literacy’: Image, Mind, and Reality, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Metz, C. (1974), Language and Cinema, The Hague: Mouton. Meyer, L.B. (2001), ‘Music and emotion: Distinctions and uncertainties’, in P.N. Juslin and J. Sloboda (eds), Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 341–60. Meyrowitz, J. (1994), ‘Medium theory’, in D. Crowley and D. Mitchell (eds), Communication Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ong, W. (1982), Orality and Literacy, London: Methuen. Peters, J.D. (1999), Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porat, M. (1977) The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Reeves, B. and Nass, C. (1996), The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, New York: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, E. M. (1962), The Diffusion of Innovations, Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

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Ryan, M.-L. (2004), ‘Introduction’, in M.-L. Ryan (ed.), Narrrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Scannell, P. (ed.) (1991), Broadcast Talk, London: Sage. ———— (2002), ‘History, media, and communication’, in K.B. Jensen (ed.), A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, London: Routledge. Scribner, S. and Cole, M. (1981), The Psychology of Literacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Searle, J.R. (1969), Speech Acts, London: Cambridge University Press. Stam, R., Burgoyne, R. and Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1992), New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, London: Routledge. Stone, A.R. (1991), ‘Will the real body please stand up? Boundary stories about virtual cultures’, in M. Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Summers, D. (2003), Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London: Phaidon. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J.H. and Jackson, D.D. (1967), Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes, New York: Norton. Wellman, B. and Haythornthwaite, C. (eds) (2002), The Internet in Everyday Life, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Williams, R. (1983), Keywords, London: Fontana.

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Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/nl.5.1.25/1

Remediation and the language of new media Jay David Bolter Abstract

Keywords

Many new-media enthusiasts have inherited from modernist aesthetic theory the assumptions of essentialism and absolute originality. They assume that each medium is constituted by a unique set of essential characteristics and that the task of designers is to explore these characteristics by creating artefacts that will ‘define the medium’. Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation is a study of intermedial relationships that rejects modernist aesthetics and calls these assumptions into question. Manovich’s The Language of New Media does not simply accept these assumptions, but it does seek to derive new-media artistic practice from modernism.

Remediation Intermediality Essentialism Avant-garde Modernist aesthetics New-media theory

Remediation is a study of the relationships between ‘new media’ and traditional media. Richard Grusin and I argued that these relationships were often ignored by popular new-media enthusiasts, who insisted on the utter novelty of digital technology as a medium. Their unstated assumption was (and is) that complete originality is a necessary condition for true creativity. In assuming that the goal of the artist or designer is (and should be) to reinvent the medium, new-media writers were adopting a popularized version of the rhetoric of high modernism. The attitude was typified by the following quotation from Steven Holtzman’s Digital Mosaics (Holtzman 1997), in which the author characterized repurposing (a kind of remediation) as a passing phase in the development of a new medium: ‘Repurposing is a transitional step that allows us to get a secure footing on unfamiliar terrain. But it isn’t where we’ll find the entirely new dimensions of digital worlds. We need to transcend the old to discover completely new worlds of expression’ (Holtzman 1997: 15). It is revealing that, even in the title of a book on the originality of new media, Holtzman referred to the ancient medium of the mosaic. Holtzman’s title was an unwitting acknowledgement that remediation is an unavoidable element in the process of mediation. But Holtzman was certainly not alone in the modernist assumption of utter originality, which is implied in the term ‘new media’ itself. By giving a name (remediation) to the process of borrowing among media forms, we hoped to challenge this assumption and encourage readers to examine the complex intermedial relationships of digital media forms to such older forms as film, television, radio and photography. The term ‘remediation’ indicates a particular kind of intermedial relationship, characterized by what Harold Bloom referred to long ago as the ‘anxiety of influence’ (Bloom 1997). In Remediation, we used a

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shorthand when we claimed that one piece remediates another or even that one media form (computer games) remediates another (narrative film). We were not trying to suggest that media are autonomous agents that act on each other or on other aspects of our mediated culture. Remediation is a process that is realized in and through the creative practices of individual producers, designers, and artists. Sometimes this remediation is conscious and intended; sometimes individual designers may not acknowledge their dependence on earlier media even to themselves. But in all cases they are engaging in a dialogue with their audience, for it is the audience who will construct the meaning of the remediation. In the remediation of one form by another, there is always a combination of homage and rivalry. A remediating form pays homage by borrowing representational practices of an older one. At the same time, the newer form is trying to surpass the older one in some way, for the simple reason that it must justify its claim on our cultural attention. There are several ways in which a new form might justify such a claim. For example, it might offer itself as a cheaper or more efficient alternative. However, such technical improvements per se do not seem to constitute new media forms; all the alphabetic soup of different wireless protocols (such as GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, and so on) is still regarded as the same medium for mobile telephony and data exchange. In order to constitute a new medium or a significant new form within an existing medium, designers must produce a significant change in representational practice with the tacit or explicit suggestion that this change offers an experience that is more compelling, more ‘authentic’, even more ‘real’. If we look at media innovations since photography, we see that remediations with significant cultural impact often claim to provide a more faithful representation of our experience of nature or human relations. In this discussion of the real, I am not making my own claim about the ontological status of any medium, as Andre Bazin did, for example, in his essay on photography (Bazin 1980). I wish to focus on cultural constructions of the real – on the belief that media can achieve a status of immediacy. We can call this a desire for transparency, and even in our sophisticated media age this desire remains pervasive. One need only read the film reviews in popular newspapers to understand the tenacity of an uncritical desire for transparency, when reviewers regularly complain that a character in a film never ‘comes to life’ or praise a film for putting us in touch with the true emotions of the characters. Remediation is meant above all to describe the competition among various media forms over the construction of the real. This competition is not the only aspect of the relationships among media, and remediation is not the only approach to examining such relationships. Remediation can be regarded as part of the larger project of intermediality, a version of comparative media studies that is now quite vigorous in Europe, particularly Germany, and in Canada, although not perhaps in the United States. Intermediality can encompass a broad range of relationships, although scholars who address intermediality have tended to focus on formal relationships and aesthetic effects. (This is in contrast to those who characterize their work as the cultural studies of visual media.) Among many authors in intermediality, we can name Jürgen E. Müller (1996), 26

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Yvonne Spielmann (1998 and 2005), Irina Rajewsky (2002), all of whom have written books with this title. There is also a journal entitled Intermedialités published by the University of Montreal. Remediation was never meant to be a purely formal concept, however, for the borrowing of representational practices always has social, ideological, and economic as well as aesthetic dimensions. With The Lord of the Rings, for example, we could explore how Peter Jackson used various filmic techniques to blur the class distinctions sanctioned in Tolkien’s original books, or, more generally, how Jackson used the techniques of blockbuster film-making (and advertising) to broaden the film’s appeal to an audience large enough to pay for the enormous costs of production – costs which of course the novels did not entail. These are aspects of remediation to which we alluded, but did not devote enough space in our book. Each filmic technique (e.g. the long take or the jump cut), every affordance in a computer interface (e.g. clickable icons or the use of the joystick) – every significant formal practice embedded in popular media artefacts contributes to a cultural construction of the real. And this construction has implications for the production and the consumption of media. Borrowing a technique in a new medium may change the construction. So for example, the long take in film was for Bazin an indication of authenticity: as a sign of an auteur, it was a technique that simultaneously ensured the realism and the aesthetic quality of film. It became associated with directors who were regarded as artists with important vision. And yet in computer games the remediation of the cinematic long take is the relentless first-person point of view that has come to be identified with a violent genre, known as the so-called ‘first person’ shooter. This genre is often regarded as a cultural embarrassment and is not held to be either realistic or the work of auteurs. In studying the remediation of the real in various media forms, Grusin and I identified two representational strategies: transparency and hypermediacy. This is obviously not a new idea with us. Many art historians and media theorists had presented dichotomies that influenced our thinking. Above all, we were influenced by the standard interpretations of modernism, by Greenberg and many others, which set up a dichotomy between the transparency of illusionistic painting and the reflexive practices (hypermediacy) of modern art. There is also McLuhan’s much maligned distinction between hot and cool media (where hot media might be thought of as transparent). And there is Benjamin’s distinction between auratic and non-auratic art. With transparency and hypermediacy, we wanted to describe in particular the ways in which designers and artists mask or acknowledge their debt to earlier media forms, as they seek to mobilize their audience’s sense of the real or the authentic. Scholars who have picked up our dichotomy have shown more interest in the notion of hypermediacy than transparency. Ours is an age of hypermediacy: with forms ranging from handwriting and print to film and 3D games, our diverse media economy welcomes hybrids. Digital technology makes it relatively easy for designers to hybridize different media. Since its formation in the first part of the twentieth century, the avant-garde has usually pursued strategies of hybridity and hypermediacy,

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and today even popular media forms (MTV, rock-music concerts, mobilephone applications) often favour these strategies. Even in this era of MySpace and YouTube, however, we should not discount the influence of the desire for transparency or immediacy (the erasure of the medium). In recent work, my colleagues at Georgia Tech and I have argued for a relationship between immediacy and Benjamin’s notion of aura (Bolter, MacIntyre, Gandy and Schweitzer 2006). The desire for immediacy can also be understood as the desire for presence. At least since Derrida, deconstructing our culture’s desire for presence has been a part of the poststructuralist and postmodern project. Theorists in these traditions tend to treat the issue as if it were settled: that we cannot attain presence through any technology of representation. But critical theory has never had much influence on either the popular imagination or the academic community outside of the humanities and some social sciences. The notion of presence lives on, for example, in computer science, among those specializing in virtual reality: Presence (published by MIT Press) is the name of the most important journal devoted to the study of virtual reality (VR) and user perception. Many popular new-media writers still like to imagine a perfected form of VR as the ultimate medium for achieving a transparent form of art and entertainment. The profound difference over the notion of presence – it is not an active disagreement because the two sides do not belong to the same discourse community – reminds us of the intellectual diversity among the various groups working in digital media. The most important division among these groups is the one between theorists and practitioners. Those who design and program applications and games tend to read only the most popular and accessible media theorists. Those working in the traditional entertainment world (television and film) read new-media authors who offer new media as a ‘respectful remediation’ of film and television. Meanwhile, digital artists give us various blends of theory (art and design theory as well as critical theory) with practice. There are profound differences even among new-media academics. Specialists in human–computer interaction (HCI), who are now studying digital mediation in the workplace and in social life, generally ground their work on the literature and techniques of cognitive science or the social sciences. Communication-studies researchers have their own vast literature with both empirical and theoretical approaches, and often examine digital media from the perspective of traditional mass media. Humanists with literary or art history backgrounds are the ones most likely to bring postmodern theory into the discussion of new media. What Grusin and I have identified as the distinction between transparency and hypermediacy expresses itself in different ways in each of these communities. No author could hope to find a language that would speak to them all.

The many languages of new media I would like to bring The Language of New Media into the discussion, keeping in mind the question: what community does Manovich belong to and which communities does he address? I would characterize his book (not surprisingly) as a study in remediation, because a key argument is that 28

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digital media today borrow and extend the representational practices of avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. In his prologue, Manovich specifically relates the key qualities of digital media to those of cinema as practised by Dziga Vertov in The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This is exactly a remediating relationship: avant-garde cinema provides an authenticity that Manovich is seeking to appropriate for digital art. In a remediating relationship the new medium not only borrows from the old, but also offers something new, and for Manovich the element that distinguishes digital media from avant-garde film (and all other media) is ‘transcoding’. As we shall see, transcoding is the process by which old media forms are transformed into software. When I claim that The Language of New Media conceives of digital art in important ways as a remediation of avant-garde film, I am not trying to diminish the scope of this work. With his commanding knowledge of the media technologies and media theory in the twentieth century, Manovich has given us the first convincing genealogy of new media. Manovich realizes that the original avant-garde offered a highly influential definition of the artist for the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century: the task of the artist is to offer critical alternatives to the representational practices of mainstream media. In The Language of New Media Manovich shows how these avant-garde alternatives re-emerge in the interface, the operations, and the code of new media. Historians of twentieth-century visual art such as Rosalind Krauss (1985) might object to this generalization of the impact and meaning of the avant-garde (and of course this is my formulation here and not necessarily Manovich’s). Hal Foster might argue that Manovich pays too little attention to the neo-avant-garde such as Andy Warhol or the minimalists such as Frank Serra and Robert Morris (Foster 1996). For Foster, the minimalists and other artists of the 1960s constitute a second key moment in the history of the avant-garde’s questioning of established practice; in this period what was called into question was the practice of the high modernists with their abstraction and insistence on the purity and isolation of their art. But The Language of New Media is not trying to be a comprehensive history of the avant-garde in the twentieth century. Much of the art of the neo-avant-garde does not bear the same relation to its contemporary media technologies that the original avant-garde bore to film. There is one important exception, however: experimental film and video of the 1960s and 1970s, to which Manovich does not perhaps do justice. He mentions Hollis Frampton and Stan Brakhage, but he has almost nothing to say about the video art of Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, and others (Spielmann 2005). Yet these video artists were also exploring a technological innovation. Just as the 1920s avant-garde was responding to narrative film of its day, video artists were offering an alternative to broadcast television in theirs. According to Spielmann they were insisting that recorded video was its own medium with its own representational practices, separate from those of television. In his brilliant genealogy of the screen (Manovich 2001a: 95–115), Manovich seems interested in almost every kind of screen (film screen, radar screen, computer screen) other than the video or television screen. I suggest that an examination of video art of the mid-twentieth century as the third moment between avant-garde film of the 1920s and

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digital art today would strengthen Manovich’s case. For example, the techniques of the video artists could enrich the analysis of operations in Chapter 3, as Manovich (2001a: 149–52) suggests in a short section on video compositing. I would like to comment on another question raised by Manovich’s appeal to the avant-garde: the distinction between elite and popular forms, between art and entertainment. In the second half of the twentieth century, the boundary between serious art and entertainment has blurred. High modernists, such as Clement Greenberg, one of whose most famous essays was entitled ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, still believed in the superiority of elite art over consumer-driven entertainment (Greenberg 1939). Even if the claim of superiority can no longer be sustained, there is certainly a significant gap between contemporary (digital and analogue) art that grows out of the avant-garde tradition and the diverse strands of popular entertainment. No one today could fail to see the differences in representational practices and in audience reception between Manovich’s own Soft Cinema project and the traditional cinema of Spielberg or James Cameron – anymore than anyone in the 1920s would have had difficulty appreciating the differences between Chien Andalou and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Once again, these differences are operative in the digital world, in part because of the diverse communities pursuing the making and critiquing of digital artefacts. They become clear if we place The Language of New Media alongside a book that appeared a few years earlier and is perhaps equally influential today, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray 1997). Although both of these books set out to describe the possibilities of digital technology as an expressive medium, they have few intertexts in common. It is not surprising that as a literary critic Murray would draw on literary models, where Manovich draws on the visual arts. But most of Murray’s literary references are to canonical authors (Shakespeare, Dickens). The literary avant-garde does not figure prominently. Her references to visual media forms come mostly from popular film (e.g. Casablanca) or mainstream television (Star Trek). Indeed the ‘holodeck’ in her title refers to the VR machine in the television and film series Star Trek – a series that, were he alive today, Greenberg would identify as archetypal kitsch. Murray has no interest in relating digital media to the visual avantgarde. She takes it for granted that film and television are narrative media forms, because narrative forms have constituted the popular tradition in each of those media. Although the premise of her book is that the digital medium will be the new cinema, this does not mean, as it does for Manovich, that digital technology will bring forth a new avant-garde language that will fragment and reconstitute our conventional narrative strategies. Instead, for Murray digital technology will allow the viewer to insert herself seamlessly into traditional Hollywood narrative. Murray’s view of the digital medium is therefore popular and influential outside of the communities of the visual arts and media studies. She offers a vision of smooth and seamless interactive narrative that appeals to the entertainment industry itself, because she implies that those brought up in the world of mainstream film and television can simply extend their aesthetic principles into the digital realm. Murray’s case for interactive 30

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narrative is particularly convincing for those in Hollywood trying to introduce user participation into conventional broadcast television (socalled ‘enhanced TV’ or ‘interactive TV’) and those in the computer- and video-game industry who make games that repurpose film and sports. With her view of digital narrative, Murray shows us the alternative to Manovich: the mainstream against which Manovich’s avant-garde is in revolt. It is hard, for example, to imagine a conference in which Murray and Manovich would both be asked to keynote. Nevertheless, there is one important area of apparent agreement in their work – on the question of whether (new) media have essential qualities.

Essentialism and new media Essentialism remains strong in popular media theory today, where the essentialist strategy is to identify certain key properties that a medium possesses – properties that are supposed to emerge from the technology itself. These properties then serve to justify arguments about how the medium can or should be used. Essentialist arguments receive a sympathetic hearing from many in new media, especially those computer specialists who develop and advance the technology. On the other hand, those working in cultural studies have long argued against essentialism and determinism in communications technologies as elsewhere in technoscience. In the 1970s Raymond Williams offered a well-known and compelling critique of technological determinism in the work of McLuhan (Williams 1974). A straightforward reading of McLuhan does suggest an essentialist – most famously in his characterization of media as hot and cool. Film is hot, for example, because of the high resolution of the analogue photographic image; television is cool because the low-resolution video image requires the viewer’s participation to complete the picture (McLuhan 1964). Murray too is an essentialist. She identifies four ‘essential properties’ of digital environments: they are the procedural, the participatory, the spatial, and the encyclopaedic. These properties function in her view both descriptively and prescriptively (Murray 1997: 71–90). They describe how digital artefacts function, and at the same time it is the task of the digital designer to explore these qualities in their applications. For Murray, the mandate of the digital age is to develop the latent possibilities of the medium by bringing these qualities to fruition. Manovich is subtler: he seems to me to be pulled in two directions here, probably because he is so widely read both in modernism and in recent art and critical theory. The admirer of the modernist avant-garde is drawn to the notion of essential qualities to be identified and explored, but the student of postmodern art and theory is concerned to avoid a charge of determinism. It is useful to compare Manovich’s five ‘principles’ (numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, transcoding) with Murray’s four essential properties, for the lists are quite different. At least two of Murray’s qualities are really popular cultural metaphors for the experience offered by digital media. To say that the computer is spatial or encyclopaedic is really to say that these are metaphors that we as a culture have chosen (or might choose) to characterize our experience with computers: they are the metaphors of cyberspace and the digital library. NL 5 25–37 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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Manovich’s principles are more abstract, and his focus is on the ways in which producers (such as artists) manipulate digital technology as the material for their expressive efforts. Manovich rejects ‘participation’ as an essential characteristic: he objects to the notion of interactivity as being too broad to be useful (Manovich 2001a: 55–61). Murray and Manovich seem to agree on one foundational principle: the coded nature of computer applications. Murray calls this quality ‘procedurality’, while Manovich refers to ‘transcoding’. But even here the differences are important. Manovich’s concept is reflexive in a way that Murray’s is not. With ‘transcoding’ he is identifying a process by which not only earlier media objects but perhaps whole media forms are transformed into the new language of computer code. He suggests that the introduction of the computer as code marks a break in the history of media: This perspective [comparing properties and aesthetics of various media] is important and I am using it frequently in this book, but it is not sufficient. It cannot address the most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent – programmability. Comparing new media to print, photography, or television will never tell us the whole story […]. To understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories, and operations that characterize media that became programmable. From media studies, we move to something that can be called ‘software studies’ – from media theory to software theory. [italics in original] (Manovich 2001a: 47–48)

From my perspective, this may be the single most important passage in The Language of New Media, because it captures precisely Manovich’s claim for the remediating power of new digital media. Like other remediations, the digital must ultimately surpass its predecessors by promoting some quality that is unique to it. As we have said, for Manovich that quality is not interactivity (the most commonly made claim for the digital); it is the fact that all digital artefacts are ultimately software. The code that underlies a digital artefact is what gives it its uniqueness (‘no historical precedent’) and therefore its authenticity. In remediating avant-garde film of the 1920s, digital art not only borrows the representational practices of that period, but also reimagines them by embodying them in code. Manovich’s own recent project in the remediation of avant-garde film is called Soft Cinema to acknowledge both its roots and its uniqueness (www.manovich.net/ softcinemadomain). Manovich appears to be coming down on one side of a divide by taking what we can call the ‘code view’.

Code and interface Manovich’s insight into the relationship of new media and the avant-garde is perhaps unique among new-media theorists. However, the code view in various forms is widely shared by computer specialists who actually write applications. The rhetoric of the code view sometimes turns up among digital poets and artists as well. I would argue, however, that there is an alternative construction of the digital, widely held but less clearly articulated: an ‘interface view’. If the code is what lies beneath the surface of a digital artefact, the interface is the surface that the artefact presents to 32

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its viewer or user: the input (what the user types on the keyboard, how the user manipulates the joystick, and so on) and the output (what the user sees on the screen or in a headset and what she hears through the speakers). The interface is all that most users ever know of any application: it constitutes the digital experience for them. Over the past thirty years the emergence of more sophisticated and varied interfaces has been the critical element in the defining of new digital media forms. The graphical user interface (GUI), developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and perfected in the Apple computers of the 1980s, was the single most important step in our culture’s changing understanding of what the computer could be. (The development of the GUI was not predetermined: it was in part the result of the creative decisions of such developers as Englebart and Kay.) Manovich in fact devotes two chapters to exploring the digital interface that grew out of the GUI together with the operations (menu items, filters, cutting, pasting, and so on) that the digital artist carries on through that interface. Many, perhaps most, digital artists today (including Manovich himself) are really artists of the interface: that is, their concern is with the experience that the application offers to the user, not the code that constitutes the application. Every programmer knows that there are many different ways to achieve the same result: that many different sequences of code can produce the same interface and therefore the same digital experience. Many digital artists and even application designers and game designers do not program themselves, but instead trust their ideas to others to code. Furthermore, most genres of computer games are almost all interface: the algorithms that drive the play action are usually trivial or at least well known. (The great exception would be the graphics algorithms – techniques for making the graphics more responsive and more photorealistic. Yet computer graphics is a kind of coding that is completely in the service of the interface.) What matters to them is simply that the program should render the design operative – that it should deliver the graphics, the sounds, and the interactions. The code and interface views reflect different aesthetic and cultural criteria. The interface view is almost by definition hybrid, multiple, concerned with effects rather than technological essences. The interface view also suggests a focus on the relationship of the viewer (user) with the artefact, or on the triangular relationship of viewer, artefact, and artist. The code view in its purest form focuses on the program itself as a texture of symbols, and those who favour the code view in this form are drawn to a traditional aesthetics of the artefact. They speak of the beauty, simplicity, and elegance of the code (Bolter and Gromala 2006). Among new-media enthusiasts and theorists, the code view and essentialism often go together. This seems to be particularly true of those who work in the area of ‘interactive narrative’, whose research focuses on narrative ‘engines’ – that is, on algorithms and data structures that will produce a dynamic story as output. Some researchers regard the form of the output, the visual expression of the story, as secondary. Some suggest that the same engine could drive various outputs: a prose version, a screenbased video version, and (ultimately) a virtual reality. The game designer Chris Crawford’s massive Storytron project (www.storytron.com) is one example of a system in which the engine is vastly more important than the

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form of the output. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s interactive drama, Façade, also seems to me to privilege the code over the interface (Mateas and Stern 2005). Façade contains a sophisticated engine, which shapes the dialogue as a series of beats within a larger story arc; what the user sees on the screen are two animated figures, whose stiff gestures would fool no user into thinking that she was really sitting in the home of a couple of old friends. Façade has been praised as a step on the way to the holodeck, but its visual style is compelling and ironic, precisely because it calls into question the claim of transparency that Façade makes. Digital artists trained in the traditions of the visual arts, on the other hand, are unlikely to emphasize the code at the expense of the visual, aural, or tactile experience that their work offers. It should be no surprise that my two categories (the code and interface views) are not always neatly observed and cannot capture every aspect of varied digital designers and artists. For example, some digital artists actually make the code part of the interface – part of what the viewer/user sees and experiences. This is true of such digital poets as John Cayley, who calls some of his work ‘code poetry’ (Engberg 2005; Hayles 2002). But digital artefacts that display their code are promoting an aesthetic of hybridity, not the seamless transparency that belongs for example to interactive narrativists. They in fact form part of Manovich’s new media avant-garde. The Language of New Media seems to me to be seeking to reconcile what I am calling the code and interface views. Throughout the book, Manovich contends that the notion of software supersedes (absorbs, transcodes) the traditional notion of media. This is an argument that he also makes explicit in the essay ‘For a Post-media Aesthetics’ (www.artmargins.com/content/eview/manovich5.html). In a sense we could say that software becomes the remediation of media. Manovich’s ‘software view’ is more encompassing than the code view, for software consists of both the interface and the code. Nevertheless, by insisting that the discourse of software should now replace the traditional discourse of media, Manovich runs the risk of validating a hierarchy that the computerscience community has accepted for decades, in which the code is more important than the interface it generates. It is true, on the other hand, that new developments in the field of HCI (human–computer interaction) are gradually eroding that sense of hierarchy even within the computer-science community. The code view seems to be growing among new-media theorists at a time when it is losing ground in the field of computer science from which it emerged. Manovich wants to do justice to the hybridity of contemporary media yet without rejecting essentialism altogether; he wants to reconcile the essential principle of transcoding with a new cinematic practice that is hybrid and contingent. Chapter 5 (‘The Forms’) lays out the argument for a ‘database logic’ through which new media can offer an alternative to narrative cinema and literature. For Manovich the database represents a new media aesthetic, founded on the computational dichotomy of data and algorithm. Database logic applies even to computer games, which often only appear to have a narrative structure:

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This [the event-driven experience of a computer game] is another example of the general principle of transcoding discussed in the first chapter – the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself […] The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects that are complementary to each other – data structures and algorithms. (Manovich 2001a: 223)

By Chapter 6, which returns to the comparison of new media and cinema, it has become clear that database cinema is a remediation of traditional cinema. Manovich wants to underline the historical significance of this move to a new media form, while avoiding the charge of determinism. Even before listing his principles in Chapter 1, he writes that: ‘Not every new media object obeys these principles. They should be considered not as absolute laws but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization’ (Manovich 2001a: 27). So unlike Murray, who commits herself firmly to the mainstream media aesthetic (transparency) and the mainstream technophilosophy (essentialism), Manovich is aware of an interplay of dichotomies (transparency–hybridity, essentialism–contingency). I think he is seeking to promote this interplay in an atmosphere freed of technological determinism, as he notes in his culminating distinction between the narrative and database forms: Rather than trying to correlate database and narrative forms with modern media and information technologies, or deduce them from these technologies, I prefer to think of them as two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, two essential responses to the world. (Manovich 2001a: 233)

I do too. I would also like to suggest that narrative and database as aesthetic forms in fact align with the two representational strategies of transparency and hypermedia. Although there are narrative styles in the twentieth century that are highly sophisticated and self-referential, mainstream narrative film and the current modest attempts at digital interactive narrative are usually promoted as transparent forms, which permit the viewer/user to become lost (or ‘immersed’) in the story (or the story world). Avant-garde film as well as postmodern and digital art are almost by definition self-aware and in my terms hypermediated. Manovich identifies the classic avant-gardist Dziga Vertov and the contemporary film-maker Peter Greenaway both as practitioners of his ‘database cinema’ (Manovich 2001a: 237–43). The very fact that the database form can be expressed in more than one medium shows that Manovich does not want to insist too strongly on the power of the computer medium to determine aesthetic principles.

Theory and practice I would like to close by touching briefly on another question: the relationship of theory and practice in new-media studies. In the past decade many universities in North America and Europe have instituted new-media programmes, most of which pay at least lip service to the notion that theory

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and practice should be closely combined. Because I teach in one such programme, it is fair to ask whether Remediation has succeeded in bringing together theory and practice – whether this monograph on media history and theory has practical value for designers and artists. Although I hoped this would be the case, the practical impact of Remediation has been small. I hope that some artists and designers have taken some inspiration from a book that seeks to validate the notion of working across media and denies the need for purity in digital media forms. But Remediation is analytical rather than prescriptive, and its argument is that artists and designers borrow from and refashion other media forms all the time, whether they are aware of this process or not. Their audiences receive their work in this spirit as well, consciously or unconsciously comparing the new media artefacts to those in other media that they know. In this sense, there is no need for artists and designers to change their practice. The only further argument I could make is that a conscious knowledge of the practices of remediation would help media producers to articulate what they already know intuitively. It is at least plausible that the concepts of remediation might help in the teaching of media design, and I believe the book may be read in some new-media programmes for this reason. The same question may be posed for The Language of New Media. It is a book of history and theory, not a practical manual. Manovich has had more success in crossing the gulf between theory and practice, above all because he is himself a practising artist. The book can be read as a historically sophisticated manifesto for the database art that Manovich himself creates: specifically, for his Soft Cinema project. The fact that Manovich himself can produce art that grows out of his theory makes the theory itself more convincing. References Bazin, A. (1980 [1967]), ‘The ontology of the photographic image’, in A. Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays in Photography, New Haven: Leete’s Islands Books, pp. 237–44. Bloom, H. (1997), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn., New York: Oxford University Press. Bolter, J. D., MacIntyre, B., Gandy, M. and Schweitzer, P. (2006), ‘New media and the permanent crisis of aura’, Convergence, 12: 1, pp. 21–39. Bolter, J. D. and Gromala, D. (2006), ‘Transparency and reflectivity: digital art and the aesthetics of interface design’, in P.A. Fishwick (ed.), Aesthetic Computing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 369–82. Engberg, M. (2005), Stepping into the River: Experiencing John Cayley’s River Island, available from http://www.dichtung-digital.com/2005/2/Engberg/index.htm. (Last accessed February 1st. 2007) Foster, H. (1996), The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greenberg, C. (1939), ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6: 5, pp. 34–49. Hayles, N.K. (2002), Writing Machines, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Holtzman, S. (1997), Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace, New York: Simon and Schuster. Krauss, R. (1985), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Manovich, L. (2001a), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———— (2001b), ‘For a post-media aesthetics’, Art Margins, available from http://www.artmargins.com/content/eview/manovich5.html. Mateas, M. and Stern, A. (artist) (2005), Façade: A One-Act Interactive Drama. http://forums.adventuregamers.com/showthread.php?t=2076 (Last accessed February 1st. 2007) McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: New American Library Inc. Müller, Jürgen, E. (1996), Intermedialität, Formen modener kultureller Kommunikation, Münster: Nordus Publikationen. Murray, J. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rajewsky, I. (2002), Intermedialität, Stuttgart: UTB. Spielmann, Y. (1998), Intermedialität: Das System Peter Greenaway. München: Wilhelm Fink. ———— (2005), Video: Das reflektive Medium, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Williams, R. (1974), Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana.

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