This document provides a summary of Lev Manovich's discussion of interface in new media from his book The Language of New Media. It discusses how Manovich views the computer as having two layers - the cultural layer where humans interact, and the computer layer comprising data and algorithms. The interface allows crossing between these layers, translating cultural concepts into computer logic and vice versa. This process of transcoding cultural meaning establishes an "ideology of software" by which interfaces structure our understanding through organizational metaphors like folders and desktops. The document then explores how this computer interface metaphor can be applied to other media like television news that also act as interfaces between humans and larger information systems.

1. Note for the Committee: I wanted to include an example of my academic writing from
my undergraduate work. I thought this seemed like an appropriate length and subject.
Thank you.
Critical Theory
Ideology, Meaning, and Mediation: The New World of Interfaces
…The computer’s own cosmology… [and] Similarly, new media in general can
be thought of as consisting of two distinct layers—the “cultural layer” and the
“computer layer.”1
-Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
Lev Manovich, in his seminal work The Language of New Media, discusses what
he identifies as “new media,” by which he means new forms of media and art that are
defined by their being digital in nature. Within his first chapter he outlines five
distinctions that divide new media from previous forms, such as film, television, and
photography. Four qualities set apart new media: Numerical Representation (they exist as
data); Modularity (they are made of independent units); Automation (media can be
altered automatically); and Variability (many identical versions exist). These all lead to
what he believes “is the most substantial consequence of the computerization of data.”2
Transcoding, the fifth quality, is a major part of the division outlined in the above quote.
Manovich views the computer as essentially divided into two “areas” of the cultural and
computer, one being the raw data and algorithms involved in the base structure of a
computer, and the other being the cultural level at which average, non-computer
programming, people are able to interact with the machine. Transcoding is, “in new
1
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. Pg. 46.
2
Ibid. 45

2. media lingo,” the act of, “translat[ing]” one form “into another format.” He goes on to
add that, “the computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in
relation to all cultural categories and concepts.”3
From this process of transcoding, in its
literal sense, Manovich is drawing the analogy that cultural meaning and language are
transcoded over time into the computer’s ontology and vice versa, making for computers
that speak our language (so to speak), and allowing us to communicate with them as
well.4
So, what he also refers to as “conceptual transfer,”5
is a defining feature of new
media, and by extension, a defining feature of computers themselves. Given that two
layers exist to Manovich, the crossing of the those layers, the point at which meaning and
understanding occur between humans and their digital boxes, is what is commonly
understood in computer terms as interface.
Interface, in its most basic definition, is principally something which allows two
otherwise unrelated systems to act and communicate with one another.6
This, quite
literally, textbook definition may, in the context of computers, seem simple enough,
especially given the concept of “two layers.” But it carries a host of implications with,
and can help us consider how we collectively understand our world through the lens(es)
of television media, film, newspaper, and, more recently, the Internet. Essentially what
interface does, in the context of computers, is allow people to interact with otherwise
impossibly large systems of information; the divide that Manovich points to is powerful
in its ability to act as an analogy for how other mediums can act as interfaces. Manovich
speaks specifically of interface as a term that can span more than just new media, but can
3
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. 47.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Interface>

3. be used for the printed word and cinema (television) as well.7
This analogy is particularly
apt when speaking of news media, given the pictorial nature of television and Internet
news. Naturally, Internet news comes with its own baggage, given the fact that it is not
only interfacing between the “data” of the news and ourselves, but also performing the
transcoding that Manovich speaks of, making computer data into news data into
information that we can all understand; this might be thought of as a possible three layer
paradigm, as Manovich speaks to in his analysis of Interface. More on that later. In
essence, what the computer Interface can show us is that numerous daily operations
involve Interfacing with many systems too complex to normally interact with. The
“ideology” associated with this mode of interface is also part of the launching point into a
larger discussion of how information is disseminated through various media; no media
performs the act of informing without leaving its own fingerprint on the content, and in
turn the user or viewer. The analogy of the computer-cultural split in computer
technology can be extended to theorize about how we look through many interfaces, and
rely on them in the tech society.
7
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. 83.

4. Computational and Human Levels: Defining the “Ideology of Software”
From media studies, we move to something that can be called “software
studies”— from media theory to software theory.8
-Lev Manovich
In his opening discussion of new media, and the introduction of new media
theory, Manovich points here to a new means of thinking about media; instead of
attempting to fit media theory, formulated by much earlier innovators such as Marshall
McLuhan, into the study of new media, which would be, very appropriately, like
attempting to run an Atari 8-Bit system on a new Dell system, Manovich declares the
need for a break with media studies. This new type of studies involves the investigation
of various components of a new media, founded on computers, unique from all other
forms. One of the important features of this break is recognizing features of new media
that simply do not exist in previous media; one such feature is the concept of interface. In
the context of computers, interface is the very thing we might want to call “our
computer.” This would include the Desktop, my folders, my “dock,” in the case of Macs,
and so forth. Everything that appears to make the machine operate, using metaphors and
images to lead us believing that, for example, one’s iTunes library is in fact stored in a
specific “space” waiting for you to go find it. This is part of the illusion that software
creates in the form of the interface, making people feel as though they have shaped their
hyper-environment to fit their own sense of logic and organization, or lack thereof.
Manovich’s concept of a software studies examines this phenomenon, among the
many that computers have brought about, especially considering their capacity to
8
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

5. appropriate “old media,” as it were, in a new media digital form. Analyzing software, and
more specifically interface, as Manovich does in the second section of The Language of
New Media, called The Language of Cultural Interfaces, allows for a reading of these
aspects of computers that can point to what Manovich conceives of as an ideology
associated with software and interface.
Before getting at this detail it will help to discuss the specificities of interface as
we know them in the context of Personal Computers. Desktop is perhaps most contingent
for our means of understanding computer interface; it allows us to have a stable home
base from which we endeavor into the system itself, locating files, or into programs that
allow us to engage the World Wide Web. No matter how far off our explorations may
carry us (and no matter if our programs lead us into the depths of video games or the
internet), there is always our comfortable starting point, complete with whatever we
desire to be visible. Within the Desktop, we place folders, another stable form for storing
information, in the form of files. Folders can have folders in them ad-infinitum, making
the system, which we perceive as very ordered, according to hierarchical structures that
govern the actual storing of files in a filing cabinet.
If one looks back at this point at the previous handful of sentences about interface,
it may seem that there are a number of misnomers in my summary of Desktops and
folders. This is absolutely true. I used a number of words (intentionally) to describe these
computational phenomena that are purely on the level of human emotion and logic. The
use of words like “stable,” “endeavor,” “engage,” “home base,” “depths,” “visible,” etc.
is exactly what Manovich wants to explain with his distinction between the computer and
cultural, or “human” level. After all, it is no accident that our personal computers work

6. with us in this manner; it is the absolute intention of modern computer programmers to
make the computers accessible in this way. This type of accessibility is, one might say,
pre-programmed with cultural codes that we intuitively learn and are able to use.9
Given that this kind of coding and use of natural language govern aspects of
computers, when Manovich speaks of the “code” involved in interface, he engages
necessarily in a discourse of ideology:
In semiotic terms, the computer interface acts as a code, which carries cultural
messages in a variety of media. When you use the Internet, everything you access —
texts, music, video, navigable spaces — passes through the interface of the browser
and then, in its turn, the interface of the OS. In cultural communication, a code is
rarely simply a neutral transport mechanism; usually it affects the messages
transmitted with its help… A code may also provide its own model of the world, its
own logical system, or ideology; subsequent cultural messages or whole languages
created using this code will be limited by this model, system or ideology… Finally,
by organizing computer data in particular ways, the interface provides distinct
models of the world. For instance, a hierarchical file system assumes that the world
can be organized in a logical multi-level hierarchy. In contrast, a hypertext model of
the World Wide Web models the world as a non-hierarchical system ruled by
metonymy. In short, far from being a transparent window into the data inside a
computer, the interface bring with it strong messages of its own.10
Thus Manovich makes this crucially important argument for the status of computer
interface as not just a useful paradigm for interaction, but as a fundamental means of
making computer code (distinct from the semiotic code brought up here) into a system
comprehensible to the average human. Ideology is in this case, as Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun points out in her essay On Software or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge, “a
functional analog”11
to software (and thus interface). According to Chun:
9
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.
10
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.76.
11
Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge."
Grey room (Winter 2005).

7. In a formal sense computers understood as comprising software and hardware are
ideology machines. They fulfill almost every formal definition of ideology we have,
from ideology as false consciousness (as portrayed in The Matrix) to Louis
Althusser’s definition of ideology as ‘a representation of the imaginary relation of
individuals to their real conditions of existence.’12
This concept also appears as N. Katherine Hayles argues that, indeed, “computers are no
longer merely tools (if they ever were) but are complex systems that increasingly produce
the conditions, ideologies, assumptions, and practices that help constitute what we call
reality.”13
She actually goes on to summarize Wendy Chun. In all, these assertions
provide a means of recognizing how computers, in their use of cultural codes and
practices, act to construct a reality within themselves that works to render us compliable
subjects. We make these programs and interfaces for people to be able to engage with
advanced technology, and in doing so we create a new set of conditions for the average
person when using that interface. In essence, as Manovich points out, using a cultural
code (desktop, open, folders etc.) allows us use of a far more complex and “unnatural”
type of code, that which actually makes the computer run and comprises the software of
the interface itself.
It is worth noting that I am blending the terms ‘software’ and ‘interface,’ though
Manovich and Chun most often keep them separate. For the sake of discussion, and in
theoretical terms as well, I do not feel this distinction carries enough weight to really
make it worthwhile to have a separate engagement with each. In the context of this essay
it is more useful to think of these two phenomena as functioning for the same purpose:
making hardware functional for humans. This is the basic underlying principle that it
12
Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge."
Grey room (Winter 2005).
13
Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.
New York: University Of Chicago, 2005. 60.

8. seems the proposed software studies would examine, among other software features. We
are all subjects of computation and interface, just as some would claim we are subjects of
ideology. As Wendy Chun says, truly demonstrating the analogous theories at play here,
“Software produces users.”14
Interface Metaphors: Internet News, Cinema/Text, and the “Cultural Interface”
Taking a “step out” from the first section, the specific interface of human-computer
becomes a kind of metaphor for speaking of other interfaces that define our society and
are the means by which we gather information. Manovich speaks of the internet as
introducing a “third” layer to the dynamic: “we are increasingly ‘interfacing’ to
predominantly cultural data: texts, photographs, films, music, multimedia documents,
virtual environments. Therefore, human-computer interface is being supplemented by
human-computer- culture interface, which I abbreviate as ‘cultural interface.’”15
This is
an interesting supplement to his first paradigm he set up, as it acknowledges that indeed
there is more to the human-computer dynamic than just the software and the person.
Examining the ideological implications in the previous section provided a metaphor with
which to examine other instances of interface in our culture, the issue of the Internet
brings its own implications. The metaphor here is the fairly straightforward idea of
humans being able to interact with computer hardware via interface as being a basic
frame for thinking about how people receive information from media. Data, the events
and information that populate our world, are consolidated and simplified for what we
would, by extension, call “user interface,” our collective understanding. This would be
14
Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy. "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge."
Grey room (Winter 2005).
15
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

9. the case for Television news, where the metaphor is clear: it provides us an interface with
our world. Using Manovich’s discussion of other media as a starting point, this metaphor
can provide the basis for even further steps outward in thinking about the phenomenon of
interface.
Turning back to the internet, the “cultural interface” Manovich proposes adds a
third layer of sorts to the computer-human dynamic. After examining the ideological
implications of that first dynamic, one must then acknowledge that computers allow users
not only interact with the hardware, but also with events, information, music, art, and
other cultural artifacts. Given the “ideology of software” hypothesis, one can state that
such cultural information is disseminated within the realm of that ideology; this would
mean basically that the logic and code of the computer interface plays a role in how the
information is understood. The logic and familiarity of the computer interface is optimal
for data comprehension, whether it be Wikipedia or NYTimes.com, as it functions
analogously to the interface of information and humans; in this way, the third layer of
culture really does add an extra level of play between the first two of computer and
human. Taking Internet news, in the realm of NYTimes.com or CNN.com, this becomes
much clearer, as “information,” a vague and difficult term, is translated purely to mean
“news,” or collected information about world events on a given day. One goes to a
website of this nature and is provided, essentially, with a hyper-media newspaper,
complete with “sections” as we understand them in the context of the newspaper that we
could have gone out and bought. Instead we are faced with the interface yet again, a
series of buttons and images and hyperlinks providing us with the “hierarchical” (as
Manovich would say) structures that we already go in knowing. The online newspaper is

10. thus an excellent manifestation of differing levels of interface. Normally, one would have
a flat, finite, surface of information in the form of the newspaper. In the online paper, we
are given that same basic format, but now the introduction of computer interface makes
for an added level of complication; newspapers could already be said to allow us
interface with the outside world, much like any news “location”, in other words the level
of “cultural interface.”
Manovich discusses other media aside from computers in the context of interface,
suggesting that the cultural interface level occurs within the mediums of print and
cinema. As a means of approaching this subject, Manovich proposes the following:
Cinema, the printed word and human-computer interface: each of these traditions has
developed its own unique ways of how information is organized, how it is presented
to the user, how space and time are correlated with each other, how human
experience is being structured in the process of accessing information. Pages of text
and a table of contents; 3D spaces framed by a rectangular frame which can be
navigated using a mobile point of view; hierarchical menus, variables, parameters,
copy/paste and search/replace operations -- these and other elements of these three
traditions are shaping cultural interfaces today. Cinema, the printed word and HCI:
they are the three main reservoirs of metaphors and strategies for organizing
information which feed cultural interfaces.16
This excerpt unites Manovich’s assessment of all these media as informing each other
throughout their development, and how they unite in some ways in the forms of computer
information. Starting with print, Manovich proposes the “page” as the first theoretical
concept that has been appropriated my new media in the form of the web page. In its
essence, a web page is very similar to any “page” that has occurred in the history of
newspapers and so forth, in that it, “is also dominated by text, with photographs,
drawings, tables and graphs embedded in between, along with links to other pages of the
newspaper.”17
Therefore, the medium of text is itself a cultural interface alone, and then
16
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.
17
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

11. in the context of computers, a three level interface of the human-computer-culture type.
Cinema behaves in a similar manner, but instead introduces Manovich’s concept of the
screen as a level of cultural interface. Just like the page has become a universal symbol,
appropriated by new media, so to has the screen gone through this transcoding, once
being the introductory surface for depth and movement, now becoming the basis for
computation, which includes both of the key facets that defined the screen as unique.
Thus these media are transferred to the new media, making for the three levels of
“cultural interface.”
A Synthesis: Interface Culture
The human-computer interface occurs at the level of a communication that defines
something new and unusual about our contemporary society. Theorists like Manovich,
Chun, and Hayles are among the pioneers of a discourse that is predicated on the
existence of what we now know to be a computer. This “computer” that people now take
for granted does not necessarily reflect the tangible components of the machine; to the
average computer user, the computer is the software that allows them to engage with the
programs and components that rest on the hardware. Our understanding of a computer is
thus based very little on anything that we can see is electronic or made of chips and disks
and so forth. It is the interface that is left in our minds as representing the computer. The
Microsoft Windows Desktop is a force unto itself. This digital environment is one that
has come to incorporate all of us computer “literate” citizens, interpolating us (to use this
term in the Althusserian frame that Chun considers it) into subjects of new interface
culture.

12. Such an “interface culture” is nothing new or just being discovered. Marshall
McLuhan, over forty years ago, had certainly anticipated a culture in which mediums
played such a crucial role in our perception of the world and in our gathering and
synthesizing of information. Subsequent study has been done on the idea of an interface
and the implications associated with it serving such a large part of culture; Manovich and
Chun are some of the many theorists now moving into these territories. The theoretical
model that is produced in these studies, particularly in the software studies, make for
whole new ways of thinking about how we view content and what digital interfaces can
mean for older mediums being appropriated by them. The interface of humans and
computers makes for a new set of tools and language that we come to understand and to
which the computer is forced to understand. Therefore, the dialogue, if we want to call it
that, is one that enacts Manovich’s transcoding principal, in that we have two very
distinct entities that communicate by vastly different codes interacting and understanding
one another, so to speak. It is not to give computers agency, but simply to realize that
something without a cognition can actually instruct us as much as we instruct it; this is
through the code of the interface, where we are swept in to a simple and recognizable
environment, complete with a nice square screen (with other square screens inside of it),
pages of written language, buttons, tabs, folders. All of these things have existed before
the computer and were appropriated for the ease of our use. Their pictorial representation
is key to our comprehension of the otherwise infinitely complex world of computer code.