Introduction to new media: what is new media?

1. Introduc)on
to new media
Lecture 1
What is new
media?

2. Standing on the
shoulders of gurus
Lev Manovich
Marshall McLuhan
Manuel Castells

3. Ques)ons to answer in the end:
• What characterizes new media?
• New media – a technology or culture?
• Examine cri)cally new media defini)ons – can
YOU define what is new media?

4. New media history
• Manovich (2008): We are largely ignorant of collaborators
who have gradually turned computer into a cultural machine
it is today.
• They knew that they were turning physical media into new
media with addi.onal proper.es to interact with.
– Alan Kay & Xerox PARC
– Ted Nelson
– Douglas Engelbart
– Ivan Sutherland
– Nicholas Negroponte
– W. Russell Newman: Blurring private‐public and interpersonal‐
mass media borders
– Andrew L. Shapiro: Shi in controlling informa)on and
experiences
– Etc.….
– Journal: Cultural Machine h_p://www.culturemachine.net/

5. New media defini)on
• the amalgama)on of tradi)onal media such as
film, images, music, spoken and wri_en word,
with the interac.ve power of computer and
communica)ons technology, computer‐
enabled consumer devices and most
importantly the Internet (wikipedia)
will be expanded at next slides
Search for alterna)ve New media defini)ons!

6. Crea)ng new media for new types of
interac)on
• The aim of the inventors of computa)onal media
was not to simply create accurate simula)ons of
physical media but in every case the goal was to
create “a new medium with new proper.es”
which would allow people to communicate, learn,
and create in new ways (Manovich, 2008).
• Which ideas from the past have influenced new
media development significantly?

7. • Xerox PARC has been responsible for
developments as:
– personal computer
– graphical user interface (GUI) featuring windows
and icons, the "look and feel"
– Smalltalk programming language (object‐oriented
programming)
– Ethernet local area computer network
– Hypertext ideas and branching the experience
Alan Kay worked in
h_p://www.ted.com/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_about_ideas.html

8. Alan Kay’s Universal Media Machine
• Turn computers into a
“personal dynamic media”
which can be used for
learning, discovery, and
ar)s)c crea)on.
• Involve learner in a two‐way
conversa.on
• He conceived the Dynabook
concept (1968) which defined
the conceptual basics for
laptop and tablet computers
and E‐books
Kay s)ll thinks the Dynabook
hasn't been invented yet,
because key soware and
educa)onal curriculum are
missing.
Read this ar)cle!
“A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages.”

9. Alan Kay’s Universal Media Machine
The democra.za.on of soHware development
was at the core of Kay’s vision
• New media are expandable – Users
themselves should be able to easily add new
proper)es, as well as to invent new media.
• Smalltalk object‐oriented programming
language
• The best way to predict the future is to invent
it! Read the ar)cle about Smalltalk history!

10. Alan Kay’s Universal Media Machine
Kay calls computers the first “metamedium”
whose content is “a wide range of already‐
exis)ng and not‐yet‐invented media.”
These new media use already exis.ng
representa.onal formats as their building
blocks, while adding many new previously
nonexistent proper.es.

11. “remedia)on”
• Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s
book Remedia-on: Understanding
New Media (2000)
• Bolter and Grusin define
remedia)on as “the representa)on
of one medium in another.”
• New media always remediate the
old ones
• Remedia.on is a defining
characteris.c of the new digital
media
For further thinking: how does remedia)on change the message?

12. “remedia)on machine” for old media
• Manovich (2008): Kay and others appear to
have locked the computer into being a
simula)on machine for “old media.”
• By developing easy to use GUI‐based soware
to create and edit familiar media types
soware turned a digital computer into a
“remedia)on machine”.

13. Beyond “remedia)on”
• Manovich (2008): the pioneers of
computa)onal media did not have the goal of
making the computer into a “remedia)on
machine” which would simply represent older
media in new ways.
• Instead, knowing well new capabili)es
provided by digital computers, they set out to
create fundamentally new kinds of media for
expression and communica.on.
Think which fundamentally new kinds of media have appeared at web 2.0 era?
New media NEW proper)es will be elaborated…

14. Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (1962)
• Sutherland’s PhD thesis: Sketchpad: A man‐
machine graphical communica-on system.
• a communica.on system between two en..es:
a human and an intelligent machine to draw
images
• The commercial desktop applica)ons that made
soware‐based media authoring and design
widely available to members of different crea)ve
professions and, eventually, media consumers
• Word (1984), PageMaker (1985), Photoshop
(1989)

15. Negroponte (1995), Being Digital
• Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab
• One Laptop Per Child
• the back page for WIRED columns
• Book Being Digital, 1995
• humanity is inevitably headed towards a future
where everything that can will be digitalized
• touch‐screen technology as a future interface
• hJp://archives.obs‐us.com/obs/english/books/
nn/bdcont.htm

16. Bits from Being Digital, 1995
• In the post‐informa)on age, we oen have an audience the size
of one and informa.on is extremely personalized.
• In being digital I am me.. Me includes informa.on and events…
But that unique informa)on about me determines news services I
might want to receive. True personaliza.on is now upon us.
• The next decade will see cases of intellectual‐property abuse and
invasion of our privacy.
• As the business world globalizes and the Internet grows, we will
start to see a seamless digital workplace
• Think of hypermedia as a collec)on of elas.c messages that can
stretch and shrink in accordance with the reader's ac.ons.
• Being digital has four very powerful quali)es that will result in its
ul)mate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and
empowering.

17. Shis how to look at new media
• Digital mys.cism: a special brand of technological
determinism in which digitality and soHware are
considered to be ontologically immaterial determinants of
new media.
• New media marked a shi from the material to the
immaterial (‘hyper’, ‘virtual’, ‘cyber’), a general
transforma)on of atoms into bits (Negroponte, 1995) and
of ma_er into mind (Barlow, 1996).
• From an op.mis.c utopian perspec.ve – poin)ng to the
emergence of virtual communi)es, new democracy, and a
new economy – or from a more pessimis.c and dystopian
angle – with warnings against the digital divide, informa)on
glut, and ubiquitous surveillance.
Digital material: Tracing New Media in Everyday life and technology (2008). Eds.
Marianne van den Boomen et al.

18. Lev Manovich: The Language of New
Media
• Lev Manovich,
The Language of New Media The
MIT Press, 2001.
• The computer, as the new
universal media machine, is
producing new discourses and new
terms, and thus a new “language”

19. New media may look like media, but
this is only the surface.”
• Wrong trend to treat the cultural products of
computer (word processing documents, cinema
with digital special effects, hypertext) as nothing
more than old media enhanced by the flexibility
and transportability of digital code and a global
network.
• The computer suggests the rela.ve autonomy of
computable informa.on from its media
“surface” ‐ computer running soware produces
digital code which simply is not a medium

20. The “trasncoding” zone between
culture and soware
• Manovich (2001): The five principles of new
media characterize that zone between, across
which the transport between computer and
culture is happening
• His topology of new media is based on a self‐
conscious analogy to the conven.onal
“levels” of the computer hardware and
soware (from microprocessor through
opera)ng system to high level applica)on).

21. Manovich (2001): The five principles of
new media
• First, through numerical representa.on, a
new object can be described formally
(mathema)cally), and subject to algorithmic
manipula)on: “in short, media becomes
programmable.”

22. Manovich (2001): The five principles of
new media
• Second, new media objects have modularity at
the level of representa.on and at the level of
code.
• Thus, new media objects are composed from an
assemblage of elements that sustain their
separate iden)ty, and can be operated upon
separately, without rendering the rest of the
assemblage unusable.
• Modular programming speeds the development
and maintenance of large‐scale soware.

23. Manovich (2001): The five principles of
new media
• Thirdly, numerical coding and modularity
“allow for the automa.on of many opera.ons
involved in media crea.on, manipula.on,
and access.”

24. Manovich (2001): The five principles of
new media
• Fourthly, while old media depended upon an
original construc)on of an object that could
then be exactly reproduced (for example as
printed book or photograph), new media is
characterized by variability.
• The variability of new media allows for
branching‐type interac.vity, periodic
updates, and scalability as to size or detail.

25. Manovich (2001): The five principles of
new media
• Fih, new media finds itself at the center of
the “transcoding” between the layers of the
computer and the layers of culture.
• The “computeriza)on of culture gradually
accomplishes similar transcoding in rela)on to
all cultural categories and subjects.”

26. interac)vity
• closed interac.vity uses fixed elements arranged
in a fixed branching structure.
• In the case of branching interac.vity, the user
plays an ac)ve role in determining the order in
which the already generated elements are
accessed.
• more complex kinds [of interac.vity] are also
possible where both the elements and the
structure of the whole object are either modified
or generated on the fly in response to user's
interac)on with a program.

27. interac)vity
• When we use the concept of “interac)ve media” exclusively
in rela)on to computer‐based media, there is danger that
we interpret "interac.on" literally, equa.ng it with
physical interac.on between a user and a media object
(pressing a bu_on, choosing a link, moving the body), at
the sake of psychological interac.on ‐ the psychological
processes which are required for us to comprehend any
text or image at all
• Interac)ve computer media aims to rely on and externalize
and objec.fy mind’s opera.ons.
• The interac)ve media asks us to iden)fy with somebody's
else mental structure. A computer user is asked to follow
the mental trajectory of a new media designer.
In the next lectures we look theories about our cogni)ve processes
in rela)on with new media

28. “cultural interface”
• The interface is habitually the crucial boundary,
or zone of ar)cula)on and transla)on whenever
a computer would communicate with
technological devices or the human user
• “Cultural interfaces”, not just the diverse
soHware interfaces of new media but also the
formal traits and user prac.ces with the printed
word and cinema, can migrate into, and become
part of, the interfaces of new media.
William B. Warner

29. “cultural interface”
• “While opera.ons [like selec)on] are
embedded in soHware, they are not )ed to it.
They are employed no only within the
computer but also in the social world outside
it. They are not only ways of working within
the computer but also in the social world
outside it. They are… general ways of working,
ways of thinking, ways of exis)ng the
computer age.”

30. “cultural interface”
• 1. Specify the soware technique and
underlying technology of new media
• 2. open these techniques and technologies
out to the broader cultural prac)ces
• From media studies, we move to something
which can be called soware studies; from
media theory — to soHware theory.

31. Culture and cultural theory becomes
“open source”
• While on the one hand new media strengthens exis)ng
cultural forms and languages, it simultaneously
“opens” them up for redefini)on.
• What was previously in the background, on the
margins, comes into the center
• New media turns all culture and cultural theory into
“open source.” This “opening up” of all cultural
techniques, conven.ons, forms and concepts is
ul)mately the most posi)ve cultural effect of
computeriza)on — the opportunity to see the world
and the human being anew, in ways which were not
available before

32. Lev Manovich. Soware Takes
Command ‐ 2008
• In the end of the 20th century humans have
added a fundamentally new dimension to
their culture. This dimension is soHware in
general, and applica)on soware for crea)ng
and accessing content in par)cular.
• “Adding” soHware to culture changes the
iden)ty of everything which a culture is made
from.

33. Lev Manovich. Soware Takes
Command ‐ 2008
• SoHware: Search engines, recommenda)on
systems, mapping applica)ons, blog tools,
auc)on tools, instant messaging clients, and
playorms which allow others to write new
soware – Facebook, Windows, Unix, Android
– are in the center of the global economy,
culture, social life, and, increasingly, poli.cs.

34. Lev Manovich. Soware Takes
Command ‐ 2008
• Soware (with the excep)on of Open Source
movement) is s.ll invisible to most academics,
ar)sts, and cultural professionals interested in IT
and its cultural and social effects.
• If we don’t address soHware itself, we are in
danger of always dealing only with its effects
rather than the causes: the output that appears
on a computer screen rather than the programs
and social cultures that produce these outputs.

35. “cultural soware”
• Defini)on: “Cultural soware” means
soHware programs which are used to create
and access media objects and environments.
• “Cultural soware” is soware directly used
by hundreds of millions of people and that it
carries “atoms” of culture (media and
informa.on, as well as human interac.ons
around these media and informa.on).

36. “cultural soware”
• Cultural soware turned media into
metamedia – a fundamentally new semio)c
and technological system which includes most
previous media techniques and aesthe)cs as
its elements
Collabora)ve wri)ng
on one document
wiki
Google‐docs
Edi)ng the digital file Wri)ng on digital paper
Copy
Paste
Edit
Taking turns
Simultaneously
emailing
Views

37. types of “cultural soware”
• Applica.ons for media development (or
“content crea.on”) – It is a subset of
applica)on soware which enables crea)on,
publishing, accessing, sharing, and remixing
images, moving image sequences, 3D designs,
texts, maps, interac)ve elements, as well as
various combina)ons of these elements such
as web sites, 2D designs, mo)on graphics,
video games, commercial and ar)s)c
interac)ve installa)ons, etc.

38. types of “cultural soware”
• The tools for social communica.on and sharing
of media, informa.on, and knowledge such as
web browsers, email clients, instant messaging
clients, wikis, social bookmarking, social cita)on
tools, virtual worlds, and so on ‐ in short, “social
soHware”.
• Such use of the term “social soware” partly
overlaps with but is not equivalent with the way
this term started to be used to refer to Web 2.0
playorms

39. types of “cultural soware”
• Tools for personal informa.on management
such as address books, project management
applica)ons, and desktop search engines.
• The boundary between “personal
informa)on” and “public informa)on” has
started to disappear

40. types of “cultural soware”
• The programming environments also can be
considered under cultural soware.
• The media interfaces themselves – icons,
folders, sounds, anima)ons, and user
interac)ons ‐ are also cultural soware, since
these interface mediate people’s interac)ons
with media and other people.

41. Lev Manovich. Soware Takes
Command ‐ 2008
• Informa)on society, knowledge society, or
network society dimensions are enabled by
cultural soHware.
• The “knowledge workers”, the “symbol analysts”,
the “crea)ve industries”, and the “service
industries” ‐ all these key economic players of
informa)on society can’t exist without cultural
soware.
• Soware is what also drives the process of
globaliza.on.

42. Target of “soware studies”
• “I think of soware as a layer that permeates
all areas of contemporary socie-es.”
• Soware Studies has to inves)gate both the
role of soware in forming contemporary
culture, and cultural, social, and economic
forces that are shaping development of
soware itself.

43. Target of “soware studies”
• I am sugges)ng “soware studies” should not be
confused with “code studies.”
• If we are to focus on soware itself, we need a
new methodology.
• “Soware” is a new object of study which should
be put on the agenda of exis)ng disciplines and
which can be studied using already exis)ng
methods – for instance, object‐network theory,
social semio)cs, or media archeology.

44. “a long tail for applica)ons”
• New technologies allow people with very li_le
or no programming experience to create new
custom soware
• But we are far from a true “long tail” for
soHware
• How soware is shaping our culture, and how
it is shaped by culture in its turn?

45. Soware culture and interac)vity
• Our contemporary society can be
characterized as a soOware society and our
culture can be jus)fiably called a soOware
culture – because today soware plays a
central role in shaping both the material
elements and many of the immaterial
structures which together make up “culture.”
• The most fundamental dimension of soware‐
driven media experience is interac-vity.

46. “soware performances”
• We now interact with dynamic “soware
performances.”
• I use the word “performance” because what we
are experiencing is constructed by soware in
real )me
• The final media experience constructed by
soware can’t be reduced to any single
document stored in some media‐ we are
engaging not with pre‐defined sta)c documents
but with the dynamic outputs of a real)me
computa)on.

47. “soware performances”
• When a user interacts with a soware applica)on
that presents cultural content, this content oen
does not have definite finite boundaries.
• the user’s experience is only partly defined by the
file’s content.
• the “message” which the user “receives” is not
just ac)vely “constructed” by her (through a
cogni)ve interpreta)on) but also ac)vely
“managed” (defining what informa)on she is
receiving and how)

48. representa)on
• Manovich (2008): As experienced by a user of
interac)ve applica)on, “representa)on”
consists from two interlinked parts:
– media structured in par.cular ways and
– the interfaces/tools provided to navigate and
work with this media.

49. “deep remixability”
• The move from desktop applica)ons to webware
(applica)ons running on the web), social media
sites, easy‐to‐use blogging and media edi)ng
tools such as Blogger, iPhoto and iMovie and the
addi)on of full media capabili)es to mobile
phones – have transformed how ordinary people
use media.
• What gets remixed today is not only content from
different media but also their fundamental
techniques, working methods, and ways of
representa)on and expression.

50. modularity
• “content wants to be modular”
• Modularity is supported by the standardiza)on of
parts and how they fit with each other
• Although we see a number of important new types of
cultural modularity emerged in soware era, it is
important to remember that modularity is something
that only applies to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web
Services. We are talking about the larger cultural logic
that extends beyond the Web and digital culture.
• What seems to be happening is that the "users”
themselves have been gradually "modularizing”
culture. In other words, modularity has been coming
into mass culture from the outside, so to speak,
rather than being built‐in, as in industrial produc)on.

51. Openness of new media
• “New media” is “new” because new proper)es
(i.e., new soware techniques) can always be
easily added to it (Manovich, 2008)
• Experimenta)ons with media during the
industrial era became the norm in a soware
society:
• Phase 1: ini)al inven)on, new media form
• Phase 2: everyday use
• Phase 3: “opening up” for new use or inven)ons

52. media hybridiza-on
• Manovich (2008): I believe that we are now
living through a second stage in the evolu)on
of a computer metamedium, which follows
the first stage of its inven)on and
implementa)on. This new stage is about
media hybridiza-on.
• I am not talking about something that already
has a name ‐ “computer mul)media,” or
simply “mul)media.”

53. hybrid media
• I’m pu|ng forward the term hybrid media
• Media hybridity is a more fundamental
reconfigura)on of media universe than
mul)media:
– In mul)media documents and interac)ve applica)ons,
content in mul)ple media appears next to each other,
mul-media does not threaten the autonomy of
different media
– In contrast, in the case of media hybrids, interfaces,
techniques, and ul)mately the most fundamental
assump)ons of different media forms and tradi)ons
are brought together resul)ng in new species of
media.
Manovich, 2008

54. hybrid media
• To represent something differently: to
reconfigure media formats in order to create
new representa-ons of human collec-ve and
individual experiences which fuse objec)ve
and subjec)ve dimensions
• To provide new ways of naviga-on and
working with exis-ng media formats i.e. new
interfaces and tools

55. Step 4
• The replacement of mass consump*on of
commercial culture in the 20th century by mass
produc*on of cultural objects by users in the
early 21st century
• People build their worlds and iden))es out of
these readily available objects by using different
tac)cs: bricolage, assembly, customiza.on,
remix
• Products are explicitly designed to be customized
by the users

56. Co‐evolving in larger techno‐social
ecology
• the computer metamedium development is like a
biological evolu)on, and the new combina)ons of
media elements are like new biological species
• some hybrids that emerge in the course of media
evolu)on will not be “selected” and will not
“replicate.”
• Other hybrids, on the other hand, may “survive” and
successfully “replicate.” Eventually such successful
hybrids may become the common conven)ons in
media design
• I am not making any claims that the actual mechanisms
of media evolu)on are indeed like the mechanisms of
biological evolu)on.)

57. Co‐evolving in larger techno‐social
ecology
• None of the soware programs and web sites func)on
in isola)on but par)cipate in larger techno‐social
ecology as a whole.
• The par)cular elements and their rela)onship in this
ecology are likely to change over )me – for instance,
most media content may eventually be available on the
network; communica)on between devices may
similarly become fully transparent; and the very rigid
physical separa)on between people, devices they
control, and “non‐smart” passive space may become
blurred

58. Changes at web 2.0
• The new paradigms that emerge in the 2000s are
not about new types of media soware per ce.
• Instead, they have to with the exponen)al
expansion of the number of people who now use
it – and the web as a new universal playorm for
non‐professional media circula)on.
• “Social soware,” “social media,” “user‐generated
content,” “Web 2.0,” “read/write Web” are some
of the terms that were coined in this decade to
capture these developments.

59. Func)onally: aggrega)on of
microcontents across domains
• Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter (2005),
“Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which
informa.on is broken up into “microcontent”
units that can be distributed over dozens of
domains.
• The Web of documents has morphed into a Web
of data.
• We are no longer just looking to the same old
sources for informa)on. Now we’re looking to a
new set of tools to aggregate and remix
microcontent in new and useful ways.”

60. Changes at web 2.0
• A much large number of producers publish
content into “a global media cloud”; the users
create personalized mixes by choosing from this
cloud.
• In the new communica)on model that has been
emerging aer 2000, informa.on is becoming
more atomized. You can access individual atoms
of informa)on without having to read/view the
larger packages in which it is enclosed.
• informa.on is gradually becoming presenta.on
and device independent

61. CO‐EVOLVING TECHNO‐SOCIAL ECOLOGY

62. Marshall McLuhan: modern media
theory
• The GuJenberg Galaxy: the making of
typographic man (1962)
• Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man
(1964)

63. Marshall McLuhan: modern media
theory
• McLuhan is rooted in the transmission” view of
culture that describes mass communica)on (and
some)mes culture in general) as a
communica)on process between the authors
who create “messages” and audiences that
“receive” them.
• McLuhan claims that the centrality of the
physical medium of communica.on: media
(environment) determines (human) culture
• His central point is: what media do in the mind

64. McLuhan (1964): Understanding
Media: the extensions of Man
• Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the
extensions of man‐‐ the technological
simula)on of consciousness, when the
crea)ve process of knowing will be collec)vely
and corporately extended to the whole of
human society
• Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot,
affects the whole psychic and social complex.

65. Global village as our extension
• By pu|ng our physical bodies inside our
extended nervous systems, by means of
electric media, we set up a dynamic by which
all previous technologies that are mere
extensions of hands and feet and teeth and
bodily heat‐controls‐‐all such extensions of
our bodies, including ci.es‐‐will be translated
into informa.on systems.

66. McLuhan (1964): Understanding
Media: the extensions of Man
• Our private and corporate lives have become
informa)on processes just because we have put our
central nervous systems outside us in electric
technology.
• As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a
village.
• This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric
implosion that compels commitment and
par.cipa.on, quite regardless of any "point of view."
The par)al and specialized character of the viewpoint,
however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age.

67. McLuhan (1964): Understanding
Media: the extensions of Man
• We actually live mythically and integrally, as it
were, but we con.nue to think in the old,
fragmented space and .me paZerns of the
pre‐electric age.
• Myth is contrac)on or implosion of any
process, and the instant speed of electricity
confers the mythic dimension on ordinary
industrial and social ac)on today.

68. • "You see, Dad, Professor
McLuhan says the
environment that man
creates becomes his
medium for defining his
role in it. The inven-on of
type created linear, or
sequen-al, thought,
separa-ng thought from
ac-on. Now, with TV and
folk singing, thought and
ac-on are closer and
social involvement is
greater. We again live in a
village. Get it?"
Drawing by Alan Dunn.; © 1966 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

69. Communi)es speed up informa)on
transport and gain control of it
• The use of any kind of medium or extension of
man alters the pa_erns of interdependence
among people, as it alters the ra)os among
our senses.
• The altera)on of social groupings, and the
forma)on of new communi)es, occur with the
increased speed of informa)on movement.
Such speed‐up means much more control at
much greater distances.
Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964)

70. Disintegra)on
• Speed‐up creates what some economists refer to as a
center‐margin structure. When this becomes too
extensive for the genera)ng and control center, pieces
begin to detach themselves and to set up new center‐
margin systems of their own (Arnold Toynbee, A Study
of History).
• Lack of homogeneity in speed of informa)on
movement creates diversity of pa_erns in organiza)on.
• It seems obvious enough that technical means of
speed‐up should wipe out the independence of villages
and city‐states. Electric speeds create centers
everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet.
Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964)

71. Speedup creates global village
• The principal factors in media impact on exis.ng
social forms are accelera.on and disrup.on. Today
the accelera)on tends to be total, and thus ends space
as the main factor in social arrangements.
• Our speed‐up today is not a slow explosion outward
from center to margins but an instant implosion and
an interfusion of space and func.ons. Our specialist
and fragmented civiliza)on of center‐margin structure
is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous
reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic
whole. This is the new world of the global village.

72. “the medium is the message”
• …the medium is the message. This is merely to
say that the personal and social consequences
of any medium‐‐ that is, of any extension of
ourselves ‐‐ result from the new scale that is
introduced into our affairs by each extension
of ourselves, or by any new technology.
• For the "message" of any medium or
technology is the change of scale or pace or
paZern that it introduces into human affairs.

73. “the medium is the message”
• Indeed, it is only too typical that the "content"
of any medium blinds us to the character of
the medium.
• “The medium is the message" because it is the
medium that shapes and controls the scale
and form of human associa)on and ac)on.
The content or uses of such media are as
diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the
form of human associa)on.

74. “the medium is the message”
• Our conven)onal response to all media,
namely that it is how they are used that
counts, is the numb stance of the
technological idiot.
• The intensifica)on of one sense by a new
medium can hypno)ze an en)re community.
• For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy
piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract
the watchdog of the mind.

75. “the medium is the message”
• Submerging na)ves with floods of concepts for
which nothing has prepared them is the normal
ac)on of all of our technology. But with electric
media Western man himself experiences exactly
the same inunda)on as the remote na)ve. We
are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV
in our literate milieu than the na)ve of Ghana is
able to cope with the literacy that takes him out
of his collec)ve tribal world and beaches him in
individual isola)on. We are as numb in our new
electric world as the na.ve involved in our
literate and mechanical culture.

76. Hybrid media
• The effects of technology do not occur at the level of
opinions or concepts, but alter sense ra.os or paZerns
of percep.on steadily and without any resistance.
• The effect of the medium is made strong and intense
just because it is given another medium as "content."
• The hybrid or the mee.ng of two media is a moment of
truth and revela)on from which new form is born.
• The moment of the mee)ng of media is a moment of
freedom and release from the ordinary trance and
numbness imposed by them on our senses.

77. Hybrid media
• Media, being extensions of ourselves, also
depend upon us for their interplay and their
evolu.on.
• All media to reshape any lives that they touch
– The electric light ended the regime of night and day, of
indoors and out‐of‐doors. But it is when the light
encounters already exis-ng paJerns of human
organiza-on mat the hybrid energy is released. Cars
can travel all night, ball players can play all night, and
windows can be leO out of buildings. In a word, the
message of the electric light is total change.

78. THE GADGET LOVER
• Men at once become fascinated by any extension
of themselves in any material other than
themselves.
• The func)on of the body, as a group of sustaining
and protec)ve organs for the central nervous
system, is to act as buffers against sudden
varia.ons of s.mulus in the physical and social
environment. Sudden social failure or shame is a
shock signaling for the person to withdraw from
the threatening situa)on.

79. THE GADGET LOVER
• With the arrival of electric technology, man
extended, or set outside himself, a live model of
the central nervous system itself. To the degree
that this is so, it is a development that suggests a
desperate and suicidal autoamputa.on.
• Any inven)on or technology is an extension or
self‐amputa)on of our physical bodies, and such
extension also demands new ra.os or new
equilibriums among the other organs and
extensions of the body.

80. THE GADGET LOVER
• Physiologically, man in the normal use of
technology (or his variously extended body) is
perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever
new ways of modifying his technology.
• Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the
machine world, as the bee of the plant world,
enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new
forms.
• The machine world reciprocates man's love by
expedi.ng his wishes and desires, namely, in
providing him with wealth.

81. New media surgery
• For massive social surgery is needed to insert new technology
into the group mind
• The new media and technologies by which we amplify and
extend ourselves cons)tute huge collec.ve surgery carried out
on the social body with complete disregard for an)sep)cs.
• So it is in our social lives when a new technology strikes, or in
our private life when some intense and, therefore, indiges)ble
experience occurs, and the censor acts at once to numb us from
the blow and to ready the facul.es to assimilate the intruder.
• Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is
like handing over the common speech to a private corpora.on,
or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a
monopoly.
Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964)

82. “the medium is the massage”
• the transforma)on of the 1st
slogan into its soma)c
extension: emphasizing the way
the physical contours of a
medium condi)ons produc)on,
use and experience of media
• how bodies can dispose
themselves while
communica)ng

83. The wheel…
…. is the extension of the foot
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ra)os of
sense percep)ons. The extension of any one sense alters the way
we think and act— the way we perceive the world.
When these ra)os change, men change.

84. Shaped by the nature of the media
• Socie.es have always been shaped more by the
nature of the media by which men communicate
than by the content of the communica)on.
• In the name of progress our official culture is
striving to force the new media to do the work of
the old.
• We approach the new with the psychological
condi.oning and sensory responses of the old.

85. Globaliza)on
• new media
drives the
globaliza)on
• the globalized
public sphere
• making physical
loca)on much
less significant
for our social
rela)onships
From “Media is the massage”

86. New media encourages unifica)on and
involvement
• The medium, or process, of our )me—electric
technology—is reshaping and restructuring
paZerns of social interdependence and every
aspect of our personal life.
• It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate
prac)cally every thought, every ac)on, and
every ins)tu)on formerly taken for granted.
• Electric technology fosters and encourages
unifica.on and involvement.

87. our claim to privacy versus the
community's need to know
• Electrical informa)on devices for universal,
tyrannical womb‐to‐tomb surveillance are causing
a very serious dilemma between our claim to
privacy and the community's need to know. The
older, tradi)onal ideas of private, isolated thoughts
and ac)ons—the pa_erns of mechanis)c
technologies—are very seriously threatened by
new methods of instantaneous electric informa)on
retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier
bank—that one big gossip column that is
unforgiving, unforgeul and from which there is
no redemp.on, no erasure of early "mistakes."

88. You can't go home again
• Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of
")me" and "space" and pours upon us
instantly and con.nuously the concerns of all
other men. It has recons)tuted dialogue on a
global scale.
• The old civic, state, and na)onal groupings
have become unworkable.
• You can't go home again.

89. crea)ve, par)cipa)ng force
• The public, in the sense of a great consensus of
separate and dis)nct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the
mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be
used as a crea.ve, par.cipa.ng force.
• The shock of recogni)on! In an electric informa)on
environment, minority groups can no longer be
contained—ignored. Too many people know too much
about each other. Our new environment compels
commitment and par.cipa.on. We have become
irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each
other.

90. The role of technology?
• The environment as a processor of
informa)on is propaganda. Propaganda ends
where dialogue begins. You must talk to the
media, not to the programmer.
• To talk to the programmer is like complaining
to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how
badly your favorite team is playing.
How is this McLuhan’s claim in accordance with the assump)ons of Manovich
about the role of soware?

91. Temporary train sta)on (Manovich,
2008)
• If a tradi)onal twen)eth century model of cultural
communica.on described movement of informa.on
in one direc.on from a source to a receiver,
• …now the recep.on point is just a temporary sta.on
on informa.on’s path.
• If we compare informa)on or media object with a
train, then each receiver can be compared to a train
sta.on.
• Informa)on arrives, gets remixed with other
informa)on, and then the new package travels to other
des)na)on where the process is repeated.

92. Manuel Castells: The Informa-on Age:
Economy, Society and Culture
• The Rise of the Network Society (1996)
• The Power of Iden-ty (1997)
• End of Millennium (1998)
• "Our socie)es are increasingly structured
around the bipolar opposi)on of the Net and
the Self"

93. Manuel Castells (1989): the “space of
places”, versus the “space of flows”
• Space is not a refec)on of the society, it is its
expressions.
• Spa.al forms and processes are formed by the
dynamics of the overall social structure.
• Social processes influence space by ac)ng on the built
environment inherited from the previous social‐spa)al
structures.
• A new industrial space is the changed forma)on of the
space as a consequence of technological innova)ons
• h_p://www.scribd.com/doc/22569859/The‐Space‐of‐
Flows‐Manuel‐Castells

94. “space of flows”
• The informa)on age is ushering in a new urban form,
the informa)onal city.
• The new society is based upon knowledge, organized
around networks, and largely made up of flows.
• Flow is a purposeful, repe))ve, programmable
sequence of exchange and interac)on between social
actors
• The “space of flows” is the material organiza.on of
.me‐sharing social prac.ces that work through flows.
• “the space of flows” . . . links up distant locales around
shared func)ons and meanings on the basis of
electronic circuits and fast transporta)on corridors,
while isola)ng and subduing the logic of experience
embodied in the “space of places”.

95. “space of flows”
• In the network of interac)on no place exists
by itself, since the posi)ons are defined by
flows.
• Places do not disappear, but their logic and
meaning becomes adsorbed in the network.
• The space of flow is not placeless – some
places are exchangers, communica.on hubs;
other places are nods of the network for
strategically important func)ons.

96. Space of flows
• A place is a locale, people s)ll live in places but
func.on and power in socie.es are organized in
the space of flows.
• The global city is not a place, it’s a process. A
process by which centers of produc)ons and
consump)ons of advanced services, and their
ancillary local socie)es are connected in a global
network, while simultaneously downplaying the
linkages with their hitherlands, on the basis of
informa)on flows.

97. "Internet galaxy"
• Castells created the term "Internet galaxy" by
analogy to media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s
term, "Gutenberg galaxy."
• McLuhan used the term to describe a complex set
of social changes in European society that
resulted from the development of the prin)ng
press.
• Castells’s book )tle implicitly signals that he
believes the Internet is as significant as
Gutenberg’s movable‐type prin.ng press.

98. Manuel Castells
• The Internet Galaxy (2001), a book by Manual
Castells
• "Networks are very old forms of human prac)ce,
but they have taken on a new life in our )me by
becoming informa)on networks, powered by the
Internet.
• the Net is crea)ng a new form of "networked
individualism" by helping Ne)zens develop
"poryolios of sociability" and "communi)es of
choice."

99. Manuel Castells
• The elas.city of the Internet makes it
par)cularly suscep)ble to intensifying the
contradictory trends present in our world.
Neither utopia nor dystopia, the Internet is
the expression of ourselves ‐ through a
specific code of communica)on, which we
must understand if we want to change our
reality,"

100. Technological determinism?
• "The culture of the Internet is made up of a
technocra)c belief in the progress of humans through
technology, enacted by communi)es of hackers
thriving on free and open technological crea)vity,
embedded in virtual networks aimed at reinven)ng
society, and materialized by money‐driven
entrepreneurs into the workings of the new economy,"
• "Technological systems are socially produced. The
Internet is, above all else, a cultural crea)on. The
Internet culture today is characterized by a four‐layer
structure: the techno‐meritocra)c culture, the hacker
culture, the virtual communitarian culture, and the
entrepreneurial culture,”

101. Ques)ons to answer in the end:
• What characterizes new media?
• New media – a technology or culture?
• Examine cri)cally new media defini)ons – can
YOU define what is new media?