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

Volume Five
ISSN 1601-829X
Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook | Volume Five

Northern Lights
Volume 5 – 2007
Volume 5
3 Introduction
Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald
7–24 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
Northern
Adam Arvidsson and Kjetil Sandvik
105–118 On transdiegetic sounds in computer games
Kristine Jørgensen
Lights
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 Contributors
Film & Media Studies Yearbook 2007
intellect Journals | Film Studies

ISSN 1601-829X
05
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Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook

Volume 5, 2007
Digital Aesthetics and Communication Journal Editors

Ib Bondebjerg
Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook is a peer-reviewed international Department of Media, Cognition and
yearbook started in 2002 and dedicated to studies of film and media. Each yearbook Communication
is devoted to a specific theme. In addition, every volume may include articles on other Section of Film and Media Studies
topics as well as review articles. The yearbook wants to further interdisciplinary University of Copenhagen
studies of media with a special emphasis on film, television and new media. Since the Njalsgade 80, 2300 Copenhagen S
yearbook was founded in Scandinavia, the editors feel a special obligation towards Phone: +45 35328102
Scandinavian and European perspectives. But in a global media world it is important Fax: +45 35328110
to have a global perspective on media culture. The yearbook is therefore open to all Mobile: +4524421168
relevant aspects of film and media culture: we want to publish articles of excellent Email: bonde@hum.ku.dk
quality that are worth reading and have direct relevance for both academics in the Web: www.mef.ku.dk
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 Guest Editors
in thorough and well-written articles on film and other media.
Arild Fetveit, Department of Media,
Cognition and Communication,
Editorial Board:
University of Copenhagen,
Ib Bondebjerg, Editor-in-chief (Department of Media, Cognition and
Email: fetveit@hum.ku.dk
Communication, Section of Film and Media Studies, University of Copenhagen),
e-mail: bonde@hum.ku.dk
Gitte Bang Stand, IT-university of
Torben Kragh Grodal (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication,
Copenhagen,
University of Copenhagen, Section of Film and Media Studies)
Email: stald@itu.dk
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)
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, ISSN 1601-829X
Denmark), Eva Warth (University of Bochum, Germany)
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Notes for Contributors

Editorial process
All articles submitted for NL must be original Punctuation marks should always be placed within Abbreviations
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elsewhere. The journal is a refereed, international (practice as research)
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not included. shown as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. The source has to be in roman type enclosed in single quote marks.
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Top of article: authors name in italics. submitted as illustrations for articles. However, programs. The following samples indicate
Before article: short introduction, in italics, max. colour prints, transparencies and small images can conventions for the most common types of
75 words. be submitted if you need to supply these. reference:
Photocopies are never advisable, but may be okay
Keywords – six words, or two-word phrases, that for diagrams. They are never acceptable for Anon (1931). Les films de la semaine. Tribune de
are at the core of what is being discussed. There is photographs. Line drawings, maps, diagrams, etc. Genéve, p. 15 (January 28).
a serious reduction in an article’s ability to be should be crisp, clear and in a camera-ready state,
searched for if the keywords are missing. capable of scanning and reduction. Although not Cabrera, D. (1998a). Table Ronde de l’APA. La
ideal, slides are certainly acceptable. Faute á Rousseau: ‘Le secret’, 18 (1),
Insert abstract after notes and references, in italics, pp. 28-29.
max 150 words. If images are supplied electronically, all images
need to have a resolution of at least 12 dpm (dots Cabrera, D. (1998b). Une chambre á soi. Trafic, 26
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Headings, Paragraphs and sections figure showing the number of pixels across the
Bold is used for title of article (bold, size 14). Bold width of the image, a figure independent of Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990). To Desire Differently:
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sub-headings, use italics (size 12). If further level multiplying the width of the image in millimetres Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
is needed, use normal (size 12). required for reproduction in the journal by 12, or in
inches by 300. This is the actual information Grande, M. (1998). Les Images non-dérivées. In
A new paragraph is indicated by a carriage return available that allows the production team to offset Fahle, O (ed.), Le Cinéma selon Gilles Deleuze.
and one tabulator indent. A new section is resolution (dpm or dpi) against width. Paris: Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 284-
indicated by two carriage returns (a blank line). 302.
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Orthography greyscale to save time uploading and downloading. Gibson, R., Nixon, P. & Ward, S. (eds.) (2003).
The Journal follows standard British English. But Tables should be supplied either within the Word Political Parties and the Internet: Net Gain?.
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language checking for UK-English or American documents. These can then be extracted and
can be used. Use ‘ize’ endings in stead of ‘ise’, reproduced. Reproducing text within images Hayward, S. (1993). French National Cinema. 2nd
when there is an option for that. supplied separately is difficult: they need a high edn. New York and Paris: Routledge.
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References Acrobat PDF document is encouraged. The PDF is
All references in the text should be according to a good proof copy that can also be used for Hottel, R. (1999). Including Ourselves: The Role
the Harvard system, e.g., (Bordwell, 1989: 9). reproduction if the table is exactly as it should be, of Female Spectators in Agnés Varda’s ‘Le
Book titles are italicized, with the main words but if editing is necessary, this can be done in bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas. Cinema
capitalized. The titles of articles are placed in Word if there is a small spelling error or if a Journal, 38(2), 52-72.
double quotation marks, with the main words statistical error is identified later. Diagrams are
capitalized, e.g., Gunning introduces these ideas in difficult to construct in Word. Diagrams are best Roussel, R. (1996), Locus Solus, Paris: Gallimard.
an article from 1983, “An Unseen Energy constructed in an object-oriented computer (Originally published 1914).
Swallows Space.” See also the sample references program rather than a text-oriented one. Diagrams
below. can be supplied to us as JPEG, TIFF or Acrobat Stroöter-Bender, J. (1995). L’Art contemporain dans
PDF documents. If a mistake is identified in a les pays du ‘Tiers Monde’. (trans. O. Barlet). Paris:
Works mentioned diagram, make the amendments and re-supply. L’Harmattan.
Titles of films, TV-program, literary works etc.
must be italicized. Works like this must be Bullets and numbered lists Mendoza, A. (1994). Las communicaciones en
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one-line space above and below, and without quote 1964–67; 1897–1901 full web reference. In the list of references at the
marks at the beginning or end. Brief quotations nineteenth century, twentieth century, end of your article, the item should read something
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quotation marks. Quotations of more than 50
words are treated as a separate section (blank line Numbers
before and after, no quotation marks, no indent). one to twenty (words); 21–99 (figures); 100, 200 Bondebjerg. (2005). Web Communication and the
thirty, forty, fifty (if expressed as an Public Sphere in a European Perspective. At
‘Scare quotes,’ highlighting or questioning the use of approximation) www.media.ku.dk, accessed February 15, 2005.
a term, are indicated by single quotation marks, also 15 years old
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“To speak of ‘interpretation’ invites misunderstanding 25 per cent
from the outset” (Bordwell 1989: 1). pp. 10–19, 19–21; 102–07, 347–49
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Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd

Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/nl.5.1.3/2
Introduction
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
NL 5 3–6 © Intellect Ltd 2007 3

1. However, it is not their particular ways, take a historical and comparative approach, exploring
always evident that
continuities and relations between past and present rather than complete
the double logic of
immediacy and breaks. Thus, they position themselves against an early tendency to dismiss
hypermediacy is vital the importance of historical precedents for digital media in the interest of
to the way emphasizing their revolutionary newness. Bolter and Grusin, as well as
remediation takes
Manovich, counter such tendencies in their own particular ways, and seek
place. This suggests
that the concept of to position ‘new media’ in an aesthetic and cultural history of western
remediation has visual culture spanning all the way back to the Renaissance, in the case of
wider relevance than Bolter and Grusin, and with a major interest in how cinematic language is
what the terms
continued in digital media, in the case of Manovich. In the beginning of his
immediacy and
hypermediacy would book, Manovich (2001: xv) proposes an examination of the idea that
initially suggest. ‘cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a
According to their story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means
preface, the origin of
by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data’. Critics
the book was a
seminar on have generally taken this to indicate that Manovich has a skewed view of
multimediacy (which the importance of cinema, rather than realizing the potential usefulness of
later became pushing such an idea for its explorative purposes, understanding that the
hypermediacy)
cinematic paradigm is first of all prominent in the opening and the closing
offered by Grusin, in
which Bolter visited of the book, as Manovich points out in the discussion ending this volume.
discussing Bolter and Grusin pursue a comparative perspective, not by opting for
immediacy. The one particular medium and exploring how it informs ‘new media’, but
concept of
through historicizing mediation across any previous divide between the art
remediation was then
developed later. This world and the world of popular culture. Within this general perspective,
decent explains the they develop a tool for examining the ways in which media histories revisit
central position that new media in the concept of ‘remediation’. Remediation entails ‘the
immediacy and
representation of one medium in another’, they claim, and is ‘a defining
hypermediacy have
been granted. In fact, characteristic of the new digital media’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45).
a theory of Through this definition, the concept structurally sets up a comparative
remediation itself project of assessing ways in which the past revisits the present, well aware
could work well also
that this is a two-way street, so that, for example, televisual features not
by allocating a less
prominent role to only reappear in various ways in websites but television itself also adopts
these terms, although elements from the newer media. Bolter and Grusin further define the
the distinction concept of remediation as being based on a double logic of immediacy and
remains a powerful
hypermediacy. Where the former represents an effort to escape mediation
one, as well as the
related distinction and access reality or whatever is mediated directly, the latter represents an
between looking at opposite logic. In this case, the experience of mediation is sought, and
and looking through multiplied, in ways that bring attention to the process of mediation itself.1
(see Bolter and
Bolter and Grusin’s concept also involves remediation in the sense of
Grusin 1999: iii, 41).
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 Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald

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 cross-
disciplinary 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

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.
6 Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald


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 Action
‘media’, frequently emphasizing how ‘new’digital media may be reproducing Communication
or reformulating ‘old’ analogue media. Through a critical examination of theory
two key contributions – Bolter and Grusin (1999) on remediation and Digital media
Manovich (2001) on the language of new media – this article suggests that History of
much current work under a heading of ‘digital aesthetics’, approaching communication
media as modes of representing reality, rather than as resources for acting in Modality
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.
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 face-
to-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

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 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

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 mid-
nineteenth-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

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

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

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,

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.

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 ‘language-
like’ 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-first-
century 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

cinema?’: ‘Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-

action 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.

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

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

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-to-
face 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 talk-
show 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,

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 Media of
third degree second degree
Figure 1: Media of three degrees.

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 co-
present 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.

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.

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Remediation and the language of new

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

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 Jay David Bolter

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,

and today even popular media forms (MTV, rock-music concerts, mobile-
phone 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 post-
structuralist 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 Jay David Bolter

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

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 avant-
garde. 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 Jay David Bolter

narrative is particularly convincing for those in Hollywood trying to

introduce user participation into conventional broadcast television (so-
called ‘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.

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 Jay David Bolter

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 screen-
based 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

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 computer-
science 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:
34 Jay David Bolter

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.
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

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,
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,
36 Jay David Bolter

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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Alan Kay’s universal media machine

Lev Manovich
Abstract Keywords
While new-media theorists have spend considerable efforts in trying to Simulation
understand the relationships between digital media and older physical and Remediation
electronic media, the important sources – the writing and projects by Ivan Metamedium
Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and other pioneers New-media theory
working in the 1960s and 1970s – remain largely unexamined. What were Alan Kay
their reasons for inventing the concepts and techniques that today make it Xerox PARC
possible for computers to represent, or ‘remediate’ other media? I suggest
that Kay and others aimed to create a particular kind of new media – rather
than merely simulating the appearances of old ones. These new media use
already existing representational formats as their building blocks, while
adding many new previously non-existent properties. At the same time, as
envisioned by Kay, these media are expandable – that is, users themselves
should be able to easily add new properties, as well as to invent new media.
Accordingly, Kay calls computers the first ‘metamedium’ whose content is
‘a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media’.
Medium: Definition 8. a. A specific kind of artistic technique or means of

expression as determined by the materials used or the creative methods involved:
the medium of lithography. b. The materials used in a specific artistic technique:
oils as a medium. (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition)
(Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

(Alan Kay)
Appearance versus function

As a result of the adoption of the GUI (graphical user interface) in the
1980s, software has replaced many other tools and technologies for the
creative professional and it has also given hundreds of millions of people
the ability to create, manipulate, sequence, and share media – but has this
led to the invention of fundamentally new forms of culture? Today,
computer scientists along with media companies are busy inventing
electronic books and interactive television; consumers are happily
purchasing (or downloading for free) music albums and feature films
distributed in digital form, as well as making photographs and video with
their digital cameras and cell phones; office workers are reading PDF
documents that imitate paper. And even at the futuristic edge of digital
culture – inhabited by smart objects and ambient intelligence – traditional

forms persist: Philips showcases ‘smart’ household mirrors which can hold
electronic notes and videos, while its Director of Research dreams about a
normal-looking vase which can hold digital photographs.
In short, the revolution in means of production, distribution, and access
to media has not been accompanied by a similar revolution in the syntax
and semantics of media. It is Alan Kay and his collaborators at PARC (the
Palo Alto Research Centre, formerly ‘Xerox PARC’) that we must call to
task for making digital computers imitate older media. By systematically
developing easy-to-use GUI-based software to create and edit familiar
media types, Kay and others appear to have locked the computer into being
a simulation machine for ‘old media’. Technologies developed at PARC,
such as the bitmapped colour display used as the main computer screen,
laser printing, and the first page description language which eventually led
to Postscript, were conceived to support the computer’s new role as a
machine for the simulation of physical media. To put these developments
in terms of Bolter and Grusin’s very influential book Remediation:
Understanding New Media (1999), we can say that GUI-based software
turned digital computers into what they might call ‘remediation machines’.
Bolter and Grusin define remediation as ‘the representation of one
medium in another’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999). According to their argument,
new media always remediate older forms and therefore, we should not
expect that computers would function any differently. This perspective
emphasizes the continuity between computational media and earlier media
forms. Rather than being separated by different logics, all media –
including computers – follow the same logic of remediation. The only
difference between computers and other media lies in how and what they
remediate. As Bolter and Grusin put this in the first chapter of their book:
‘What is new about digital media lies in their particular strategies for
remediating television, film, photography, and painting.’ In another place in
the same chapter, they make an equally strong statement that leaves no
ambiguity about their position: ‘We will argue that remediation is a
defining characteristic of the new digital media.’
If we consider today all the digital media created both by consumers and
by professionals – digital photography and video shot with inexpensive
cameras and cell phones, the contents of personal blogs and online journals,
illustrations created in Photoshop, feature films cut on AVID, etc. – in terms
of its appearance, digital media indeed often looks to the casual observer
exactly the same way it did before it became digital. Thus, if we limit
ourselves to looking at the surfaces of media, the remediation argument
accurately describes much of what goes on with computational media. But
rather than accepting this condition as an inevitable consequence of the
universal logic of remediation, we should ask why this is the case. In other
words, if contemporary computational media imitates other media, how did
this become possible? There was definitely nothing in the original
theoretical formulations of digital computers by Turing or Von Neumann
about computers imitating other media such as books, photography, or film.
The conceptual and technical gap that separates the first room-sized
computers – used by the military to calculate the shooting tables of anti-
aircraft guns or to crack German communication codes – versus the
contemporary small desktop and laptop computers – used by ordinary
40 Lev Manovich
people to store, edit, and share media – is vast. The contemporary identity 1. Kay has expressed his
ideas in a few articles
of a computer as a media processor took about forty years to emerge, if we
and a large number of
count from 1949 when MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory started to work on its interviews and public
first interactive computers, to 1989 when the first commercial version of lectures. The
Photoshop was released. It took generations of brilliant and very creative following have been
my main primary
thinkers to invent the multitude of concepts and techniques that today make
sources: Alan Kay
it possible for computers to ‘remediate’ other media so well. What were and Adele Goldberg,
their reasons for doing this? What was their thinking? In short, why did ‘Personal Dynamic
these people dedicate their careers to inventing the ultimate ‘remediation Media’, IEEE
Computer, Vol. 10,
machine’?
No. 3 (March 1977).
I cannot consider the thinking of each of the key figures in the history My quotes are from
of media computing in the space of one article. However, we can take a the reprint of this
closer look at one place where the identity of a computer as a ‘remediation article in New Media
Reader, eds. Noah
machine’ was largely put in place – Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group
Wardrip-Fruin and
at Xerox PARC in operation during the first part of the 1970s. Nick Montfort (The
We can ask two questions: first, what exactly did Kay want to do, and MIT Press, 2003);
second, how did he and his colleagues set about to achieve their aims?1 The Alan Kay, ‘The Early
History of Smalltalk’,
brief answer – which will be expanded below – is that Kay wanted to turn
(HOPL-II/4/93/MA,
computers into a ‘personal dynamic media’ that could be used for learning, 1993); Alan Kay, ‘A
discovery, and artistic creation. His group achieved this by systematically Personal Computer
simulating most existing media within a computer, while simultaneously for Children of All
Ages’, Proceedings of
adding many new properties to these media. Kay and his collaborators also
the ACM National
developed a new type of programming language that, at least in theory, Conference, Boston,
would allow users to quickly invent new types of media using the set of August 1972; Alan
general tools already provided for them. All these tools and simulations of Kay, Doing with
Images Makes
already existing media were given a unified user interface designed to
Symbols (University
activate multiple mentalities and ways of learning, including the Video
kinaesthetic, the iconic, and the symbolic. Communications,
Kay conceived of ‘personal dynamic media’ as a fundamentally new 1987), videotape
(available at
kind of media with a number of historically unprecedented properties, such
http://www.archive.org);
as the ability to store all of the user’s information, simulate all types of Alan Kay, ‘User
media within a single machine and, as Kay and Adele Goldberg put it, Interface: A Personal
‘involve the learner in a two-way conversation’ (Kay and Goldberg 2003: View’, p. 193, in
Brenda Laurel, ed.,
399).2 These properties enable new relationships between the user and the
The Art of Human-
media she may be creating, editing, or viewing on a computer. And this is Computer Interface
essential if we want to understand the relationships between computers and Design (Reading,
earlier media. Briefly put, while visually computational media may closely Mass.’ Addison-
Wesley, 1990), pp.
mimic other media, these media now function in fundamentally different
191–207; David
ways. Canfield Smith et al.,
For instance, consider digital photography that often does in fact imitate ‘Designing the Star
the appearance of traditional photography. For Bolter and Grusin, this is an user Interface’, Byte,
issue 4 (1982).
example of how digital media ‘remediates’ its predecessors. But rather than
2. Since the work of
only paying attention to their appearance, let us think about how digital Kay’s group in the
photographs can function. If a digital photograph is turned into a physical 1970s, computer
object in the world – an illustration in a magazine, a poster on the wall, a scientists, hackers,
and designers added
print on a t-shirt – it functions in the same ways as its predecessor.3 But if
many other unique
we leave the same photograph inside its native computer environment – properties. For
which may be a laptop, a network storage system, or any computer-enabled instance, we can
media device such as a cell phone which allows its user to edit and move it quickly move media
around the Net and
to other devices or the Internet – it can function in ways which, in my view,

share it with millions make it radically different from its traditional equivalent. To use a different
of people using
term, we can say that a digital photograph offers its users many more
Flickr, YouTube, and
other sites. affordances that its non-digital predecessor could. For example, a digital
3. However, consider photograph can be quickly modified in numerous ways, and equally
the following quickly combined with other images; it can be instantly moved around the
examples of things to
world and shared with other people; and it can be inserted into a text
come: ‘Posters in
Japan are being document, or an architectural design. Furthermore, we can automatically –
embedded with tag by running the appropriate algorithms – improve its contrast, make it
readers that receive sharper, and even in some situations remove blur.
signals from the
Note that only some of these new properties are specific to a particular
user’s “IC” tag and
send relevant media – in this case, a digital photograph (i.e. an array of pixels represented
information and free as numbers). Many other properties are shared by a larger class of media
products back’ species: for instance, at the current stage of digital culture, all types of
(Hoshimo 2005: 25).
media files can be attached to an e-mail message. Still others display more
4. The emphasis in this
and all following general features of the current GUI paradigm (which was developed thirty
quotes from this years ago at PARC): for instance, the fast response of the computer to its
article is mine – L.M. user’s actions assure that there will be, as Kay and Goldberg put it, ‘no
discernable pause between cause and effect’ (Kay and Goldberg 2003:
394). Still other features are enabled by network protocols such as TCP-IP
that allow all kinds of computers and other devices to be connected to the
same network. In summary, we can say that only some of the ‘new DNA’
of a digital photograph is due to its particular place of birth, i.e. inside a
digital camera. Many of its other features are the result of the current
paradigm of network computing in general.
‘Simulation is the central notion of the Dynabook’

While Alan Kay has articulated his ideas in a number of articles and talks,
his 1977 article co-authored with one of his main PARC collaborators,
computer scientist Adele Goldberg, is a particularly useful resource if we
want to understand contemporary computational media. In this article, Kay
and Goldberg describe the vision of the Learning Research Group at PARC
in the following way: to create ‘a personal dynamic medium the size of a
notebook (the Dynabook) which could be owned by everyone and would
have the power to handle virtually all of its owner’s information-related
needs’ (Kay and Goldberg 2003: 393).4 Kay and Goldberg ask the readers
to imagine that this device ‘had enough power to outrace your senses of
sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of
page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records,
drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations
and anything else you would like to remember and change’ (Kay and
Goldberg 2003: 394).
In my view, ‘all’ in the first statement is important: it means that the
Dynabook – or the computational media environment in general, regardless
of the size or form of the device in which it is implemented – should
support the viewing, creating , and editing of all possible media that have
traditionally been used for human expression and communication.
Accordingly, while separate programs to create works in different media
were already in existence, Kay’s group for the first time implemented them
all together within a single machine. In other words, Kay’s paradigm was
not to simply create a new type of computer-based media that would
42 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi hasof the

referred to Welles as
coexist with other physical media. Rather, the goal was to establish the 5. This elevation
techniques of
computer as an umbrella, a platform for all already existing expressive
particular media to a
artistic media, which Kay and Goldberg dub the ‘metamedium’. This status of general
paradigm changes our understanding of what media is. From Lessing’s interface conventions
Laocoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) to Nelson can be understood as
the further unfolding
Goodman’s Languages of Art (1968), the modern discourse about media
of the principles
depends on the assumption that different media have distinct properties and developed at PARC
in fact should be understood in opposition to each other. Putting all media in the 1970s. First,
within a single computer environment does not necessarily erase all the PARC team
specifically wanted to
differences in what various media can represent and how they are perceived
have a unified
– but it does bring them closer to each other in a number of ways. Some of interface for all new
these new connections were already apparent to Kay and his colleagues; applications. Second,
others became visible only decades later when the new logic of media set they developed the
idea of ‘universal
in place at PARC unfolded more fully; some are perhaps still not visible to
commands’ such as
us today because they have not been given practical realization. One ‘move’, ‘copy’, and
obvious example of such connections is the emergence of multimedia as a ‘delete’. As described
standard form of communication: web pages, PowerPoint presentations, by the designers of
the Xerox Star
multimedia artworks, mobile multimedia messages, media blogs, and other
personal computer
communication forms which combine media. Another is the rise of released in 1981,
common interface conventions and tools which we use in working with ‘MOVE is the most
different types of media regardless of their origin: for instance, a virtual powerful command
in the system. It is
camera, a magnifying lens, and, of course the omnipresent copy, cut, and
used during text
paste commands.5 Yet another is the ability to map one media into another editing to rearrange
using appropriate software – images into sound, sound into images, letters in a word,
quantitative data into a 3D shape or sound, etc. – used widely today in such words in a sentence,
sentences in a
areas as DJ/VJ/live cinema performance and information visualization.
paragraph, and
This situation is the direct opposite of the modernist media paradigm of the paragraphs in a
early twentieth century, which was focused on discovering the unique document. It is used
language of each artistic medium. All in all, it is as though different media during graphics
editing to move
are actively trying to reach towards each other, exchanging properties and
picture elements,
letting each other borrow their own unique features. such as lines and
Alan Turing theoretically defined a computer as a machine that can rectangles, around in
simulate a very large class of other machines, and it is this simulation an illustration. It is
used during formula
ability that is largely responsible for the proliferation of computers in
editing to move
modern society. But as I have already mentioned, neither he nor other mathematical
theorists and inventors of digital computers explicitly considered that this structures, such as
simulation could also include media. It was only Kay and his generation summations and
integrals, around in
that extended the idea of simulation to media – thus turning the Universal
an equation’ (David
Turing Machine into a Universal Media Machine, so to speak. Accordingly, Canfield Smith et al.,
Kay and Goldberg write: ‘In a very real sense, simulation is the central ‘Designing the Star
notion of the Dynabook’ (Kay and Goldberg 2003: 399). When we use user interface’, Byte,
4: 1 (1982),
computers to simulate some process in the real world – the behaviour of a
pp. 242–82).
weather system, the processing of information in the brain, the deformation
of a car in a crash – our concern is to correctly model the necessary features
of this process or system. We want to be able to test how our model would
behave in different conditions with different data, and the last thing we
want is for the computer to introduce some new property into the model
that we ourselves did not specify. In short, when we use computers as a
general-purpose medium for simulation, we want this medium to be
completely ‘transparent’.

2. Kieslowksimine
has –
6. Emphasis But what happens when we simulate different media in a computer? In
L.M.
this case, the appearance of new properties may be welcome as they can
extend the expressive and communicative potential of these media.
Appropriately, when Kay and his colleagues created computer simulations
of existing physical media – i.e. the tools for representing, creating, editing,
and viewing these media – they ‘added’ many new properties. For instance,
in the case of a book, Kay and Goldberg point out,
It need not be treated as a simulated paper book since this is a new medium with
new properties. A dynamic search may be made for a particular context. The non-
sequential nature of the file medium and the use of dynamic manipulation allows
a story to have many accessible points of view.
(Kay and Goldberg 2003: 395)6
Kay and his colleagues also added various other properties to the computer
simulation of paper documents. As Kay referred to this in another article,
his idea was not to simply imitate paper but rather to create ‘magical paper’
(Kay 1999: 199). For instance, the PARC team gave users the ability to
modify the fonts in a document and create new fonts. They also
implemented another important idea that was already developed by
Douglas Engelbart’s team in the 1960s: the ability to create different views
of the same structure (I will discuss this in more detail below). And both
Engelbart and Ted Nelson also already ‘added’ something else: the ability
to connect different documents or different parts of the same document
through hyperlinking – i.e. what we now know as hypertext and
hypermedia. Engelbart’s group also developed the ability for multiple users
to collaborate on the same document. This list goes on and on: e-mail in
1965, newsgroups in 1979, the World Wide Web in 1991, and so on.
Each of these new properties has far-reaching consequences. Take
‘search’, for instance. Although the ability to search through a page-long
text document does not sound like a very radical innovation, as the
document gets longer, this ability becomes more and more important. It
becomes absolutely crucial if we have a very large collection of documents
– such as all the web pages available today. Although current search engines
are far from being perfect and new technologies will continue to evolve,
imagine how different the culture of the Web would be without them.
Or take the capacity to collaborate on the same document(s) by a
number of users connected to the same network. While it was already
widely used by companies in the 1980s and 1990s, it was not until early
2000s that the larger public saw the real cultural potential of this ‘addition’
to print media. By harvesting the small amounts of labour and expertise
contributed by a large number of volunteers, social software projects –
most famously, Wikipedia – created vast and dynamically updatable pools
of knowledge which would be impossible to create in traditional ways. In
a less visible way, every time we do a search on the Web and then click on
some of the results, we also contribute to a knowledge set used by
everybody else – since in deciding the sequence in which to present the
results of a particular search, Google’s algorithms take into account those
among the results of previous searches for the same words people found
most useful.
44 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi hasvideo
Studying the writings and public presentations of the people who 7. The complete
of Douglas
invented interactive media computing – Sutherland, Engelbart, and Kay –
Engelbart’s 1968
makes it clear that they did not come with new properties of computational demo is available at
media as an afterthought. On the contrary, they knew that they were turning http://sloan.stanford.
physical media into new media. In 1968, Engelbart gave his famous demo edu/MouseSite/1968
Demo.html.
at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco before a few
thousand people that included computer scientists, IBM engineers, people
from other companies involved in computers, and funding officers from
various government agencies (Waldrop 2001: 287). Although Engelbart
had ninety minutes, he had a lot to show. Over the few previous years, his
team at the Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect had
essentially developed the modern office environment as it exists today (not
be confused with the modern media design environment which was
developed later at PARC). Their computer system included word
processing with outlining features, documents connected through
hypertext, online collaboration (i.e. two people at remote locations working
on the same document in real time), online user manuals, an online project
planning system, and other elements of what is now commonly called the
‘computer-supported collaborative work’. This team also developed the
key elements of the modern user interface that were later refined at PARC:
the mouse and multiple windows.
Paying attention to the sequence of this demo reveals that while
Engelbart had to make sure that his audience would be able to relate the new
computer system to what they already knew and could use, his focus was on
a completely new set of features available in computer-simulated media.
Engelbart devotes the first segment of the demo to word processing, but as
soon as he briefly demonstrated text entry, cut, paste, insert, naming, and
saving files – in other words, the set of tools that make a computer into a
more versatile typewriter – he then goes on to show at more length the
features of his system which no writing medium had before: ‘view control’.7
As Engelbart points out, the new writing medium could switch at the user’s
wish between many different views of the same information. A text file could
be sorted in different ways. It could also be organized as a hierarchy with a
number of levels that can be collapsed and expanded – like the outline tools
included in modern word processors such as Microsoft Word.
In his demo, Engelbart next shows another example of view control,
which today, forty years later, is still not available in popular document
management software. He makes a long ‘to do’ list and organizes it by
locations. He then instructs the computer to display these locations as a
visual graph (i.e. a set of points connected by lines). In front of our eyes,
representation in one medium changes into another medium – text becomes
a graph. But this is not all. The user can control this graph to display
different amounts of information – something that no image in physical
media can do. As Engelbart clicks on different points in a graph
corresponding to particular locations, the graph shows the appropriate part
of his ‘to do’ list. This ability to interactively change how much and what
information an image shows is particularly important in today’s
information visualization applications.
Next, Engelbart presents ‘a chain of views’ which he prepared
beforehand. He switches between these views using ‘links’, which may

2. Kieslowksi has
look like hyperlinks the way they exist on the Web today – but they actually
have a different function. Instead of creating a path between many different
documents à la Vannevar Bush’s Memex (often seen as the precursor to
modern hypertext), Engelbart is using links as a method for switching
between different views of a single document organized hierarchically. He
brings up a line of words displayed in the upper part of the screen; when he
clicks on these words, more detailed information is displayed in the lower
part of the screen. This information can, in its turn, contain links to other
views that show even more detail.
In this way, rather than using links to drift through the textual universe
associatively and ‘horizontally’, we move ‘vertically’ between general and
more detailed information. Appropriately, in Engelbart’s paradigm, we are
not ‘navigating’ – we are ‘switching views’. We can create many different
views of the same information, and switch between these views in different
ways. And this is what Engelbart systematically explains in this first part of
his demo. He demonstrates that one can change views by issuing
commands, by typing numbers that correspond to different parts of a
hierarchy, by clicking on parts of a picture, or on links in the text.
Since new-media theory and criticism emerged in the early 1990s,
endless texts have been written about interactivity, hypertext, virtual space,
cyberspace, cyborgs, and so on. But I have never seen anyone discuss ‘view
control’. And yet this is one of the most fundamental and radical new
techniques for working with information and media available to us today.
‘View control’, i.e. the ability to switch between many different views and
kinds of views of the same information, is now implemented in multiple
ways not only in word processors and e-mail clients, but also in all ‘media
processors’ (i.e. media editing software) such as AutoCAD, Maya, After
Effects, Final Cut, Photoshop, InDesign, and so on. For instance, in the
case of 3D software, it can usually display the model in at least half a dozen
different ways: in wireframe, fully rendered, etc. In the case of animation
and visual-effects software, since a typical project may contain dozens of
separate objects, each having dozens of parameters, it is often displayed in
a way similar to how outline processors can show text. In other words, the
user can switch between more and less information. One can choose to see
only those parameters on which the user is working at present. One can also
zoom in and out of the composition. When this is done, parts of the
composition do not simply get smaller or bigger – they show less or more
information automatically. For instance, at a certain scale, the user may
only see the names of different parameters; but when one zooms into the
display, the program may also display the graphs that indicate how these
parameters change over time.
As we can see from the examples analysed above, the aim of the
inventors of computational media – Engelbart, Nelson, Kay, and colleagues
with whom they have worked – was not to simply create accurate
simulations of physical media. Instead, in every case, the goal was to create
‘a new medium with new properties’ which would allow people to
communicate, learn, and create in new ways. So while today, the content of
these new media may often look the same as its predecessors, we should
not be fooled by this similarity. The newness lies not in the content but in
the software tools used to create, edit, view, distribute, and share this
46 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi has
content. Therefore, rather than only looking at the ‘output’ of software-
based cultural practices, we need to consider the software itself – since it
allows people to work with media in a number of historically
unprecedented ways. To summarize: while on the level of appearance,
computational media indeed often remediate (i.e. re-presents) previous
media, the software environment in which this media ‘lives’ is very
different.
Let me add one more item to the examples discussed above – Ivan
Sutherland’s ‘Sketchpad’ from 1962. Created by Sutherland as a part of his
Ph.D. thesis at MIT, Sketchpad deeply influenced all subsequent work in
computational media (including that of Kay) not only because it was the
first interactive media-authoring program, but also because it made it clear
that computer simulations of physical media can add many exciting new
properties to the media being simulated. Sketchpad was the first software
that allowed its users to interactively create and modify line drawings. As
Noah Wardrip-Fruin points out, it ‘moved beyond paper by allowing the
user to work at any of 2000 levels of magnification – enabling the creation
of projects that, in physical media, would either be unwieldly large or
require detailed work at an impractically small size’ (Wardrip-Fruin
2003:109). Sketchpad similarly redefined graphical elements of a design as
objects which ‘can be manipulated, constrained, instantiated, represented
ironically, copied, and recursively operated upon, even recursively merged’
(Wardrip-Fruin 2003:109).. For instance, if the designer defines new
graphical elements as instances of a master element and later makes a
change to the master, all these instances would also change automatically.
Another new property that perhaps demonstrates most dramatically how
computer-aided drafting and drawing differed from their physical
counterparts was Sketchpad’s use of constraints. In Sutherland’s own
words, ‘The major feature which distinguishes a Sketchpad drawing from
a paper and pencil drawing is the user’s ability to specify to Sketchpad
mathematical conditions on already drawn parts of his drawing which will
be automatically satisfied by the computer to make the drawing take the
exact shape desired’ (Sutherland [1963] 2003). For instance, if a user drew
a few lines, and then gave the appropriate command, Sketchpad
automatically moves these lines until they are parallel to each other. If a
user gives a different command and selects a particular line, Sketchpad
moves the lines in such a way that they are parallel to each other and
perpendicular to the selected line.
Although we have not exhausted the list of new properties that
Sutherland built into Sketchpad, it should be clear that this first interactive
graphical editor was not only simulating existing media. Appropriately,
Sutherland’s 1963 paper on Sketchpad repeatedly emphasizes the new
graphical capacities of his system, marvelling how it opens new fields of
‘graphical manipulation that has never been available before’ (Sutherland
[1963] 2003: 123). The very title Sutherland gives to his Ph.D. thesis
foregrounds the novelty of his work: Sketchpad: A Man-Machine
Graphical Communication System. Rather than conceiving of Sketchpad as
simply another medium, Sutherland presents it as something else – a
communication system between two entities: the human and the intelligent
machine. Kay and Goldberg will later also foreground this dimension of

2. Kieslowksi has
communication by referring to it as ‘a two-way conversation’ and calling
the new ‘metamedium’ ‘active’ (Kay and Goldberg 2003: 394). We can also
think of Sketchpad as a practical demonstration of J.C. Licklider’s idea of
the ‘man-machine symbiosis’ applied to image-making and design
(Licklider [1960] 2003).
Permanent extendibility
As we saw, Sutherland, Nelson, Engelbart, Kay, and other pioneers of
computational media have added many previously non-existent properties
to media that they have simulated in a computer. The subsequent
generations of computer scientists, hackers, and designers have added
many more properties – but this process is far from finished. And there is
no logical or material reason why it will ever be finished.
To add new properties to physical media requires modifying its physical
substance. But since computational media exists as software, we can add
new properties or even invent new types of media simply by changing
existing, or writing new, software. Adding plug-ins and extensions, as
programmers have been doing with Photoshop and Firefox, is another way
to innovate. One can also combine existing software together. For instance,
at the moment of this writing in 2007, programmers keep extending the
capacities of mapping media by creating software mash-ups which
combine the services and data provided by Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon,
other sites, and media uploaded by users. In short, ‘new media’ is ‘new’
because new properties (i.e. new software techniques) can always be easily
added to it. Put differently, in industrial, i.e. mass-produced media
technologies, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ were one and the same thing. For
example, the pages of a book were bound in a particular way that fixed the
order of pages. The reader could change neither the order nor the level of
detail displayed à la Engelbart’s ‘view control’. Similarly, the film
projector combined hardware and what we now call ‘media player’
software into a single machine. In the same way, the controls built into the
twentieth-century mass-produced camera could not be modified at the
user’s will. And although today the user of a digital camera similarly cannot
easily modify the hardware of her camera, as soon as she transfers the
pictures into a computer, she has access to an endless number of controls
and options for modifying her pictures via software.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were two types of
situations when the normally rigidly fixed industrial media was more less
fixed. The first type of situation was when a new media was being first
developed: for instance, the invention of photography in the 1820s–1840s.
The second type of situation was when artists would systematically
experiment with and ‘open up’ already industrialized media – such as the
experiments with film and video during the 1960s, which came to be called
‘Expanded Cinema’.
What used to be separate moments of experimentations with media
during the industrial era became the norm in software society. In other
words, computers have legitimized experimentation with media. Why is
this so?
What differentiates a modern digital computer from any other machine
– including industrial media machines for capturing and playing media – is
48 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi has
the separation of hardware and software. It is because an endless number of
different programs performing different tasks can be written to run on the
same type of machine, this machine – i.e. a digital computer – is used so
widely today. Consequently, the constant invention of new and the
modification of existing media software are simply two examples of this
general principle. In other words, experimentation is a default feature of
computational media. In its very structure, it is ‘avant-garde’ since it is
constantly being extended and thus redefined.
If in modern culture ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ are opposed to the
normalized and the stable, this opposition has largely disappeared in
software culture. And the role of the media avant-garde is performed no
longer by individual artists in their studios, but by a variety of players, from
very big to very small – from companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, and
Apple, to independent programmers, hackers, and designers.
But this process of the continual invention of new algorithms does not
move in just any direction. If we look at contemporary media software –
CAD, computer drawing and painting, image editing, audio and video
remixing, word processing – we see that most of their fundamental
principles were already developed by the generation of Sutherland and Kay.
As new techniques continue to be invented, they are layered over the
foundations that were gradually put in place by Sutherland, Engelbart, Kay
and others in the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, we are not dealing here only with the history of ideas. Social
and economic factors – such as the dominance of the media software
market by a handful of companies, or the wide adoption of particular file
formats –– also constrain possible directions of software evolution. Put
differently, today, software development is an industry and as such it is
constantly balanced between stability and innovation, standardization and
exploration of new possibilities. But it is not just any industry. New
programs can be written and existing programs can be extended and
modified (if the source code is available) by anybody who has
programming skills and access to a computer, a programming language,
and a compiler. In other words, today, software is fundamentally modifiable
in a way that physical industrially produced objects usually are not.
Although Turing and Von Neumann already formulated this fundamental
extendibility of software in theory, its contemporary practice – thousands
of people daily involved in extending the capabilities of computational
media – is a result of a long historical development. This development took
us from the few early room-sized computers that were not easy to
reprogram, to a wide availability of cheap computers and programming
tools decades later. Such democratization of software development was at
the core of Kay’s vision. Kay was particularly concerned with how to
structure programming tools in such a way that would make development
of media software possible for ordinary users. For instance, at the end of
the 1977 article I have already been extensively quoting, Kay and Goldberg
write: ‘We must also provide enough already-written general tools so that
a user need not start from scratch for most things she or he may wish to do.’
Comparing the process of continuous media innovation via new
software to the history of earlier, pre-computational media reveals a new
logic at work. According to a commonplace idea, when a new medium is

2. Kieslowksi has
referred to
theWelles as
8. We should also invented, it first closely imitates already existing media before discovering
mention work on
its own language and aesthetics. Indeed, the Bibles first printed by
SAGE by MIT
Lincoln Laboratory, Gutenberg closely imitated the look of handwritten manuscripts; early
which by the middle films produced in the 1890s and 1900s mimicked the presentational format
of the 1950s, had of theatre by positioning the actors on an invisible shallow stage and having
already established
them face the ‘audience’ represented by the fixed camera. Slowly, printed
the idea of interactive
communication books developed a different way of presenting information; similarly
between a human and cinema also developed its own original concept of narrative space. Through
a computer via a repetitive shifts in points of view presented in subsequent shots, the
screen with a
viewers were placed inside this space – thus literally finding themselves
graphical display and
a pointing device. In inside the story.
fact, Sutherland Can this logic apply to the history of computer media? As theorized by
developed Sketchpad Turing and Von Neumann, the computer is a general-purpose simulation
on the TX-2, which
machine. This is its uniqueness and its difference from all other machines
was the new version
of a larger computer and previous media. This means that the commonplace idea – that a new
MIT had constructed medium gradually finds its own language cannot apply to computer media.
for SAGE. If this were true, it would go against the very definition of the modern
digital computer. This theoretical argument is supported by practice. The
history of computer media so far has not been about arriving at some
standardized language – the way this, for instance, happened with cinema
– but rather, it seems to be about the gradual expansion of uses, techniques,
and possibilities. Rather than arriving at a particular language, we are
gradually discovering that the computer can speak more and more
languages.
If we are to look more closely at the early history of computer media –
for instance, the way we have been looking at Kay’s ideas and work in this
text – we will discover another reason why the idea of a new medium
gradually discovering its own language does not apply to computer media.
The systematic practical work on making a computer simulate and extend
existing media (e.g. Sutherland’s Sketchpad, the first interactive word
processor developed by Engelbart’s group, etc.) came after computers were
already put to multiple uses – performing different types of calculations,
solving mathematical problems, controlling other machines in real time,
running mathematical simulations, simulating some aspects of human
intelligence, and so on.8 Therefore, when the generation of Sutherland,
Nelson, and Kay started to create ‘new media’, they built it on top of, so to
speak, what computers were already known to be capable of. Consequently,
they added new properties into the physical media they were simulating
right away. This can be very clearly seen in the case of Sketchpad.
Understanding that one of the roles a computer can play is that of a problem
solver, Sutherland built in a powerful new feature that never before existed
in a graphical medium – satisfaction of constraints. To rephrase this
example in more general terms, we can say that rather than moving from an
imitation of older media to finding its own language, computational media
was from the very beginning speaking a new language.
In other words, the pioneers of computational media did not have the
goal of making the computer into a ‘remediation machine’ that would
simply represent older media in new ways. Instead, well knowing the new
capabilities provided by digital computers, they set out to create
fundamentally new kinds of media for expression and communication.
50 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi has
These new media would use as their raw ‘content’ the older media, which
already served humans well for hundreds and thousands of years – written
language, sound, line drawings and design plans, and continuous tone
images like paintings and photographs. But this does not compromise the
newness of new media. For computational media uses these traditional
human media simply as building blocks to create previously unimaginable
representational structures, creative and thinking tools, and communication
options.
Although Sutherland, Engelbart, Nelson, Kay, and others developed
computational media on top of already existing developments in
computational theory, programming languages, and computer engineering,
it would be incorrect to conceive the history of such influences as only
going in one direction – from already existing and more general computing
principles to particular techniques of computational media. The inventors
of computational media have had to question many, if not most of the
already established ideas about computing. They have defined many new
fundamental concepts and techniques of how both software and hardware
work, thus making important contributions to hardware and software
engineering. A good example is Kay’s development of Smalltalk, which for
the first time systematically established a paradigm of object-oriented
programming. Kay’s rationale in developing this programming language
was to give a unified appearance to all applications and the interface of the
PARC system and, even more importantly, to enable its users to quickly
program their own media tools. Kay cites an interesting example in which
an object-oriented illustration program written in Smalltalk by a
particularly talented 12-year-old girl was only a page long (Kay 1987: v).
Subsequently, the object-oriented programming paradigm became very
popular and object-oriented features have been added to most popular
languages such as C++ and Java.
Looking at the history of computer media and examining the thinking of
its inventors makes it clear that we are dealing with the opposite of
technological determinism. When Sutherland designed Sketchpad, and
Nelson conceived hypertext, or Kay programmed a paint program, each
new property of computer media had to be imagined, implemented, tested,
and refined. In other words, these characteristics did not simply come as an
inevitable result of a meeting between digital computers and modern
media. Computational media had to be invented, step-by-step. And it was
invented by people who were looking for inspiration in modern art,
literature, cognitive and educational psychology, and theory of media as
much as technology. For example, Kay recalls that reading McLuhan’s
Understanding Media led him to a realization that the computer can be a
medium rather than a mere tool (Kay 1990: 192–93).
So far, I have talked about the history of computational media as a series
of consecutive ‘additions’. However, this history is not only a process of
the accumulation of ever more options. Although, in general, we have more
techniques at our disposal today than twenty or thirty years ago, it is also
important to remember that many fundamentally new techniques were
conceived but never given commercial implementation, or were poorly
implemented and did not become popular. Or perhaps they were not
marketed properly. Sometimes the company making the software might go

2. Kieslowksi has
out of business. At other times, the company that created the software
might be purchased by another company that in turn would ‘shelve’ the
software so it would not compete with its own products. And so on. In
short, the reasons why many new techniques have not become
commonplace are multiple, and are not reducible to a single principle such
as ‘the most easy to use techniques become most popular’.
For instance, one of the ideas developed at PARC was ‘project views’.
Each view, according to Kay, ‘holds all the tools and materials for a
particular project and is automatically suspended when you leave it’ (Kay
1990: 200). Although currently, in 2007, there are some applications that
implement this idea, it is not a part of most popular operating systems, that
is, Windows, MAC OS X, and Linux. The same holds true for the
contemporary World Wide Web implementation of hyperlinks. The links on
the Web are static and one-directional. Ted Nelson, who is credited with
inventing hypertext around 1964, conceived it from the beginning as
having a variety of other link types. In fact, when Tim Berners-Lee
submitted his paper about the Web to the ACM Hypertext 1991 conference,
his paper was only accepted for a poster session rather than the main
conference program. The reviewers saw his system as being inferior to
many other hypertext systems that were already developed in the academic
world over the previous two decades (Wardrip-Fruin and Montford 2003)..
Computer as metamedium
As we have established, the development of computational media runs
contrary to previous media history. But in a certain sense, the idea of a new
media gradually discovering its own language actually might apply to the
history of computational media after all. And just as it was the case with
printed books and cinema, this process has taken a few decades. When the
first computers were built in the middle of the 1940s, they could not be
used as media for cultural representation, expression, and communication.
Slowly, through the work of Sutherland, Engelbart, Nelson, Papert, and
others in the 1960s, the ideas and techniques were developed which made
computers into a ‘cultural machine’. One could create and edit text, make
drawings, move around virtual objects, etc. And finally, when Kay and his
colleagues at PARC systematized and refined these techniques, placing
them under the umbrella of GUI, which made computers accessible to
multitudes, a digital computer was finally, in cultural terms, given its own
language.
Or rather, it became something that no other media has been before. For
what has emerged was not yet another medium but, as Kay and Goldberg
insist in their article, something qualitatively different and historically
unprecedented. To mark this difference, they introduce a new term –
‘metamedium’.
This metamedium is unique in a number of different ways. One of them
we already discussed in detail – it could represent most other media while
augmenting them with many new properties. Kay and Goldberg also name
other properties that are equally crucial. The new metamedium is, they
assert, ‘active – it can respond to queries and experiments – so that the
messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation’. For Kay,
who was strongly interested in children and learning, this property was
52 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi has
particularly important since, as he and Goldberg puts it, it ‘has never been
available before except through the medium of an individual teacher’ (Kay
and Goldberg 2003: 394). Further, as noted above, the new metamedium
can handle ‘virtually all of its owner’s information-related needs’. It can
also ‘serve as a programming and problem solving tool’, and ‘an interactive
memory for the storage and manipulation of data’ (Ibid.: 393). But the
property that is the most important from the point of view of media history
is that the computer metamedium is simultaneously a set of different media
and a system for generating new media tools and new types of media. In
other words, a computer can be used to create new tools for working in the
media it already provides, as well as to develop new not-yet-invented
media.
Using the analogy with print literacy, Kay motivates this property in the
following way: ‘The ability to “read” a medium means you can access
materials and tools generated by others. The ability to write in a medium
means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both
to be literate’ [original emphasis] (Kay 1990: 193). Accordingly, Kay’s key
effort at PARC was the development of the Smalltalk programming
language. All media-editing applications and GUI itself were written in
Smalltalk. This made all the interfaces of all applications consistent,
facilitating the quick learning of new programs. Even more importantly,
according to Kay’s vision, the Smalltalk language would allow even
beginning users to write their own tools and define their own media. In
other words, all media-editing applications, which would be provided with
a computer, were to serve also as examples, inspiring users to modify them
and to write their own applications.
Accordingly, a large part of Kay and Goldberg’s paper is devoted to a
description of software developed by the users of their system: ‘an
animation system programmed by animators’, ‘a drawing and painting
system programmed by a child’, ‘a hospital simulation programmed by a
decision-theorist’, ‘an audio animation system programmed by musicians’,
‘a musical score capture system programmed by a musician’, ‘an electronic
circuit designed by a high school student’. As can be seen from this list that
corresponds to the sequence of examples in the article, Kay and Goldberg
deliberately juxtapose different types of users – professionals, high-school
students, and children – in order to show that everybody can develop new
tools using the Smalltalk programming environment.
This sequence of examples also strategically juxtaposes media
simulations with other kinds of simulations in order to emphasize that the
simulation of media is only a particular case of computer’s general ability
to simulate all kinds of processes and systems. This juxtaposition of
examples gives us an interesting way to think about computational media.
Just as a scientist may use a simulation to test different conditions and play
different what/if scenarios, a designer, a writer, a musician, a film-maker,
or an architect working with computer media can quickly ‘test’ different
creative directions in which the project can be developed, as well as see
how modifications of various ‘parameters’ might affect the project. The
latter option is particularly easy today, since the interfaces of most media-
editing software not only explicitly present these parameters, but also
simultaneously give the user the controls for their modification. For

2. Kieslowksi has
9. http://www. instance, when the formatting palette in Microsoft Word shows the font
processing.org.
used by the currently selected text, it is displayed in a column next to all
10 http://www.
processing.org/ the other fonts available. Trying a different font is as easy as scrolling down
reference/environment/. and selecting the name of a new font.
11 http://www. To give users the ability to write their own programs was a crucial part
processing.org/faq/.
of Kay’s vision for the new ‘metamedium’ he was inventing at PARC.
According to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Engelbart’s research program was
focused on a similar goal: ‘Engelbart envisioned users creating tools,
sharing tools, and altering the tools of others’ (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort
2003: 232). Unfortunately, when Apple shipped the first Macintosh in
1984, which was to become the first commercially successful personal
computer modelled after PARC system, it did not have an easy-to-use
programming environment. HyperCard, written for the Macintosh in 1987
by Bill Atkinson (who was a PARC alumni) gave users the ability to
quickly create certain kinds of applications – but it did not have the
versatility and breadth envisioned by Kay. Only recently, as general
computer literacy has widened and many scripting languages have become
available – Perl, PHP, Python, ActionScript, Vbscript, JavaScript, etc. –
more people have started to create their own tools by writing software. A
good example of a contemporary programming environment – which is
currently very popular among artists and designers and which, in my view,
is close to Kay’s vision – is Processing.9 Built on top of the Java
programming language, Processing features a simplified programming
style and an extensive library of graphical and media functions. It can be
used to develop complex media programs and also to quickly test ideas.
Appropriately, the official name for Processing projects is ‘sketches’.10 In
the words of Processing initiators and main developers Ben Fry and Casey
Reas, the language focuses ‘on the “process” of creation rather than end
results’.11 Another popular programming environment that similarly
enables the quick development of media software is MAX/MSP and its
successor PD developed by Miller Puckette.
Conclusion
The story I have just related could also be told differently. It is possible to
put Sutherland’s work on Sketchpad in the centre of computational media
history; or Engelbart and his Research Centre for Augmenting Human
Intellect, which throughout the 1960s, developed hypertext (independently
of Nelson), the mouse, the window, the word processor, mixed
text/graphics displays, and a number of other ‘firsts’. Or we could shift
focus to the work of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which since
1967 was headed by Nicholas Negroponte (and in 1985 became known as
The Media Lab). We also need to recall that by the time Kay’s Learning
Research Group at PARC fleshed out the details of GUI and programmed
various media editors in Smalltalk (a paint program, an illustration
program, an animation program, etc.), artists, film-makers, and architects
were already using computers for more than a decade and a number of
large-scale exhibitions of computer art were displayed in major museums
such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Jewish Museum,
New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And certainly, in
terms of advancing techniques for visual representation enabled by
54 Lev Manovich
2. Kieslowksi has3D
computers, other groups of computer scientists had already made important 12. For more on
virtual navigable
advancements. For instance, at the University of Utah, which became the
space as a new
main place for computer-graphics research during the first part of the media, or a ‘new
1970s, scientists were producing 3D computer graphics much superior to cultural form’, see
the simple images that could be created on the computers being built at chapter on
‘Navigable Space’
PARC. Next to the University of Utah, a company called Evans and
in The Language of
Sutherland (headed by the same Ivan Sutherland who was also teaching at New Media.
University of Utah) was already using 3D graphics for flight simulators –
essentially pioneering the type of new media that is now called ‘navigable
3D virtual space’.12
The reason I decided to focus on Kay is his theoretical formulations that
place computers in relation to other media and media history. While
Vannevar Bush, J.C. Licklider, and Douglas Engelbart were primarily
concerned with augmentation of intellectual and, in particular, scientific
work, Kay was equally interested in computers as ‘a medium of expression
through drawing, painting, animating pictures, and composing and
generating music’ (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003: 393). Therefore, if
we really want to understand how and why computers were redefined as a
cultural media, and how the new computational media is different from
earlier physical media, I think that Kay provides us with the best
perspective. At the end of the 1977 article that served as the basis for our
discussion, he and Goldberg summarize their arguments in the phrase,
which in my view is the best formulation we have so far of what
computational media is artistically and culturally. They call the computer
‘a metamedium’ whose content is ‘a wide range of already-existing and
not-yet-invented media’. In another article published in 1984, Kay unfolds
this definition. By way of conclusion, I would like to quote this longer
definition, which is as accurate and inspiring today as it was when Kay
wrote it:
It [a computer] is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other
medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, though it
can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of
freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet
barely investigated.
[original emphasis] (Kay 1984: 41).
References
http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/pictures/display-mirror.html. Accessed 20
January 2005.
Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Canfield Smith, David et al. (1982), ‘Designing the Star user interface’, Byte, 4: 1,
pp. 242–82.
Engelbart, Douglas C. (1968), Live public demonstration of the NLS at the Fall Joint
Computer Conference, Convention Center in San Francisco, available online at
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html. Accessed 18 April 2007.
Gassee, Jean-Louis and Rheingold, Howard (1991), ‘The evolution of thinking tools’,
in Brenda Laurel (ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Boston, MA:
Addison-Wesley Professional.

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Hoshimo, Takashi (2005), ‘Bloom time out east’, ME: Mobile Entertainment, 9
(November), p. 25, available online from http://www.mobile-ent.biz. Accessed 18
April 2007.
Kay, Alan (1972), ‘A personal computer for children of all ages’, Proceedings of the
ACM National Conference, Boston, August.
Kay, Alan (1984), ‘Computer Software’, Scientific American, 251(3):41-47, September
1984.
———— (1987), Doing with Images Makes Symbols, videotape, University Video
Communications, available from http://www.archive.orgAccessed 18 April 2007.
———— (1990), ‘User interface: A personal view’, in Brenda Laurel (ed.), The Art of
Human-Computer Interface Design, Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional,
pp. 191–207.
———— (1993), ‘The early history of Smalltalk’, (HOPL-II/4/93/MA).
http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html Accessed 18 April
2007.
Kay, Alan and Goldberg, Adele ([1977] 2003), ‘Personal dynamic media’, in Noah
Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds), New Media Reader, Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, pp. 391-404.
Licklider, J.C. ([1960] 2003), ‘Man–machine symbiosis’, in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and
Nick Montfort (eds), New Media Reader, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Processing programming language, available from http://www.processing.org,
http://www.processing.org/reference/environment/ and http://processing.org/faq/.
Accessed 20 January 2005.
Sutherland, Ivan ([1963] 2003), ‘Sketchpad: a man-machine graphical communication
system’, in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds), New Media Reader,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2001), The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution
That Made Computing Personal, London: Viking.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Nick Montfort (eds) (2003), New Media Reader, Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press.
56 Lev Manovich

Convergence by means of globalized

remediation
Arild Fetveit
Abstract Keywords
Prophecies of media convergence have been a key component of recent Convergence
discussions of digitalization. It has been claimed that the manipulability of Remediation
digital data facilitates convergence and allows an erosion of differences Digitalization
between media. This article questions these assumptions by showing how Post-medium
there are also considerable obstacles against such manipulability, as well condition
as against the erasure of differences between media. By examining New media
empirical developments, as well as arguments put forward by theorists like Media aesthetics
Friedrich Kittler, Jay Bolter, Lev Manovich and Rosalind Krauss, it is
maintained that what we are seeing is more a proliferations of media than
a convergence leading to their unification. In part, this is due to our
affection for a multiplicity of media. However, one way in which media do
become similar is by increasingly being remediated on a digital platform.
Thereby they become subject to a globalization effect by having their
functionalities augmented by basic traits of the computer.
‘[w]hat used to be cinema’s defining characteristics have become just the default
options, with many others available.’
(Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 2001: 293)
In the introduction to Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, the German media

theorist Friedrich Kittler stipulates a convergence, which will erase
previous differences among media. He writes:
Once movies and music, phone calls and texts reach households via optical fiber
cables, the formerly distinct media of television, radio, telephone and mail
converge, standardized by transmission frequencies and bit information […]. The
general digitalization of channels and information erases the differences among
individual media.
(Kittler [1986] 1999: 1)
The gist of Kittler’s prediction of twenty years ago still seems valid in
important ways. Reports on media convergence have become a daily
feature in the news. We hear about Yahoo expanding their services
towards television and mobile phones, about Motorola making a wireless
phone featuring a customized Google search service, about Apple’s new
iPhone, which is a combination of mobile phone, video iPod, and Internet
device, and so on. Media as well as media companies migrate ever more

2. Kieslowksi
quality has
referred tocameras
Welles as
1. The of mobile seamlessly into neighbouring areas, and telephone companies do the
telephone is
same.
steadily increasing,
especially in terms of One of the more salient illustrations of convergence is actually offered
storage and by the mobile phone. Through the years, a number of gadgets have been
resolution. Lenses offered as metamedium machines carrying a wide set of media functions,
will in most cases not
but nothing has been as successful as the mobile telephone. Besides a
be allocated much
space, however, and telephone service, this universal media machine now often offers television
this is likely to clips, music, radio, e-mail, web browsing, and computer games. It takes
remain the most photographs, records video, and handles the new media SMS and MMS,
important limitation
just as it may offer additional non-media features like an alarm clock,
of phone cameras. In
general, producers calendar, notebook, calculator, and even penlight. The scope is impressive
will seek to increase considering its small size, but many of its functions offer a quality that is
the quality until it rather limited, much like the scissors on a Swiss Army knife. Regarding its
reaches a certain
photographic and web-browsing capabilities, for example, it remains more
level of customer
satisfaction. In terms of a toy than a serious media machine. Thus, on a number of such levels,
of photographs, a we need more specialized devices. Still, the mobile telephone compensates
new low-fidelity for its low-fidelity quality in a number of areas by means of versatility and
aesthetic partly
portability.1
promoted by the
limited quality of the The remediation of these media to our mobile telephones makes picking
early mobile-phone up our photographic camera to shoot still images or our video camera to
photograph has shoot moving images, much the same thing.2 When these devices are
lowered the demands
remediated to our phones as the same physical object, choosing between
on photographs. This
might be seen as part them now becomes a matter of selecting between two settings on the
of a bigger picture in camera menu of the telephone. If differences among media are merely
which a low-fidelity becoming a matter of alternative settings in the same software running on
aesthetic of mobility
universal media machines, are the differences between individual media
has gained
prominence, for then disappearing? Kittler does not only claim an erasure of the differences
example, in television among individual media. In continuation of the quote above, he also
spearheaded by projects the erasure of the very concept of medium:
reality shows.
2. The concept of
remediation was Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without
introduced’ by Bolter image, sound, or voice. And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct
and Grusin and they data flows into a standardized series of digital numbers, any medium can be
have kept its
translated into any other. With numbers, everything goes. Modulation,
definition rather
open. They describe transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transportation; scrambling,
remediation as ‘the scanning, mapping – a total media link on a digital base will erase the very
representation of one concept of medium.
medium in another’,
(Kittler [1986] 1999: 1–2)
and argue that
‘remediation is a
defining In the following, my question will be: to what extent and in which ways
characteristic of the could these predictions be said to describe the situation now emerging? To
new digital media’
what extent is a convergence of media taking place and what form does it
(Bolter and Grusin
1999: 45). This take? Do formerly distinct media converge so that the differences among
allows remediation to them in fact disappear, and does this imply an erasure of the concept of
be about the medium? There has in fact been talk of a ‘post-medium condition’ and a
borrowing of formal
‘post-media aesthetics’. These notions have respectively been brought up
traits, as well as the
recirculation of by the art historian Rosalind Krauss (1999a, 1999b), and by the media
stories and characters theorist Lev Manovich (2001b). What do such notions entail, and what
as in adaptations bearing do they have on the convergences addressed here and on the future
where material from
of the concept of medium?
58 Arild Fetveit
2. Kieslowksi
mediumhas
referred to The
Welles as
Before addressing Krauss and Manovich’s notions, I will first confront one is used
in another.
the widespread perception that with digitalization, ‘everything goes’, in
concept, according to
terms of data manipulation, and second, I will look at how media interact, Bolter and Grusin,
in terms of competition, symbiosis, and remediation. On this background, also ‘express[es] the
I move on to address the concept of medium itself, before concluding with way in which one
medium is seen by
a reassessment of the shape that convergence actually seems to take today.
our culture as
reforming or
With digitalization – ‘everything goes’ improving upon
The judgement that digitalization brings unlimited freedom, where another’ (Bolter and
Grusin 1999: 59).
‘everything goes’, as Kittler claimed in the 1980s, is still surprisingly
This way of defining
common, in spite of, among others, Manovich’s demonstrations (2001a: the concept also
138) of how laborious, ‘time-consuming and difficult’ digital compositing, allows any
for example, may be. Such a notion of freedom is, for example, still Mark digitalization of a
medium to be a
B.N. Hansen’s bid on the question of what difference the digital makes, in
remediation of the
his book New Philosophy for New Media (2004). His answer is that previous version of
‘digitalization allows for an almost limitless potential to modify the image, the medium. In the
that is, any image’ (Hansen 2004: 31). The qualifier ‘almost’ could indicate following I will draw
upon these meanings
some moderation to this claim. But after Hansen takes Manovich to task for
freely, without
‘correlating new media with earlier media types’, like the cinema and, to attempts to delimit its
see new media as strongly influenced by earlier media, Hansen goes on to meaning beyond
characterize new media by their ‘total material fluidity’, because ‘rather what the flow of the
argument will effect.
than being anchored to a specific material support, new media are fully
3. In fact, this means
manipulable, digital data’ (Hansen 2004: 31). Thus, it appears that Hansen that creativity in the
grounds his ‘new philosophy for new media’ on an empirically dubious and new prolific area
hyped conception of such media. between live-action
cinema and
In order to correct our perception of what digitalization has brought, it
animation to a great
is time to reassess and clarify the view of new media as ‘fully extent takes place by
manipulable’, and focus not only on the manipulability of digital data, but way of software
also on the various limitations to which such a manipulability is subject. development. This
also has a bearing on
The efforts and achievements of the companies producing digital effects
the ways in which
for cinema give a good indication of how difficult digital data is to mould aesthetic ideas and
and shape. Rendering hair, water, storms, lava from volcanoes, not to visions are spread
mention altering and controlling expressions on the human face, still today. New code
might be written for a
represent daunting and costly challenges for highly specialized digital-
special project, like
effects companies. Each achievement tends to elicit explicit celebrations: The Matrix (1999) or
inside the production environment (in journals like American Lord of the Rings
Cinematographer and Cinefex), within professional organizations like (2001), only to
reappear as a set of
SIGGRAPH (devoted to the development of computer graphics), as well
features in editing
as in public (when marketing new movies featuring spectacular effects).3 software, which
Thus, talk of digital media as ‘fully manipulable’ belies the fact that any secures viral spread
meaningful alteration of a photographic image in some way comes up of an aesthetic effect
across visual culture,
against the challenge of drawing. An exploration of to what extent the rich
though often in
set of effects and tools developed for controlling the alteration of diluted versions. The
photographs can aid us in overcoming this challenge is worthy of a study dynamics of this
in its own right. field, in which
programmers seek to
A second limitation to the manipulability of digital media files is related
make digital data
to the fact that institutional players in the field work to limit our freedom to manipulable in
modify and edit the material we can access via our computers. In order to aesthetically
get a clearer picture of this, it might be useful to consider key aspects where productive ways, is
worthy of a study in
the computer differs from earlier media.
its own right.

2. Kieslowksi has
4. Such technologies Medium of display and medium of storage
partly dilute the idea
of a unique original,
The computer ensures a radical separation between what we might call the
rendering the medium of display and the medium of storage, initiated by the advent of
‘original’ just one mechanical mass production. A traditional medium like painting knew no
among many. But no separation between the two. Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656) is
matter how many
there are, they are
both displayed and stored by the singular painting hanging in the Museo del
still considered Prado in Madrid. Sculpture is a somewhat more complicated case:
originals. Thus, the sculptures carved in stone, such as Michelangelo’s Statue of David (1504),
distinction between combine the storage and display function in the original sculpture, like the
original and copy is
another matter. It is
painting, in this case to be inspected in the Accademia Gallery in Florence.
not based upon mass With the development of mass-production technologies related to items
production, but upon like bronze sculptures, printed books, graphical prints, a separation
reproduction of an between the storage and display mediums develops, to the extent that casts
original by what is
somehow regarded as
and presses are stored.4 In the case of photography, the Daguerreotype and
inferior means. The the later Polaroid photograph still combine storage and display functions
copy may, for much as in a painting. But with the positive/negative technique made
example, not be public by Fox Talbot in 1839, a separation occurred, such that the negative
created from the
original cast at the
became the privileged medium of storage for photography, while the
time of the others, positive print took care of the display function (albeit the use of positive
not be signed by the prints in a storage function – in family albums and elsewhere – should not
artist, or it may be underestimated). In the case of sound, the gramophone record provides
derive from an
alternative
another transitory case. It provides storage in a way that leaves the sound
technology, like a on display in some form, since the sound can be inspected directly on the
photographic record for levels of intensity. This option disappears with the magnetic tape,
reproduction of an oil where the medium of storage can still be held in our hand and inspected for
painting, for example
(see Benjamin 1973).
possible damage, but where the information stored has moved beyond the
range of human perception. The computer radicalizes this, especially when
we have dispensed with floppy disks and the like, and increasingly use our
hard disks for storage. Then we end up first of all seeing the stored works
in terms of icons and file names.
The development sketched above, I believe, has been vital in inspiring
current talk of dematerialization. However, what the examples above
clearly indicate is that any general notion of dematerialization is missing
the point. What is dematerialized in a certain way is our media of storage,
in the sense that they are no longer physical objects we can hold in our
hands as much as they are data codes kept in computer files.
This dematerialization and standardization allows data to be stored in a
computer and enables smoother operations of translation between formats,
as well as further possibilities for editing and manipulation. When a
computational device also becomes connected to other devices through
interconnected networks, file transfer becomes easy, and allows an instant
materialization of various data on a number of connected display units
across the globe, notably screens and speakers. This allows for an increased
use of the computer as a general media player, which in turn provokes
producers to secure a separation between the two features discussed above,
that of the display function and what we in terms of the computer might call
the storage and manipulation function, because what we can store in a
computer we also, for the most part, can edit.
60 Arild Fetveit
Copyright and the wall between editing and display 2. Kieslowksi has
In the development of the computer towards a metamedium – with an
increased ability to remediate other media and show us films, television
programmes, newspapers, and journals – the storage and manipulation
capabilities of the computer are often left unengaged or explicitly locked
out. We are often left with the option of displaying media content that we
cannot change: to play movies or television programmes, to display
newspaper or journal articles, and so on. Sometimes we can store media
files on our computer; at other times we can neither download, nor store
them. Very often, even if we can store them, editing is cumbersome and
difficult, much more so than the technological possibilities of the computer
itself would suggest, and certainly more than notions of ‘total
manipulability’ indicate. However, a number of software agents offer keys
to unlock this wall, at least partly, thus allowing us to copy and share audio-
visual and other files. The competence of users also varies rather
dramatically in terms of how skilled they are in finding the right software
or in hacking their way beyond the limitations of this wall.
A feud is ongoing in this field between copyright holders and encryption
experts on the one side, and users, software agents, and hackers on the
other. The film and music industries, especially, are trying to ensure that
their material is not distributed for free or re-edited and used in ways that
they do not approve of. However, they are at the same time increasingly
eager to stimulate user activity in a number of ways, in order to profit from
the user-driven productivity sometimes talked about under the rubric Web
2.0. The strengthening of such an interest represents a major trend in the
current entertainment industry. This trend produces a certain slack in terms
of how forcefully copyright holders seek to prevent attempts to play with
and manipulate their material. Audience activity takes place under the
watchful eye of a producer who is both happy to see people supply their
labour for free while adding value to his product – but is also nervous,
since his lack of control means he cannot dictate exactly how the product
will turn out, or where all the revenue might end up. A major challenge for
media producers is to accommodate, absorb, and utilize this creative vogue
empowered by the digital democratization of the means of production.
Arvidsson and Sandvik discuss this challenge related to computer games in
the present volume. Henry Jenkins (2003, 2006) has discussed it in terms
of audience participation in popular culture. Relating to this, there is also a
trend in the art world where generating and reworking social relations are
at issue, as discussed by Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) under the term
‘relational aesthetics’. In short, ours is not only a time of convergence, but
also of increased democratization of cultural production. In fact, the two
are linked, in that the technological convergence makes it easier to mix,
edit, and play with various files, in spite of the limitations I have pointed to
above. But let us now take a closer look at what convergence entails, what
shape it seems to take, and how far it appears to go.
Convergence – competition and symbiosis

Bolter and Grusin (1999: 47–48) note how ‘television and the World Wide
Web are engaged in an unacknowledged competition in which each now
seeks to remediate the other. The competition is economic as well as

2. Kieslowksi haspoints
referred to Welles in
as
5. John Caldwell aesthetic; it is a struggle to determine whether broadcast television or the
to high ambitions
Internet will dominate the American and world markets.’ Much like the
the case of the early
cross-platform work earlier struggle between television and film, the relationship between
for the television television and the World Wide Web is not only one of struggle, but also one
series Homicide of tactical cooperation and symbiosis.
(NBC), but notes that
An illustration of this can be found in television’s rapid expansion to
this level of ambition
has become rare integrate mobile telephones and web pages into their programmes. This
(Caldwell 2003: 129). expansion gives us, not television per se, but a multimedial circuit of
There is a tendency television/mobile/Web, which demonstrated its revenue-generating
to use the Internet to
potential with Big Brother. This is a set-up that has been adopted in
send viewers to
television and vice numerous programmes since, in later reality-based programmes like Pop
versa. Internet sites Stars as well as in a host of other shows, enticing the audience to engage in
also allow the SMS voting, thereby creating substantial extra revenue. Fictional
audience to engage
programming has become multimedial too, through offering websites that
with the story worlds
in multiple ways, draw the audience into web-based chats, games, podcasts and ancillary
through games, products of various kinds. In most cases this leaves a main medium like
discussion groups, radio, film, or television in the leading position, being supported and
and additions to the
expanded by new points of access and supplementary products.5
fictional world (like
plot expansions and But the tendency is not only one of symbiosis between distinct media. It
character background is also one in which a series of remediations allow established media like
stories not used in the newspapers, photography, radio, film, and television to free themselves
dramatic production).
partly from the media technologies in which they were developed and
They might also
allow producers to migrate across any channel open to them. The technological convergence
tap fan cultures for facilitates these media’s reappearance on the screens of our computers, our
ideas and useful mobile telephones, our PDAs (personal digital assistants), our iPods or
material. There have
wherever they can be displayed. Texts, sounds, and images become
also been attempts to
make the media equal detached from the media technologies that used to support them, and
in importance in the perhaps even gave birth to them (like in the case of photographic emulsion
unfolding of a story, and the celluloid film strip), and migrate and multiply on technological
for example in the
platforms flattened by digital technology. At the same time, texts as well as
use of radio and the
Internet (see media seem to excel in exercises of remediation, in which they mirror and
Neumark 2006). cite each other and simulate each other’s characteristic features, as Bolter
6. Jenkins (2001: 1) and Grusin note in terms of television adopting aspects associated with web
argues that, ‘Part of
pages and the reverse. What seems to appear is a double move in which the
the confusion about
media convergence technological convergence supports a tendency toward remediation and
stems from the fact recirculation which also entails elements of aesthetic convergence, but at
that when people talk the same time, medium specificity also seems to be maintained through the
about it, they’re
recirculation of specific medial characteristics. This prolific activity of
actually describing at
least five processes.’ remediation raises obstacles for any theory of convergence, leading to the
I second Jenkins’s end of media, a post-medium situation in which all media converge into
call for distinctions one super medium capable of performing the functionality of every
between levels when
previous medium, or at least, capable of satisfying much of our urge for
addressing
convergence, and mediation.
three of his five Now, to get a handle on the complexity and the conflicting tendencies
levels coincide with characterizing convergence, it is useful to distinguish between the various
the distinctions I have
levels on which it takes place.6 First, digitalization itself, of course, renders
opted for. In
Jenkins’s view, the media texts into data files that, to a substantial degree, are easily combined
convergence can be and circulated. This is the technical convergence that forms an important
(1) technological, (2) basis for other kinds of convergence. But to which extent does this situation
economic, (3) social
entail convergence on other levels as well – on the level of cultural forms;
62 Arild Fetveit
2. Kieslowksi has
referred and
to Welles
(5) as
on the level of aesthetics; on the level of the physical devices that deliver or organic, (4)
cultural
our media; and on the level of industrial actors?
global. His
Clearly, industrial actors are merging on a grand scale, AOL and Time description of the
Warner, Sony and Ericsson, Google and YouTube, to mention just a few, or processes is crisp and
they are making exclusive or semi-exclusive partnerships, like Apple with his idea of ‘social or
organic convergence’
Google, Cingular, and others. The more thorny issues to assess are those of
original (Jenkins
aesthetics and cultural forms, and the level of the physical devices. In terms 2001: 1). Social or
of the last, it is clear that the computer is aspiring to the condition of a organic convergence
metamedium, a machine which can display and handle all other media in is a matter of what he
calls consumers’
some sense, while the mobile telephone effectively demonstrates this
‘multitasking
multimediality with the help of its onboard mini-computer. On this strategies for
background, industry operators are pondering whether consumers will be navigating the new
satisfied by just carrying a multimedia mobile phone around, as well as a information
environment’, and it
digital music player and a PDA. Or, if we look a few more years ahead, will
occurs when ‘a high
our present devices be replaced by, or grow into, portable computers the size schooler is watching
of mobile phones, with virtual keyboards and roll-out screens?7 When it baseball on a big-
comes to our homes, will we continue to have radios, music screen television,
listening to techno on
systems/players, newspapers, magazines, televisions, and computers, or will
the stereo, word
we be satisfied with one or more multimedial super computer(s) taking care processing a paper
of it all? The possible future of a multimedial super computer that can and writing e-mail to
replace the television and the computer by combining the functionalities of his friends’ (Jenkins
2001: 1). This also
both is much a matter of cost and of practicalities. For an expansion of our
relates to an
present televisions to allow us to browse the Internet and to have similar economic
functionalities as our computers, they need to be equipped with basic convergence in which
computer components, which would incur additional costs. When it comes Jenkins locates the
exploitation of
to our computers, they already handle video and audio streams, so minimal
‘synergies’, and a
adjustments would seem to be necessary, except for the reading of analogue cultural convergence
signals (which requires an additional tuner), but as the analogue net is about where he finds
to be replaced by digital, this is hardly an issue. This means that social ‘transmedia
storytelling, the
preferences may be more important than technical possibilities for assessing
development of
the effects of the convergence. Thus, one of the key questions becomes, will content across
we want to have our work desk also be the site for aesthetic experience and multiple channels’
entertainment, or will we move the device between our workspace and our (Jenkins 2001: 1).
The processes of
living-room relaxation area according to our needs? Actually, it seems more
convergence are
reasonable to assume that we will have different devices in different places, intertwined and
tailored to the various uses in those places, and that those devices will have entangled in
a degree of specialization rather than full multifunctionality. Jenkins’s short
description, but I
The more complex issue is the convergence of aesthetics and cultural
think he does well in
forms respectively. This is only to a limited degree a matter of trying to separate
digitalization, as cultural forms intermix and imitate each other throughout them out. If a sixth
history. This issue has in fact been the subject of ongoing debates at least process should be
added to Jenkins’s
since Horace pointed to the correspondence between painting and poetry in
scheme, aesthetic
his Ars Poetica, condensed in the phrase ‘ut Pictura Poesis’, (as is painting, convergence could be
so is poetry). This observation has provided a major reference point for a strong candidate.
such debates, especially after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing made it a key
target of criticism in his Laocoön ([1766] 1984), followed up in Irving
Babbitt’s The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910),
and with substantially greater impact in Clement Greenberg’s ‘Towards a
Newer Laocoon’ ([1940] 1985), which may be the first powerful
articulation of Greenberg’s view of modernism.8

2. Kieslowksi
cost andhas
7. The the size Greenberg is of special interest in this context, because, as I soon will
of computers are still
show, he develops a conception of modernity that seems surprisingly
shrinking. But as the
electronics of the interlinked with Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation. Greenberg
computer gets implicitly suggests that the convergence of aesthetic forms take place with
smaller, the two parts shifting intensity historically, and that the defining aesthetic of a period
that must also shrink
might first of all be characterized by undoing the effects of such a
are the keyboard and
the screen. A virtual convergence. This is actually how he defines modernism. The definition
keyboard, which is springs from a concern with the way in which art forms may compromise
projected on a surface their own nature in an effort to absorb the effects of, and to imitate the
(preferably a table),
characteristics of, other art forms, particularly the dominant art form of the
is already developed,
so is a screen that period. He says,
may be rolled up
when not in use. There can be, I believe, such a thing as a dominant art form; this was what
Screen projection
literature had become in Europe by the 17th century. […] Now, when it happens
could also be viable,
but has the that a single art is given the dominant role, it becomes the prototype of all art: the
disadvantage of others try to shed their proper characters and imitate its effects.
requiring a (Greenberg [1940] 1985)
reasonably white
surface whereupon
the image may be Greenberg comes to define modernism as a process of undoing the effects
beamed. Therefore, of such imitation, of purging the arts and their media from the impurity
chances are that we caused by the borrowing and absorptions of effects from other media. This
will still use laptops
process, he points out, becomes one of consolidating or entrenching an art
like today’s, only
lighter and with form in its own area of competence. In ‘Modernist Painting’, Greenberg
better screens, writes,
batteries, and bigger
memory capacity.
The essence of modernism lies […] in the use of the characteristic methods of a
Chances are also that
the divide between discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to
high-fidelity and low- entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. […] It quickly emerged that the
fidelity performance unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was
will become more
unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate
institutionalized, so
that we have both a from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably
high-fidelity service be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be
from our laptops and rendered ‘pure’ […].
stationary computers,
(Greenberg [1960] 1993)
as well as a low-
fidelity version that
can fit in our pocket, Thus, it seems that Greenberg is keenly interested in what we today are
whether it be more likely to call ‘remediation’, which may be described as the adoption
cameras, browsers,
or absorption of the effects of one medium in another. In short, and from
e-mail services and
more. This also calls this perspective, it appears that Greenberg is describing modernism as
for better systems of remediation in reverse. The idea of modernism is to undo the effects of a
integration between previous remediation, which has levelled the differences between art forms,
the two kinds of
because these promiscuous arts thrive in imitating each other’s effects, that
devices. Apple may
have taken an is, their artistic means.
important step in this It appears that we find ourselves again in a promiscuous time where
direction by having media borrow effects from each other, not only because we may still be
the iPhone run OS X,
under the influence of a postmodern counter-reaction against modernism’s
the same operating
system that runs on penchant for the purity of media forms, but also because digital technology
their computers. encourages the playful recombination of media. This is one of the key
8. The convergence of features computer pioneers like Alan Kay sought to develop. The capacity
aesthetics and
of the computer for sampling and recombining various textual elements, its
64 Arild Fetveit
2. Kieslowksi hascould,
referred
course,tobe
Welles as
enhanced potential for post-production remixing of previous material, has cultural forms
of
contributed to an aesthetic of sampling which we can also see as adding to
described from a
cultural convergence, where for example the art world and the world of number of other
media entertainment come closer. However, in this field of intermix, media perspectives. For
hardly disappear. In fact, the aesthetics of sampling even allow old and instance, a
Bakhtinian
outdated media forms and modes to be reborn into new contexts and to
perspective would
thrive. Yet another reason why media do not disappear so easily is our love assess voices
for them, even when they may seem old and outdated. Their aesthetics travelling across texts
seem to live on as they are utilized and recirculated in our digital phone and media, which is
often done by way of
cameras for example, which may have settings for sepia or solarization.
the concept of
Old film stock and the Super 8 format are often found in films and music intertextuality. Anna
videos. These anachronistic appearances testify to some level of truth in Everett (2003)
Marshall McLuhan’s statement ([1964] 2001) that ‘the medium is the pursues such a
perspective in the
message’, in that, at times, the specific medial quality may be of key
development of her
importance to the aesthetics developed. In order to communicate in a rich concept of
way, we mobilize and use a number of media formats, in part because they ‘digitextuality’,
help us articulate ourselves in rich and interesting ways. meant to describe the
particular textual
Another obstacle for a generalized convergence, as envisioned by Kittler
form encouraged by
and others, is the lack of standardized formats, which brings us back to the digital media.
very basis of a digitally driven convergence. Arriving at a common and
practical format is just the first obstacle here. Agreeing on a standard often
seems even more difficult, as major economic interests are at stake. Thus,
we get the common situation of various forms of war between competing
formats. Apple iPods, for example, employ a standard that carries more
information than MP3 files, and therefore, sending an iPod music file to a
PC-user with an MP3 player may leave the latter without a chance to hear
the music. Similarly, the current battle between the Blu-ray Disc and High-
Definition television echoes the war over formats that took place with the
establishment of VHS as the standard video technology in popular use.
Computer games continue to confront each other across a number of
competing consoles, like Playstation 2 and 3, Xbox, Nintendo Gamecube
and Wii. There is also the silent war going on between telephone companies
and emerging Internet telephone providers that may eventually offer
mobile services (Apple’s partnership with Cingular might be seen as an
attempt to avoid such a possible standoff, by bringing the biggest mobile-
telephone company on board rather than risking countermeasures from
their side). Industrial strategies set in motion to act against competitors and
secure profit for key players also work in part to halt technical
convergence. These strategies and behavioural logics also defy any ideal
operation of the free market, and instead seek to create and benefit from
market situations that allow higher prizes than a freely functioning market
would. This is the context in which we can see European regulators recent
claims that iTunes should be compatible with all MP3 players, so that
music bought from the iTunes Store can also play on devices from Apple’s
competitors.
In short, the tendency to produce incompatible standards may be
motivated to some extent by diverging convictions about the benefits of the
various standards proposed, but it is also driven by the desire to undercut
the workings of a free market and protect major companies from open
competition. Thus, even on the technological level where digitalization

2. Kieslowksi haslocates
9. Krauss herself would seem to ensure a common platform, the picture is much more
such a reinvention of
complex and riddled with conflicts.
the medium in James
Coleman’s double Kittler’s conception of convergence implies a notion of a post-medium
portraits, which are condition of some sort, an assumption that distinct media will become less
photographic, but important or even disappear, along with the concept of medium itself.
also invoke (or
Related notions are also put forward by Krauss and Manovich, respectively.
remediate) the medial
forms of feature films
and photo novels. A The post-medium condition and post-media aesthetics
reinvention of the After Kittler, we seem to be confronted with two major attempts to
medium could also be
articulate a ‘post-medium condition’, as Rosalind Krauss (1999) calls it, or
claimed for Gerhard
Richter’s that of a ‘post-media aesthetics’ as it is labelled by Manovich (2001b). In
photorealistic her article, ‘Reinventing the medium’, Krauss discusses the shifting status
paintings, which of photography in the art world and how photography in part became a tool
seem to both redeem
for deconstructing an art practice based on the specificity of the medium,
and re-actualize
painting and be it the specificity of painting, sculpture, graphic print, or, ironically,
photography at the photography itself. She argues that photography enters the art world, or, in
same time as they are her words, ‘converges with art’
positioning
themselves as neither
painting nor as a means of both enacting and documenting a fundamental transformation
photography. In fact, whereby the specificity of the individual medium is abandoned in favor of a
Richter himself practice focused on what has to be called art-in-general, the generic character of
claims to be doing
art independent of a specific, traditional support.
photography, ‘by
other means’. We (Krauss 1999b: 293–94)
must merely learn to
accept that Thus, photography is implicated in the enactment and the documentation of a
photographic
change from a situation in which artists work within media (like painting,
emulsion and optical
lenses are not integral sculpture, graphical print and so on) to a situation that Krauss refers to as the
to photography (see ‘post-medium condition’. This casts photography in a new role, that of
Richter 1995). documenting various performances or ‘hors-media’ events where art practices
have migrated beyond and outside established media forms to strategically
and in ad hoc situations deploy various objects, actions, and events to convey
conceptual ideas. Thus, in this ‘post-medium condition’, which Krauss also
associates with postmodernism, practice, according to Krauss, ‘is not defined
in relation to a given medium – sculpture – but rather in relation to the logical
operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium – photography,
books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself – might be used’ (Krauss
1999: 289). This move away from the classic media of the academic tradition
(which basically is thought of as painting, sculpture and graphic print), and
from the modernism defined by Greenberg, which explored the medium
specificity of painting and sculpture in particular, has according to Krauss left
the artist in a ‘post-medium condition’ to explore ‘art-in-general’.
However, this ‘post-medium condition’ does not so much take away the
media from artists as it refigures their functions and multiplies them.
Because now, any medium can be used and almost anything can become a
medium; even ice cubes might become media in conceptual ephemeral
events, as well as streams of air hitting the spectator’s head inside the
gallery space. But elements of other medial practices could also be
implicated in medial situations which in part may redeem an interest in
their specificity, or in Krauss’s words, ‘reinvent the medium’, or have these
media serve ad hoc strategic purposes of different kinds.9
66 Arild Fetveit
2. Within
Kieslowksi hasworld
referred to Welles
theas
On this background, Krauss’s labelling of a situation in the modern art 10. the art
itself, however,
world – where artists no longer explore a single medium like painting and
term ‘media art’
sculpture – as a ‘post-medium condition’ is somewhat ironic. The situation remains contested
is partly defined by the fact that artists work across a range of different and riddled with
media, combining them pragmatically for various purposes and effects. We uncertainty as to what
it should mean. It has
could see this as a move from the singular to the plural, from the medium
been used in a more
artist faithful to the exploration of a specific means of expression, to the specialized meaning
media artist defined by an adulterous pragmatism using whatever medium to designate a
or combination of media that seem to work. Thus, ‘the post-medium particular kind of art
where the logic of the
condition’ might as well be labelled ‘the medium condition’, or ‘the
medium itself is
condition of media proliferation’, for this ‘post-medium condition’ is one explored and where
in which the artist constantly comes to choose certain media among the the medium involved
many possible. Whereas one medium conveniently can be called painting, is preferably digital.
From this vantage
or sculpture – most of the time without recourse to the concept of medium
point strategies of
– a host of different medial options tends to render every one of them a inclusion have been
‘medium’. Under such a condition, most art might become ‘media art’, and attempted to integrate
most artists ‘media artists’ of some sort. ‘media art’ (or ‘new
media art’) into the
A further reason why artists become media artists is related to the
established art world
political and cultural interventionist project of jamming – re-figuring, re- (see Grau 2007).
programming – important aspects of the culture articulated in ‘the Such a conception of
media’. And by ‘media’, in this context, I mean major outlets like media art has come
up against at least
television, film, newspapers, media that in many ways define our culture,
two problems. First,
and that artists may feel compelled to comment on. This intervention will it risks holding onto a
often employ the media formats that are being commented on and it may Greenbergian
render the art ‘media art’, both in terms of its subject matter and its conception of art as
an interrogation of
medial means.10
the medium used. In
The challenge from Manovich’s notion of a post-media aesthetics is the face of art’s social
considerably greater in that it projects an end to media as well as to the turn, this risks
concept of medium itself. This is first of all because Manovich’s conception rendering ‘media art’
dated and without
of a post-media aesthetics is in part based on digitalization. But in his
contemporary
argument, an internal tension in the concept of medium also comes to the sensibility (see
fore, a tension that goes some way towards explaining the persistence of the Bourriaud 2002).
concept of medium allegedly faced with annihilation, for instance, the fact Second, the
interpretation that all
that the medium of film seems to have faint problems surviving the death
art uses some kind of
of the celluloid filmstrip. Manovich starts his dismantling of the concept of medium and is
medium by claiming that: therefore by
definition media art
risks a certain
In the last third of the twentieth century, various cultural and technological
redundancy. The
developments have together rendered meaningless one of the key concepts of crisis for the concept
modern art – that of a medium. However, no new topology of art practice came to of ‘media art’ has
replace media-based typology which divides art into painting, works on paper, manifested itself in
the removal of the
sculpture, film, video, and so on.
concept of medium
(Manovich 2001b: 1) from the German art
festival transmediale
Manovich cites a number of reasons why the concept of the medium, in his – international media
art festival, which
words, is ‘rendered meaningless’. First, the proliferation of new artistic
now is renamed
forms replacing traditional art threaten old typologies of media, sometimes transmediale –
with arbitrary combinations, sometimes even as dematerialized ‘conceptual festival for art and
art’. The introduction of modern media like video provides yet another digital culture.
challenge in that, as Manovich writes, the

2. This
Kieslowksi hasthe
referred to Welles
issues as
11. is one of mass medium of television and art medium of video used the same material base
conceptual […] and also involved the same condition of perception (television monitor). The
Noël Carroll
discusses in the three
only justifications of treating them as separate mediums were sociological and
first chapters in economic […]. Gradually, this sociological difference in the distribution
Theorizing the mechanisms, along with other sociological differences […], became more
Moving Image (1996) important criteria in distinguishing between mediums than the distinctions in
12. For photography, the
loss of the material
material used or conditions of perception. In short, sociology and economics took
support based on over aesthetics.
chemistry was [original emphasis] (Manovich 2001b: 2–3)
especially powerful,
because, as Barthes
(1981: 80) notes,
In order to strengthen his suit, Manovich does not play the digital card early
photography was not in his discussion. Rather, he attempts to make a strong case for a crisis of the
an optical invention medium existing before digitalization. And he manages to do so to some
in the wake of the extent, but even more, his argument comes to lay bare the inherent
Albertinian
perspective, but a
complexity in the concept of medium itself. His account starts off with an
chemical invention. assumption that the concept designates the medium’s technological base, or
Thus, the digital what in the language of art history and criticism is usually designated ‘the
change seemed to material support’. Eventually, however, Manovich comes to describe what
tamper with
photography’s own
we might call a metamorphosis in which the concept of medium comes to
defining be based as much on other parameters. The parameters Manovich nominates
characteristics. for distinguishing between media may actually form part of a richer
Moreover, conception of medium, made more urgent by these acts of disappearance
photography had
rested comfortably
and of migration away from the initial material supports on which the
within its chemical medium was conceived. Apart from ‘material used’, which otherwise can be
ground through a referred to as media technology or material support, he mentions
number of other ‘distribution mechanisms’, ‘conditions of perception’, and lastly, the less
technical transitions,
and had hardly been
clearly defined ‘other sociological differences’ (Manovich 2001b: 3).
subject to very many The key observation here, which may seem paradoxical, is precisely that
revolutionary medial the medium of film survives so effortlessly the death of its medium, in the
changes, at least, this sense of its technical support.11 Photography as well now seems to thrive on
I believe is how it
was perceived by the
its new digital platform; in fact, it thrives to such an extent that it seems
late 1980s. What was almost unreal to think of the repeated death sentences it received during the
eventually 1990s as its material support became destined for the technical museum.12
demonstrated by the In the face of such changes, Manovich notes that ‘despite the obvious
digitalization of
photography – that it
inadequacy of the concept of medium to describe contemporary cultural
was possible to lift and artistic reality, it persists. It persists through sheer inertia – and also
the medium of because to put in place a better, more adequate conceptual system is easier
photography away said than done’ (Manovich 2001b: 4). If the concept persists, it is because
from its medium of
invention and let it be
people persist in using it. And when the concept of film, for example, seems
remediated on a to survive even when films are often not shot on film, it is because the
digital platform – had concept of medium is much more complicated than we often realize, and
already been this is precisely what Manovich comes to articulate in the parameters
demonstrated by
other media, like the
above.
LP which had
become a CD, and Revising the concept of medium
continues to be Basically, the concept of medium seems to involve a lot more than the
demonstrated,
without much public
material support it is often associated with, as can be seen in a number of
anxiety, by television. definitions, which Bruhn Jensen points out in his article ‘Mixed Media’ in
A comparative this volume. If we take as a vantage point the parameters Manovich
project might well be suggests, beyond the medium technology (or technical support), we have
68 Arild Fetveit
2. Kieslowksi here
has to
referred to
to Welles
what as
‘distribution mechanisms’, ‘conditions of perception’, and the less clearly undertaken
uncover
defined ‘other sociological differences’. Without aiming for any fully
extent various media
coherent conception and avoiding internal overlap, we could perhaps add have changed their
‘sociocultural use’ along with the ‘aesthetic practices’ associated with such technical supports
use. and with what
consequences and
What complicates the picture, but also makes it more interesting, is that
possible difficulties.
it seems that the concept of medium, the way that it is currently used, is
capable of migrating between these parameters which make up the concept
of medium, rendering some more important sometimes, and others more
important at other times. Thus, the emphasis on the various aspects
defining a medium may be shifting. At times, the technological aspect of
the medium seems of central import, while at other times the formal,
thematic, and aesthetic aspects, or ‘distribution mechanisms’ and
‘sociocultural uses’ come to the fore. W.J.T. Mitchell captures this
complexity well, when he fits this difficult term with the following elusive
description:
An image appears only in some medium or other – in paint, stone, word, or

numbers. But what about media? How do they appear, make themselves manifest
and understandable? It is tempting to settle on a rigorously materialist answer to
this question, and to identify the medium as simply the material support in or on
which the image appears. But this answer seems unsatisfactory on the face of it.
A medium is more than the materials of which it is composed. It is, as Raymond
Williams wisely insisted, a material social practice, a set of skills, habits,
techniques, tools, codes and conventions.
(Mitchell 2005: 203)
In terms of the position of the concept, Mitchell adds, ‘[t]he concept of a

medium […] seems […] to occupy some sort of vague middle ground
between materials and the things people do with them’ (Mitchell 2005:
204). But the vagueness of this ‘ground’ can be clarified, I believe, by
studying how the concept operates in actual cases. Then we might find that
different aspects of the concept will be at play at different times. If we limit
ourselves to what it is possible to say about the medium of film, we can get
an illustration of the multifaceted nature of the concept of ‘medium’, and
of how its various aspects can be actualized in almost paradoxical ways. It
has been noted that the medium of film is dying because film stock is being
replaced by digital video. In this case, the medium of film is referred to in
terms of its technical support. If we counter that films survive because
people simply love stories told in an audio-visual format, what is referred
to is the medium of film as a cultural and aesthetic form. If we say that
films will still die because theatres that show films lose their audiences and
will soon have to close, we are conceiving of the medium of film in terms
of its primary viewing practice in theatres, more than in terms of the
technical support and the cultural and aesthetic form.
These complexities relating to the concept of medium have led to recent
attempts to clarify and to define the concept. In the article ‘Convergence?
I Diverge’, Henry Jenkins proposes to distinguish between media, genres
and delivery technologies. He claims: ‘Recorded sound is a medium. Radio
drama is a genre. CDs, MP3 files and eight-track cassettes are delivery

2. The
Kieslowksi
concepthas
13. of technologies. Genre and delivery technologies come and go, but media
delivery technologies
persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and
serves to detach the
concept of medium entertainment system’ (Jenkins 2001). This might seem clarifying. But if
from the realm of recorded sound is a medium, and not CDs, what other media are there and
technical support. is it possible to invent new ones? These questions are implicitly answered
The concept of genre
by Jenkins five years later as he lists the following media, ‘spoken words’,
works to protect the
concept against ‘printed words’, ‘cinema’, ‘theatre’, television’, ‘radio’ (Jenkins 2006: 14).
shifting aesthetic and One could try to continue this list by adding ‘book’ and ‘newspaper’. But
cultural practices. these seem partly superfluous when ‘printed words’ are already mentioned.
14. From his initial
In fact, ‘book’ and ‘newspaper’ could well be regarded as mere delivery
attempt to clarify the
concept, Jenkins has technologies for the medium ‘printed words’. Likewise, radio might be
also found Lisa regarded not as a medium, but as a delivery technology for the medium
Gitelman’s work on ‘spoken words’, or perhaps even better, for ‘recorded sound’. In short, the
the concept useful,
framework proposed by Jenkins is not entirely satisfactory, but it is
without having that
interest amalgamate productive in provoking us to rethink the concept of medium.
into a coherent The strategy behind making ‘recorded sound’ a primary example of
position. Gitelman what a medium is, could be to protect the concept of medium from the
proposes to ‘define
creative turmoil that takes place in the realms of technological and social
media as socially
realized structures of inventions on the one side, and cultural and aesthetic inventions on the
communication, other.13 But the outcome is not so much to protect the concept as to
where structures undermine its relevance. For if it merely designates allegedly stable medial
include both
forms like ‘recorded sound’, ‘printed words’, and traditional media like
technological forms
and their associated radio, television, and cinema, it need not be on everybody’s lips, like it is
protocols, and where today.
communication is a Whatever the strategy, what is negated by making ‘recorded sound’ a
cultural practice, a
primary example of what a medium is, is the multiple aspects of the
ritualized collection
of different people on concept, and its migratory flexibility in which different aspects seem to be
the same mental map, emphasized at different times. Any attempt to admit the concept only one
sharing and engaging dimension, be it technical device, cultural or aesthetic practice, form of
with popular
perception, or socio-economic mode of circulation, or medial form like
ontologies of
representation’ ‘recorded sound’, belies this multiplicity.14
(2006: 7). She The inherent richness and flexibility in the concept of medium is an
recognizes, that important reason why the predictions of Kittler and Manovich – that the
‘[d]efining media this
concept will become obsolete in the wake of convergence – may not hold
way admittedly keeps
things muddy’ up. If the concept is ‘rendered meaningless’ (Manovich) in one of its
(2006: 7). In spite of aspects, it may still persist as long as it is meaningful in terms of other
saying, somewhat aspects. Another reason, of course, is that media forms do not so much
later that, ‘the
disappear as they reappear, through acts of remediation and recirculation.
“materiality” of
media is one of the The conception of ‘medium’ put forward here may also help us to
things that interest explain and assess how creativity and renewal take place within a medium.
me most’, her Manovich suggests in his contribution to this volume that new media
definition is not clear
remain perpetually new because they are made up of software that is being
as to what extent
technological support renewed. This is a suggestive idea, but once we see the many aspects of the
or media materiality concept of medium, we see that updates to the software first of all renew
is admitted into her one aspect of the medium, namely its technical basis. What implications
definition.
this will have in terms of other aspects of the medium, its cultural and
aesthetic forms, or the logic of production and distribution characterizing
it, is uncertain. In fact, technical changes (for example, in terms of software
additions) need to be accepted, and utilized, so that they have consequences
on other aspects of the medium as well, for them to be truly effective in
70 Arild Fetveit
2. These
Kieslowksi
are, ofhas
referred tolike
Welles
copy,as
contributing to a change of the medium as a whole. This suggests that 15. course,
functions
certain technical extensions will hardly be significant, whereas others may
paste, search, save,
lay the basis for powerful reinventions of the medium, through their impact but also a host of
on aspects like aesthetic practices, sociocultural use, distribution other more
mechanisms, and audience practices. specialized options
that only some users
will end up using. An
The globalization of software additions illustration of the
I started this discussion by referring to Kittler’s prediction that ‘[t]he potential in this can
general digitalization of channels and information erases the differences be found by looking
at the plug-ins for the
among individual media’. And I have used much of the space to raise
Firefox browser.
objections against the powerful convergence envisioned by Kittler. I also
suggested above, however, that the gist of Kittler’s prediction still seems
succinct. Let me now qualify this beyond the obvious presence of the
metamedia, which our computers and our mobile telephones now represent.
When assessing the consequences of digitalization, instead of talking about
the erasure of differences, and to judge the level of convergence by the
amount of differences erased, it may be as productive to talk about the
addition of similar traits, viewing this as a major source fuelling
convergence.
The remediation of most media on a digital platform is about to make all
media ‘new media’, in the sense that they are all empowered by computer
technologies in one way or another. Hence, they are also more or less
subject to the addition of new properties, beyond the new affordances they
may already have been granted as part of their digitalization. A basic logic
of the computer is therefore coming to redefine both the production and the
reception processes related to media, to the extent that computers are
involved in media production and consumption. Manovich has commented
on this in The Language of New Media where he says
The logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional

cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect
the cultural layer. The ways in which the computer models the world, represents
data and allows us to operate on it; the key operations behind all computer programs
(such as search, match, sort, and filter); the conventions of HCI […] influence the
cultural layer of new media, its organization, its emerging genres, its contents.
In short, with the pervasive presence of computers in the handling of

media, the latter have come to be affected by what we can call a
‘globalization effect’ in which their new affordances come to be ones which
the computer can provide to most media, and which feature as standard
menu options in most applications.15 In other words, what we seem to get
is a form of convergence by means of a globalized remediation, a
remediation where previous media have been remedied by expansions to
their powers that tend to be similar. Simply put, by being more and more
supported by and interwoven with the computer, media now are
increasingly profiting from the enhancements the computer can offer. As
the computer tends to offer similar enhancements to most media, a
convergence by means of globalized remediation takes place. A couple of
examples may lay this out in more detail.

2. This
Kieslowksi has the
referredfor
to Welles
a vogueasof
16. has prepared In its digital version, the New York Times offers photographic slide
ground
shows, film clips and music. The original newspaper, just like any printed
new digital-effects
films, and for comic- matter, magazine or book, cannot display time-based media, but its
strip heroes entering remediated version on the Web can. And it becomes increasingly effective
the movie theatres. in doing so as the capacity of digital networks increases. Film provides
Commenting on this
another example of computer-augmented affordances. Animated films used
development,
Manovich (2001a: to be able to depict events that were impossible to relay in live-action
295) somewhat cinema. When live-action film is enhanced by digital production
provocatively states technologies, however, its affordances increasingly come to involve the
that ‘cinema can no
stunning effects of animated films, and these effects can now be offered in
longer be clearly
distinguished from photorealistic quality.16
animation. It is no The increased affordances generated through digitalization may be said
longer an indexical simply to reflect the characteristics of the computer as a metamedium, its
media technology
ability to handle most, if not all, previous media, albeit within the
but, rather, a
subgenre of painting’. parameters of its interface.17 This sets in motion a development that may
17. Specific media eventually make most media capable of displaying most other media. This
materialities are tendency is illustrated by the broadcaster BBC which features newspaper-
thereby lost in this
like articles on their websites, complementing their television and radio
remediation except to
the extent that they programmes, and newspapers like the New York Times which features
can be represented television offerings on their website, complementing their printed matter.
within the operative As Manovich puts it in his contribution to this volume, ‘it is as though
mode of the
different media are actively trying to reach towards each other, exchanging
computer. It is, for
example, difficult to properties and letting each other borrow their unique features’. However,
tell that most of the ways in which this will pave out, and the actual forms it will take, still
Gerhard Richter’s remain to be seen given the high level of dynamism and turmoil in the field.
pictures are paintings
rather than
photographs in their Conclusion
photographically All in all, what we have before us is a complex picture in which
mediated convergence is a powerful tendency, continuously counteracted by
reproduction on a
powerful counter-tendencies holding back on a full convergence that might
computer screen.
promise to erase the differences among individual media so as to have us
end up with merely one mediatory device. The picture is one in which a
number of obstacles – such as multiple formats, copyright holders’
resistance against copying, storage, and manipulation, and not least our
attachment to media aesthetic diversity – continue resisting universal
convergence. At the same time, however, convergence works powerfully to
make files compatible, to have devices communicate with each other, and
to endow media with globally shared features. This means that our many
media do not disappear to be replaced by one, or even just a few.
Nevertheless, this is no guarantee that our concept of medium will persist.
As long as we have a multiplicity of media as competing alternatives to
consult, to express ourselves in, or to comment on, we may find the concept
of medium relevant. In the heyday of painting and sculpture in the art
academy, when relatively few media alternatives were around, the need for
a concept like ‘medium’ was hardly a matter of urgency. Some of the
changes in the field of media – the occurrences of new means of
communication, like SMS, MMS, Skype, Instant Messenger, etc. do not
necessarily urge the use of the concept of medium. We may often be
content talking about them as ‘applications’, or we may just refer to them
using names like ‘Skype’, or ‘Messenger’. In fact, the proliferation of
72 Arild Fetveit
2. Kieslowksi has
media in the guise of new applications, which digitalization has brought,
may represent a new threat to the concept of ‘medium’, in that we just do
not conceive of ‘medium’ as the proper descriptive word for these new
media. Thus Kittler’s predictions about the erasure of ‘the very concept of
medium’ may be well worth reassessing in another ten or twenty years. In
the mean time, we are likely to see more bids on how the concept should
be defined.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Liv Hausken, Ulrik Ekman, Kiersten Leigh Johnson and
Francesco Lapenta who have read the article in draft form and proposed
valuable adjustments. I am also grateful for the productive interchanges
offered by my colleagues in the Media Aesthetics research project at the
University of Oslo, supported by the Norwegian Research Council through
the programmes KULFO and KIM, and last but not least, I am thankful for
great discussions with my inspiring students in the Department of Media,
Cognition, and Communication, University of Copenhagen, and with my
colleagues in the same department.
References
Arvidsson, Adam and Sandvik, Kjetil (2007), Gameplay as Design: Uses of Computer
Players’ Immaterial Labor, London: Intellect Press.
Babbitt, Irving (1910), The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Barthes, Roland (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill
and Wang.
Benjamin, Walter (1973), ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in
Illuminations, London: Collins (Fontana).
Bolter, Jay and Grusin, Richard (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media,
Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Les Presse Du Reel.
Caldwell, John (2003), ‘Second-shift aesthetics’, in Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell
(eds), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, London and New York:
Routledge.
Carroll, Noël (1996), Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Everett, Anna (2003), ‘Digitextuality and click theory: Theses on convergence media in
the digital age’, in Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (eds), New Media: Theories
and Practices of Digitextuality, London and New York: Routledge.
Gitelman, Lisa (2006) Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture,
Grau, Oliver (2007), MediaArtHistories, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Greenberg, Clement ([1940] 1985), ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’, in Francis Frascina
(ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, London: Paul Chapman.
________ ([1960] 1993), ‘Modernist painting’, in John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected
Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hansen, Mark B.N. (2004), New Philosophy for New Media. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Horace ([18 BC] 1989), Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (‘Art Poetica’), ed.
Niall Rudd, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Kieslowksi has
Jenkins, Henry (2001), ‘Convergence? I diverge’, Technology Review, 1 June, available
from http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/12434/. Accessed 19 February
2007.
———— (2003), ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital cinema, media convergence,
and participatory culture’, in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds), Toward an
Aesthetics of Transition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———— (2006), Convergence Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kittler, Friedrich A. ([1986] 1999), Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Krauss, Rosalind (1999a), Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium
Condition, London: Thames & Hudson.
———— (1999b), ‘Reinventing the medium’, Critical Inquiry, 25: 2, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 289–305.
Lessing, Gotthold ([1766] 1984), Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Manovich, Lev (2001a), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———— (2001b), ‘Post-media aesthetics’, available from http://www.manovich.net/.
Accessed 19 February 2007.
McLuhan, Marshall ([1964] 2001), Understanding Media, London and New York:
Routledge.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005) What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Neumark, Norie (2006), ‘Different spaces, different times: Exploring possibilities for
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Richter, Gerhard (1995), The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993,
74 Arild Fetveit
Volume Five
ISSN 1601-829X
Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook | Volume Five

Northern Lights
Volume 5 – 2007
Volume 5
3 Introduction
7–24 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
Northern
Adam Arvidsson and Kjetil Sandvik
105–118 On transdiegetic sounds in computer games
Kristine Jørgensen
Lights
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 Contributors
Film & Media Studies Yearbook 2007
intellect Journals | Film Studies

ISSN 1601-829X
05
intellect
9 771601 829000 www.intellectbooks.com
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Volume Five

Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook | Volume Five

intellect Journals | Film Studies

9 771601 829000 www.intellectbooks.com

Northern Lights cover.indd 1 8/22/07 4:51:16 PM

Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook

Digital Aesthetics and Communication Journal Editors

Northern Lights is published once a year by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall

© 2007 Intellect Ltd. Authorisation to photocopy items for internal or

Notes for Contributors

Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd

NL 5 3–6 © Intellect Ltd 2007 3

4 Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald

and The Language of New Media (Manovich 2001) to represent a limiting

NL 5 3–6 © Intellect Ltd 2007 5

6 Arild Fetveit and Gitte Bang Stald

Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd

Mixed media: from digital aesthetics

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 7

thinkable, as well. As in the case of communication, the

The means in the middle

8 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

output options. All three senses – mode of expression, material of

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 9

research entities can no longer depend on old-style development processes,

10 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

The social dimension of immediacy and hypermediacy is as important as their

Still, the theory of remediation tends to choose sides, inviting an analytical

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 11

question is how its internalist perspective may be complemented to

The functionalities of new media

12 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

regardless of their immediate appearance, they are the product of numerical

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 13

With reference to the basic semiotic matrix of paradigms and syntagms, he

14 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

cinema?’: ‘Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-

Modernism is back, not just as aesthetic logic, but as technological form.

Media showing, telling, and doing

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 15

• Information: Sound serves as an explicit and regularized vehicle of

16 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

itself to externalization and dissemination, through the modalities of human

Media of three degrees

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 17

a simple, immediate presence in the world – even face-to-face ‘dialogue

18 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

one-to-one reproduction, storage, and presentation of a particular content

Figure 1: Media of three degrees.

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 19

although this interface, as well as that of mobile telephones, is likely to

20 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 21

22 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Hayles, N.K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,

NL 5 7–24 © Intellect Ltd 2007 23

24 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Northern Lights Volume 5 © 2007 Intellect Ltd

Remediation and the language of new

Remediation is a study of the relationships between ‘new media’ and

NL 5 25–37 © Intellect Ltd 2007 25

26 Jay David Bolter

NL 5 25–37 © Intellect Ltd 2007 27

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