While reading through this chapter about new media, all I could think about was how this is common knowledge of everyday life that people don’t think twice about, yet was such a big breakthrough back then. Things like the computer and the photograph are normal parts of our society – Hell, every single phone has a camera in it now – so it’s a weird feeling, reading about something that was so new at the time that is so common today.
What stuck out to me the most was Manovich’s second principle of new media – the idea of modularity, or the idea that media elements when put together can create something bigger than them, like a computer, or the World Wide Web. This really caught my attention because I used to teach kids how to code on the computer, and one of the first things I had to teach them was that these small parts that we were working on every day would come out to create a bigger, meaningful whole. Manovich states that “If a particular module of a computer program is deleted, the program will not run.” That sentence in particular really stuck out to me because I would always have to troubleshoot when helping kids create websites, games, or whatever they desired, and many times it was because they accidentally forgot or deleted a part of their code. This makes me think about the physical pieces of a computer as well as the internal codes that are used to create websites and more. If you don’t have a mouse or a speaker, you are missing a huge component to a computer, or at least in our society. Back then, they weren’t even worried about those things – they were just trying to build it and code computer programs. I just think this passage is very eye-opening in the sense that things that we overlook and take for granted today were once either greatly desired by society, or not even invented yet!
