Manovich talks about how numerical coding and the modular structure allowed for the automation in media and how these are part of the principles of new media. Automation helps save time by creating something from scratch and develop it to a basic form so that people would able to use it in a form that they understand. For example, bb code is automated on most forums and blogs so that posting becomes easier and people would not have to spend time typing in every code. The code is automated into a icon, and by clicking on the icon, people just need to put in the link whether it is a picture, gif, or video. Other key features like bold, italics, quoting, emoticons, etc.
Automation is very important for any website that requires input from others online because most people who go online are use to the automation. For instance, there was this forum that I visited and the administrator decided to relocate the forum so they created a new forum. The problem was that everyone had to manually type in the code when posting, for example, if someone wanted to post a picture, he/she had to type “[IMG] link for picture here [/IMG],” imagine typing this every time posting an image. I think changing from automation to manual discourages people from posting because I also saw that the site traffic also dropped drastically. Once something is automated, people become reliant on it to the point that they might even forget or not even know the manual way of doing something. Overall, I believe that automation has allowed more people to use new media but also changed the way we think. We often times take what is automated for granted, thinking of it as its original form but if it was taken away we would not know how to do anything because we skipped the most basic part of the learning process which is learned manually. Although automation makes things easier, people would be stuck if the automation does not work correctly. A way to reconcile this gap is to know the manual way of the automation.