Homework 2

One Response to Homework 2

1. tm086892 says:

   September 8, 2014 at 1:58 pm

   Manovich opens this chapter on Xerox PARC pioneer Alan Kay with a definition of medium:

   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 specific artistic technique: oils as a
   Medium. American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition
   (Houghton Mi#in, 2000)

   This definition serves to describe Kay, Nelson, and Englebart’s desire to use software to create new and different media and, possibly mediums using software as the change agent. Manovich provides several examples on the following pages:
   61- “Kay wanted to turn computers into a “personal dynamic media” which could be used for learning, discovery, and artistic creation. His group achieved this by systematically simulating most existing media within a computer while simultaneously adding many new properties to these media. Kay conceived of “personal dynamic media” as a fundamentally new kind of media.”
   64 – “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 could have the power to handle virtually all of its owner’s information-related needs…’”
   65 – “Kay’s paradigm was not to simply create a new type of computer-based media that would co-exist with other physical media. Rather, the goal was to establish a computer as an umbrella, a platform for all existing expressive artistic media. (At the end of the article Kay and Goldberg give a name for this platform, calling it a ‘metamedium’”.
   65 – “Ted Nelson’s concept of hypertext that he developed in the early 1960s (independently but
   parallel to Engelbart).20 In his 1965 article A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate, [Nelson] introduces his new concept: ‘However, with the computer-driven display and mass memory, it has become possible to create a new, readable medium, for education and enjoyment…Let me introduce the word “hypertext” to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not be conveniently resented or represented on paper.’21 “A new, readable medium”—these words make it clear that Nelson was not simply interested in “patching up” books and other paper documents. Instead, he wanted to create something distinctively new.”

   83 – “Finally, at least in Kay’s and Nelson’s vision, the task of defining new information structures and media manipulation techniques— and, in fact, new media as a whole—was given to the user, rather than being the sole province of the designers.”

   85 – “… the aim of the inventors of computational media—Engelbart, Nelson, Kay and the people who worked with them—was not simply to 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 that of 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 content.”

   Early on in the chapter he asks whether software as a creative instrument has “led to the invention of fundamentally new forms of culture.” I believe it has, hence this course. Manovich posits on page 56 that today’s media essentially allows one to mimic the traditional media of books, films, albums and photographs but the innovations in the afore-mentioned “have not been accompanied by a similar revolution in the syntax and semantics of media.” Manovich faults (page 56) “Alan Kay and his collaborators at PARC…for making digital computers imitate older media.” His contention that is that “by 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’ Or, to put this in terms of Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s influential book Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), we can say that GUI-based software turned a digital computer into a ‘remediation machine’: a machine that expertly represents a range of earlier media…’the representation of one medium in another.’”

   Although the Manovich clearly believed the Kay, Nelson and others wanted to create new mediums for expression, acknowledging and citing their many visionary thinking and numerous innovations such as view control, hypertext, hyperfilm and hypermedia, hyperlinking, digital paint systems and digital frame buffer (graphics card), I believe he felt that they were not entirely effective and could have advocated more to scrap traditional forms of media mediums sooner rather than later. In a perfect world with unlimited funding, and resource maybe Manovich vision is possible. He addresses this briefly but not I believe realistically. I think this statement on page 83, is, for me, the underpinning for web 2.0 “the prefixes ‘meta-‘ and ‘hyper-‘ used by Kay and Nelson were the appropriate characterizations for a system which was more than another new medium that could remediate other media in its particular ways. Instead, the new would be capable of simulating all these media with all their remediation strategies—as well as supporting development of what Kay and Goldberg referred to as new “not-yet-invented media.” Equally important was the role of interactivity…The new meta-systems proposed by Nelson, Kay and others were to be used interactively to support the processes of thinking, discovery, decision making, and creative expression.

   I did not elaborate or discuss Engelbart, Smith or Sutherland because of 1) blog length, 2) we talked about them in class, or 3) they can be found in the chapter.
   You can view Engelbart’s demo here: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

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