I found Manovich’s chapter, “Principles of New Media” super intuitive, however did not find it as interesting as the previous article assigned. New media entails a lot, but when I took a closer look at it due to reading the article, I realized that the definition wasn’t clear to me. Even though I am surrounded by digital media and arts directly created using computers, it barely had occurred to me the progression that media had to have taken to get here. In Manovich’s article, he laid out the five principles of new media and that was very helpful in his breakdown of the influences that drive new media today.

As a CIS major, my knowledge lies in the digital world and my technical troubleshooting skills often have me deep diving into code to find problems. The part where Manovich stated that the first principle of new media was numerical representation interested me. I hadn’t realized it, but new media objects really are just a bunch of back end numbers and are just composed of digital code. Manipulating new media is as easy as changing a couple of numbers around for us. All the keywords that are incorporated in new media today such as digitization or resolution wasn’t thing during the time of the printing press and old media. Only until new media started to emerge, that we started to use technical terms to refer to media.

Another aspect of the principles of new media that I found to be eye opening is that new media today is very modular. Meaning, new media is made up of modules such as media elements (pixels, polygons, voxels, characters, scripts). Manovich even explained how the world wide web is also completely modular. It has many web pages and each web page consists of other objects. These two principles really helped me align with the back end of new media and helped me gain a better appreciation for the technical side.