$#!% I Say

Manovich lists his five principles of new media as being: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and cultural transcoding. The means by which visual new media is created, its very essence, as Manovich puts it, is divided into the continuous and the discrete, or digitized, formats. Manovich purports that Jacqurd’s loom had first developed a discrete form of the visual image while Daguerre developed a continuous image with the daguerreotype.

            Manovich gives a somewhat adequate representation of what visual media consists of. He describes the means by which it developed and, I believe, rightly bunches them into two categories. By describing digital images as discrete structures, Manovich provides a good breakdown as to what the visual image is in digital format. He also describes the format of photographic and motion film as being continuous since there are no breaks within the visual image (to the naked eye at least).

            After considerable thought I believe that Manovich is on to something when discussing the two forms of visual image. I am an artist and tend to view things in their aesthetic dimension. What I am good at is taking the whole image and breaking it down into its most basic parts. But I haven’t thought of a binary means of viewing an image. By binary I mean either there are breaks in the lines or there are not. Digitizing an image causes these breaks due to the quadrant manner in which the computer must render the image. The grid format in which the computer renders the image is what causes pixilation. It works on a pixel at a time rather the entirety of the image.

            Film on the other hand is continuous, as Manovich puts it. Lines are fluid without any breaks that are visible to the human eye. What film does is replicate what the eye sees. It superimposes the light which our eyes are subject to and imprints that light, or lack of it, into the film. Our eyes see what we basically would have seen had we been looking at the image itself. The only thing which is an issue with this is that the ability of the camera and its lens may limit certain light from being picked up. So there may be certain images which will not fully replicate reality.

            Manovich then further states that there is a melding of the two formats in moving pictures. There is the continuous format in the still image taken by the video camera but when placed into motion by juxtaposing the frames one after the other there is a discrete nature which causes breaks not in the lines of the image but in the lines of movement of the image. A great observation by Manovich in my opinion. It may not sound so profound to the layman but to me as an artist it is eye-opening in its simplicity and insight.

            When I first thought of Manovich’s claim that numerical representation was a principle of new media I balked at accepting it. Yet, after much thought, I came to realize that numerical representation was meant to denote the zeros and ones which computers use to generate the image and not whatever else was running through my mind trying to grasp the expression. It was a more literal representation and thus more fitting.

            The means by which the image is produced is a principle of new media—the computer generates an image which is in a discrete format. The two formats, continuous and discrete, will soon become harder to discern with the advent of newer technologies.

I see there are others who feel the same about Facebook.

SADIA: Funny you should mention controlling people. I believe that Facebook is taking advantage of the fact that (1) there is no other social site available with as much activity as Facebook and (2) that nobody wants to move to another site and refriend all of those people. So, they are making money off of our accounts by offering data mining and focused advertising to companies. Though it is true that they provide a service for free (I forgot to mention that I have an account on a Russian social site called Odnoklassniki which charges for everything from creating an account to posting pictures), what Facebook is doing is very unethical.

PROFESSOR: Facebook just had better functionality and games. The old Facebook made doing everything easy. Though Myspace was customizable, Facebook had more class than Myspace (which mostly teens used). I didn’t “need” to move over but the games was a big attraction factor, like being able to challenge your friends at games and compare high scores. The downfall of some websites is fixing what’s not broken. There was an interview with Craig Newmark in Wired magazine where Newmark despised change for only aesthetic appeal. Craigslist is similar in the ease of use of the old delicious site, it hasn’t changed and doesn’t need to change. The morons of this world try to attain aesthetics over functionality (hence the overwhelming amount of dumb, beautiful people).

 KAMILAH: All the new updates to Facebook have been bothersome but it has not fully changed the site itself (as delicious was). Deleting your account won’t neccesarily change anything though. The second you post something, it automatically is saved somewhere on Facebook’s servers and can theoretically be retrieved at any time in the future. It bothers me when people feel an overstated sense of paranoia over opening a Facebook account. You control what you post, they don’t immediately suck the information from you via the monitor. Post nothing sensitive or embarrassing and you have no privacy or security concerns to deal with.

 I agree about delicious though I am giving it a chance now that the YouTube guys saved it from oblivion. I do miss the very simple, no-frills interface and functionality of the old del.icio.us

I started with social media when many of my old friends had pushed me to join Friendster. I had all of my friends there. Then they all went to Myspace and I followed but wasn’t as involved as I was with Friendster. Then everyone moved to Facebook. I followed suit but I think the whole hassle of re-friending all of my friends wasn’t really worth it. I did locate many old friends through Facebook and it was great to talk to them again. Yet, I found that we were all older and different so we either didn’t have time to actually hangout together but that we also really didn’t want to hangout together.

I mainly used Facebook to play the games–first it was Mafia Wars, then Scrabble, then this Ninja game, and then Poker. I spent so many hours on there that could’ve been more productively used. I made some posts but rarely. I liked posting Youtube videos and videos that I created but then Facebook got all police state and started taking everything down, which inevitably took away our individuality and expression through music (Myspace’s success). My photos that I posted were looked at by others but then Facebook changed its structure. It was hard to find my friends and photos, and my videos had all been taken down (I’m banned from uploading videos).

Though I still have a Facebook account, I rarely use it. Facebook messed with something that was great and didn’t fix it, just made it worse (like the way Yahoo bought delicious.com and ruined the entire site beyond recognition).