According to Manovich, “all new media object, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations.” Manovich also proclaims that many new media objects are converted from various forms of old media. He expresses that this is evident in the fact that new media objects are subject to algorithmic manipulation. I agree with the evidence that he portrays and have witnessed it before on many different media objects.
With only focusing on the computer, there are many instances where digital coding is evident during the use of it. When a website is uploading digital coding is showed at the bottom left hand corner that directs web browser where to go. Next time a website is uploading notice the digital codes at the bottom of the screen. Digital coding is also present when the URL is typed into the browser. If you have ever edited a homepage on social networking sites like MySpace or twitter, you have probably played around with digital coding. For instance I constantly remember editing my page when I had MySpace. I would embed different videos and links to other websites on my page for others to view. I even remember going into the coding for my page’s background and changing some of the numbers to change the colors of my background. I did not notice it then but I was altering the old digital coding and altering it to create something new. Digital coding is in all media objects as a set of data that gives a command to let the media object know what function to do. Whether we pay attention to it, it is used in all media objects.
I lkie your examples of code at work in the digital media and tools you’ve used. I think, though, that we can dig even deeper if we consider not the html or php code you note but binary code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_code) that’s at the heart of any computerized operation. Binary code is only zeroes and ones. It looks like this: 10011100111 . . . . 0s are “off” and 1 is “on” — all computer code reduces to this. There are other examples as well where mathematical plot points on an x and y axis correspond to pixels in an image. We don’t deal with this so much now as programing languages are layered on top of machine code but in the early days of computing, programmers dealt almost exclusively with numerical representations of data.