Mmmmm, Posting

Hey y'all,

Michael Trice posting late on a Monday afternoon, with full intent to hypertext ya to death.

I primarily consider myself a writer, and my web presence sorta reflects that. You can catch some RPG credits at a couple of places, a short story, the website I design for Texas State, and the new alumni mag I put up over the break. Like I said in class, I worked at Apple and Hart, among a few other places, mostly as a writer or web designer. Now I'm an MATC grad student and an assistant editor for KAIROS.

My current goal is to say I came from here and ended up here. Until I end up elsewhere.

On to our list of articles.

I'm not a fan of the term New Media. It's far too now to have lasting value, and the name inspires overly stressed definitions as offered by Manovich's "New Media User's Guide." While not specifically incorrect on the 1-4 take, with the exception of the fact that New Media can be reduced to code it's also not so hard to apply these same principles to previous media, as well. Baron gets in on this a bit, but tends to become obsessed with writing. Why stop at writing?

Language itself requires mastery of a skill that clearly requires technical achievement. My point being that sometimes contemporary perspective lends a certain arrogance that robs scholars of objectivity. There's precious little new about New Media other than form, which likely explains why Manovich dismisses content. Baron hints at this with his tale of Thoreau and the pencil, but doesn't embrace the full extent of his own paradigm. To be nice, Manovich gets too lost in an agenda of promoting the concept of the new artist to objectively evaluate just how new New Media might be in "From Borges to HTML" (and I adore Jorge Luis Borges with all sorts of unbridled affection). Manovich does better in the next article. Better is always relative, though better.

I love the form of whatever we're calling New Media, even as I claim the function remains a constant with past media. Personal communication is multimodal. We love having features, gestures, sound, scent, and touch to tell a story. The form of modern communication allows us to experience and create communications at a distance that incorporate all these elements, with the exception of scent and touch (for the most part, for now). We're sorta unlearning the past 500 years of Gutenberg-inspired mass communication by remembering that communication is two-way and collaborative (I'm deeply saddened that Manovich touches on the illusion of sole authorship only to try and champion the names of different types of artists rather than honestly acknowledging the looming death of such recognition - too scary, I guess). We've always known we preferred this type of multimodal communication one-on-one, but now we're figuring how to do it as a society, one-to-many and many-to-one and many-to-many. Media that incorporates these principles pretty much constitutes what these writers refer to as New Media for me.

To be fair to Manovich, I admire giving designers their due, and don't disagree with the sentiment. Yet, I disagree in singling out technical design over production, narrative design, and even the key grip. It's a collaborative world and we all have to accept it. I also disagree with Manovich's need to separate social construct from technical object, but I'm getting a bit longwinded and steamed. ;) Let me say that where Manovich might see the designer of Blogger as the artist behind our work here, I see that designer, each of us, and anyone who comments as equal collaborators in a vital, social media form.

That said, Manovich's championing of the toolmakers deserves support, even if the it creates doubts about the banishment of content as overly reactionary.

I'll discuss Negroponte more in class, but I'm wary of anyone who stresses the generation gap over economic gaps in technology. Generational gaps require a narrow focus on the less than 20% of the world's population who have access to make age dominate over resources. Even in the U.S. a substantial portion of the population lacks reliable Internet access, and just at 50% of the population have broadband access. Try watching youtube on dialup and tell me that kids growing up in a dialup household will have mastered the skills needed to communicate by the time they are adults. Denying the economic and class gap of the digital divide is the epitome of philosophical irresponsibility. You want a good reason why Facebook is gaining ground on MySpace? Examine which requires lower resource requirements to enjoy.

Okay, we'll chat it up in class or comment fields!

-MT (hey, now Blogger saves my drafts automatically!)