Introduction 2 Summary

Lev Manovich provides a short history of the institutionalization of new media, as well as eight reflections on ways in which to define “new media.”
New media can, in one perspective, be very simply be understood as “computer based artistic activities.” These activities, once present in the US periphery, took about ten years to move into the cultural mainstream. Although the technologies may have been introduced first in the US, other countries eventually surged ahead in exploring new media art. Manovich partly attributes this to the phenomenon that new technologies are assimilated quickly in the US—too quickly too allow time for critical refliection of these technologies. Accordingly, while the internet became a fixture in most US homes seemingly overnight, other countries were taking the time to critically think about how to integrate these new technologies with existing art and culture. Progress in new media art was further stymied in the 90’s, Manovich continues, by the low level of public support for the arts in the US.
Ultimately the use new media became omnipresent in the art world, forcing the question, “if all artists now…routinely use digital computers to create, modify, and produce works, do we need o have a special field of new media art?” Manovich answers ‘yes,’ asserting that there are many theororetical questions pertaining to this field that must be addressed, a task the New Media Reader will work toward.

What Is New Media? Eight Propositions
NM versus Cyberculture
• Cyberculture is the social phenomena resulting from the introduction of New Media into society and the interaction of the culture with the New Media.
NM as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
• Media is by definition distributed to a large audience on some platform. New Media is by definition the media which uses digital computer technology as a distribution platform
NM as Digital Data Controlled by Software
• Cultural objects can be digitally represented in potentially many different states by the use of software that can be manipulated. Interesting that the logic of images and texts have different rules; images can be comprehended compositally while text must be linear and semiotic.
NM as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software
• New Media is a mix of already mature cultural forms that are undergoing digitization and novel media “native” to computers. It is the difference between being “gazed at, rather than interacted with.” It is also the difference between a continuous field and one broken up with hyperlinks constituting several regions.
NM as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Comm. Tech.
• Similar aesthetic strategies reappear in media. The moving image as cinema was reinvented on a computer screen 100 years after it was “born.”
NM as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Tech.’s.
• New Media accelerates data processesing, leading to qualitatively new phenonmena
NM as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde
• The new avant garde was concerned with seeing the world in as many ways as possible—existing media became the raw material for artistic innovation. The new media avant guard came up with a new way to package “reality.”
NM as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing

U.S. cultural trends in art and ideas of the past four decades led to the developing paradigms of new media. Non-heirachrchal organization on the interactive web melded well with post cold-war sensibilities.