The Language of New Media

by Lev Manovich

In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.

Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Art, Technology, Academic, Philosophy, Film

395 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Lev Manovich is an artist, an author and a theorist of digital culture. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Manovich played a key role in creating four new research fields: new media studies (1991-), software studies (2001-), cultural analytics (2007-) and AI aesthetics (2018-). Manovich's current research focuses on generative media, AI culture, digital art, and media theory.
Manovich is the founder and director of the Cultural Analytics Lab (called Software Studies Initiative 2007-2016), which pioneered use of data science and data visualization for the analysis of massive collections of images and video (cultural analytics). The lab was commissioned to create visualizations of cultural datasets for Google, New York Public Library, and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
He is the author and editor of 15 books including The Language of New Media that has been translated into fourteen languages. Manovich's latest academic book Cultural Analytics was published in 2020 by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Chris Friend · Rating 3 out of 5]

What started out very, very tediously eventually built to an interesting discussion, then receded again into tedium only to stop suddenly without a rewarding or insightful conclusion.

The author's fixation on cinema was obsessive to the point of distraction: I often felt that the book's title should more appropriately have been "Manovich's New Language of Cinema"; however, this predication was out of necessity for his argument. Manovich suggests that the way we've viewed, analyzed, and critiqued film (and the creation/digestion/exhibition/reproduction thereof) is relevant to new media, as well.

With painstaking detail and thoroughness, this text catalogues the ways in which we can study and interpret new media, providing context, category, and connotation for the various terms used in discussing it.

While this was an extremely difficult (as in dull, tedious, and repetitive) read, it provides a foundation of vocabulary for a field of study. As such, I suppose it serves a purpose. Do I think that makes it good? :-) No, not really.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.

In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich draws on the history of cinema, photography, art, design, and telecommunications to theorize about new media. Primary to my concerns are his five "principles of new media," which he characterizes as what makes new media different from "old media":

1. Numerical representation: new media objects exist as data (27)
2. Modularity: the different elements of new media are discrete samples (30)
3. Automation: new media objects can be created and modified automatically; there is less human intentionality necessary for the creation and modification of media (32)
4. Variability: new media can be copied and created into a wide variety of versions (36)
5. Transcoding: new media can be converted into other formats (47). This he sees as "the most substantial consequence of the computerization of media" (45).

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

In summary, today strategies used by social media companies often look more like tactics in the original formulation by de Certeau while tactics look like strategies. Since the companies that create social media platforms make money from having as many users as possible visit them (they do so by serving ads, by selling data about usage to other companies, by selling add-on services, and so on), they have a direct interest in having users pour as much of their lives into these platforms as possible. Consequently, they give users unlimited storage space for all their media and the ability to customize their online lives (for instance, by controlling what is seen by whom) by expanding the functionality of the platforms themselves.

This, however, does not mean strategies and tactics have completely exchanged places. If we look at the actual media content produced by users, here the relationship between strategies and tactics is different. As I already mentioned, for many decades companies have been systematically turning the elements of various subcultures into commercial products. But these subcultures themselves rarely develop completely from scratch; rather, they are the result of the cultural appropriation and/or remix of earlier commercial culture.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s certainly interesting to read a book-length exploration of such an idiosyncratic and hyper-personal theory of media art (clearly largely built off of Manovich’s coming of age in the Cold War-era Soviet Union), but what was “new media” in 2001 is no longer remotely new, and Manovich seems primarily interested in its novelty, to the exclusion of tons of relevant information. Jurassic Park is certainly a milestone work in combining animated creatures with live action actors, but Windsor McKay interacted with an animated dinosaur named Gertie 60 years earlier, which gets no mention, presumably because it doesn’t approach photorealism or Manovich’s pet idea of virtual reality. Stan VanDerBeek is briefly complimented for his skill at cinematic montage, but his groundbreaking computer animation isn’t mentioned at all, and Lillian Schwartz doesn’t get any reference whatsoever. David Blair’s Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees is discussed as an early example of internet-based cinema (it was presented in hyperlink form and streamed over the internet over a decade before that was “a thing”), but its commentary on virtual reality and military simulators is completely ignored, making it fairly clear that Manovich has only read about it and never actually engaged with it directly. How do you constantly cite Benjamin and talk about the flâneur as someone who assembles a database and analyzes a space through experiencing its usage without discussing his Arcades Project???? He starts this book by claiming he doesn’t plan on predicting the future, so it’s not like I can really judge this book for being immediately dated (“street view” both negates and supports several claims in this book, but it didn’t exist yet!), but he seems to be here primarily to prognosticate all the same - this is a book about “the future aesthetics of the macrocinema” that claims that one day we will all have high resolution VR chips implanted in our retinas. Factual errors abound, too, to the point where I wondered if I was reading an advance copy that hadn’t gone through a final round of editing, but nope - Tomb Raider isn’t a first person shooter, Karel Zeman wasn’t named Konrad and Stan didn’t spell his last name Brackhage, but you wouldn’t know any of these things from reading this book! As a critic, Manovich can be fairly sharp - when Peter Greenaway’s career is over, I can’t think of anyone better to write the retrospective book on his work - but as a theoretician I’m far less convinced of his insight.

All of this would be a lot easier to deal with if Manovich had tolerable prose, but unfortunately, he is the most annoying stylist I have ever encountered. Within 3 pages of the intro I could instantly clock that 25 years later Manovich was a hardcore NFT/AI guy, and all of his loving references to Gibson may have done irreversible damage to my estimation of that author. He fancies himself a super cool cyberpunk data cowboy, but he’s primarily engaged with high end, expensive mainstream culture, analyzing the films of James Cameron or haute couture and leaving vast swaths of (frankly, better, more enduring AND more relevant) art behind in a rush to write an important, groundbreaking work that’s first to formalize “the language.” If only he wrote a valuable or continually-relevant one instead!

[Nissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lev Manovich is my hero since I read this. it inspired 3 independent studies my last year in college. and it's helped shape a lot of my in progress plans to revolutionize the world ;-)
it'll (probably) change the way you see and analyze what goes on in the increasingly technologized world.

but just so i don't sound like *too* much of a fanboy, it has a definite idealistic slant to it, and I highly recommend reading it along with "Control and Freedom" because the two books complement each other well.

[Lily Poppen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offers insightful structure for new media considerations + stylistically it is quite decent but had to skip some sections as they were didactic.

[Marius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manovich makes a good argument for the understanding of interfaces as cultural artifacts, but the book is often a little dry. I've found his other texts to be more useful, this book seems to much like a basic introduction and didn't go as much into detail as I had hoped. Nevertheless, it's great for an introduction for readers new to the field of media art.

[Lorena · Rating 3 out of 5]

confusing!

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

【Lev Manovich / The Language of New Media / MIT Press, 2001】

You would see how we have not progressed in ideas from this book published in 2001 - and we even seem to be losing interactivity defined in this book: "to fill in missing information" (P56) by the audience.

What scares me is rather how we haven't progressed from this stage:

--No longer embedded within particular texts and films, these organizational strategies are now free floating in our culture, available for use in new contexts. (P73)

This point is also declared even now as if it were something novel:

--Thus, along with selection, compositing is the key operation of postmodern, or computer-based, authorship. (P142)

Even this type of simple facts is so often distorted:

--The original, nineteenth-century meaning of television was "vision at a distance." Only after the 1920s, when television was equated with broadcasting, did this meaning fade away. (P169)

Namely, communication is not the only function of signs or symbols.

--In fact, the user is put in a much stronger position of mastery than ever before when she is "deconstructing" commercials, newspaper reports on scandals, and other traditional noninteractive media. (P209)

--The open nature of the Web as a medium (Web pages are computer files that can always be edited) means that Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. (P220)

--Still, the subjectivity of the flâneur (citation note: modern urban man) is, in essence, intersubjectivity -- an exchange of glanced between him and other human beings. (P269)

And this point is sadly overlooked:

I would like to compare the shift from analog to digital film-making to the shift from fresco and tempera to oil painting in the early Renaissance. (P305)

I would suggest multitasking while reading this book, like listening to a podcast: that would realize how this book was showing the horizon of selective / sampling / montage media reception.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit dated in its examples, Manovich's descriptions and even conjecture about society's transition to a digital basis is prescient and persuasive for even contemporary readers. Some of his verbiage gets to be a bit much and things that he emphasizes turn out to be not as important today as he thinks they will be, but Manovich really can't be blamed for such shortcomings. What does become somewhat frustrating is his relatively consistent reference to works that few readers then and even fewer now will ever be able to access. Using these for examples may be quite accurate in illustrating his points, but I'll never know, unfortunately.

All around an excellent examination of some rather pressing topics regarding how the digital influences our thinking and our daily lives. While maybe not quite as applicable to today in some respects, there's still certainly a lot in here to chew on and think about: the problems he addresses and identifies aren't going away anytime soon.

[Uriah Todoroff]

Good stuff but very entry-level in terms of what it analyzes. Manovich only brings up the topic of new media distribution in the final section, and as far as I'm concerned, this is the dominant issue in contemporary visual culture, new media studies, and film studies. I did think it was interesting how he predicted that the loop would become dominant, and it has; I don't see how the spatialization of images has become a dominant form in cinematic language, which is another prediction he makes towards the end. Despite how all books on new media become dated almost as soon as they are published, this one isn't: the constant references to Myst, Doom, Quake, Titanic and CD-ROMs is a little dated, but the analysis occurs at a level abstract enough that the book, by-and-large, is still entirely relevant. It just doesn't address the question of distribution, because in 2003 the web was still a wild, open zone.

[Casey Browne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author's fixation on cinema was obsessive to the point of distraction: I often felt that the book's title should more appropriately have been "Manovich's New Language of Cinema"; however, this predication was out of necessity for his argument. Manovich suggests that the way we've viewed, analyzed, and critiqued film (and the creation/digestion/exhibition/reproduction thereof) is relevant to new media, as well.

With painstaking detail and thoroughness, this text catalogues the ways in which we can study and interpret new media, providing context, category, and connotation for the various terms used in discussing it.

[Alexa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have finally found it....the most painful theory reading I have ever been assigned in any class ever. While conceptually, the ideas about new media presented were interesting and give interesting lens of analysis this was...so just so inaccessibly dull.

[Vanessa_Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

though some opinions have been out of date ,it's still worthy of reading
A helpful book in writing the review for the new media art in current China

[Alberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy bueno, una lectura que marcará mis próximos trabajos.

[Eleonora · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it for academic reasons.
Interesting, but not so easy to understand.

[Renato Cruz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manovich presents very fascinating ideas, in a style not so compelling.

[Rapunzella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book.

[Aimée]

Manovich seeks to investigate the effects of digital media (what he calls “the computer revolution”) on visual culture at large. Manovich draws from art history, literary criticism, photography, design, and most importantly film studies to ask the question: what is actually new about new media? To answer this question, Manovich engages a set of sub-questions: 1) How does the shift to computer-media based media redefine the nature of static and moving images? 2) What is the effect of computerization on the visual language used by our culture? 3) What new aesthetic possibilities are available to us? In The Language of New Media, Manovich drives home the telling fact that “today’s digital designers and artists use only a small set of action grammars and metaphors out of a much larger set of all possibilities” (Manovich 71).

Developing the possibilities of a new language for new media, Manovich develops the idea of a newly fashioned cinematic language, which builds on the aesthetic strategies of previous cinematic languages. These previous aesthetic strategies exhibited: “a particular configuration of space, time, and surface articulated in the work; a particular sequence of the user’s activities over time in interacting with the work; a formal, material, and phenomenological use experience” (66). Working toward building a new cinematic language, Manovich suggests: “If there is a new rhetoric or aesthetic here, it may have less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or orator, and more with spatial wandering” (78).

Manovich observes that communication or telecommunication as social, cultural activity can drastically change the “paradigm of the aesthetic object.” He asks the following questions of the aesthetic:” Is it necessary for the concept of the aesthetic to assume representation? Does art necessarily involve a finite object? Can telecommunication between users by itself be the subject of an aesthetic? Similarly, can the user’s search for information be understood aesthetically? In short, if a user accessing information and a user telecommunicating with other(s) are as common in computer culture as a user interacting with a representation, can we expand out aesthetic theories to include these two new situations?” (164).

While Manovich never answers these questions outright, he does develop several elements of the “new cinematic language” which can help point toward answers–elements which can cope with our data-rich, data-demanding lives. These elements include hypertext reading, montage, simultaneity, and the aesthetics of density. According to Manovich, the aesthetics of density is about representation of “contemporary information displays such as web portals, which may contain a few dozen hyper-linked elements or the interfaces of popular software packages, which similarly present the user with dozens of commands at once Manovich ends by with more questions: “Can contemporary information designers learn from information displays of the past–particularly films, paintings, and other visual forms that follow the aesthetics of density? “ (327).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A simultaneously inspiring and depressing read. This book is full of wonderful theoretical frameworks, as well as several near-misses that are still interesting and instructive, and a very few full misses that aren't any fun at all. (Also a few blind spots due to the author's fully disclosed visual media bias.)

The author spent the first five chapters building an argument as well as a useful theory of new media, piece by piece. A lot of it worked very well; even when I disagreed with the argument, I often found the theory sound.

It all completely fell apart for me in the final chapter, so it was quite a bummer to end on that note.

The author approaches the creation of a theory of new media from the angle of the visual arts in general, and film theory in particular. This produces many solid ideas with accessible examples. Still, one can't help thinking of the many other disciplines that could provide alternative theoretical models for some of the ideas with which the author engages.

In his defense, the author says as much several times in the text. He presents absolutely no illusion of the production of the definitive theoretical model for new media. He's very clear that he's presenting a single theoretical framework, and that others are very much possible.

And that is a major weakness of this book, if one can call it weakness: it is good enough, complete enough, and smart enough to give an inkling of how much better a more interdisciplinary framework might be. It reveals its limitations and shares them freely. It helps you form a clear articulation of what it lacks, leading you to want exactly that.

Warning: Liberal usage of, and references to: hypermedia, QuickTime, VR, and VRML. Also occasionally refers to computer games as "CD-ROMs". Gotta give him a break, it was ten years ago.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in media studies.

[Andrew Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manovich discusses the language through which we engage digital technologies (New Media). The way we interact in a digital environment is inherited through language. For example, we read web pages and bookmark them, all the while exploring them through windows. The digital world that has been created could not have been created from nothing, but needed to use the structure that existed in culture. This culture is not limited to language, but includes the visual as well. Currently you are looking at this on a screen, it may be a portrait or a landscape setting, even the ideas of portrait and landscape are artistic terms for types of paintings. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in technology, as his work requires you to deconstruct the ways in which you interact with “New Media.”

[lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lev Manovich's 'The Language of New Media' is one of 2 main texts we're using in The Dynamic Media Institute's coursework, research and discussion for Design Seminar 1. Fantastic read, great insight into the field and history of new media art. I have owned the book since 2004, read bits and pieces, but now I have a fantastic excuse to dig in and really live in the subject matter.

A great place to start. Well-written.

[Mark Schomburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The trouble with writing about new media is that everyone has their own ideas. Manovich lays down historical connections on which to base his theory. I did enjoy the trip back to Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera and early cinema, though honestly I wasn't expecting this kind of entrenching content. The book is beautiful, and that physical aspect makes it more readable, despite some difficult passages where the words just didn't flow.

[Lauren Klotz · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I read this book, I honestly felt like I was getting stupider. Reccommended for pseudo-intellectual wannabes with no tech-savvy. If you know anything, you would probably know better than to read this book, which for some reason is still required reading in some circles...

[Sam]

It's the book that all media theory classes teach when it comes to new media. Its permanent status on syllabi is clearly deserved but in rereading this book a few times, it's way too cinema-biased, which I think is still an issue in contemporary media theory. Nevertheless, this is a serious book.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

My boss once said: "Manovich is like the Rolling Stones of media studies. His older work is better, but he's still the Stones." Now, I'm not exactly familiar with his older work (yet), but I do have to agree on the "Stones" part of the sentiment. Must read.

[Jessica Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I shouldn't technically get to add this to my Goodreads because I didn't read the whole thing. So I note that here--and now it's okay to add it. Interesting read and some unique observations about what makes for new media.

[Mark]

Using Vertov's silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera as his starting point Manovich draws a convincing history of the evolution of media.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely dense, and somewhat obtuse, this book takes the reader through some of the most fundamental New Media art projects and software applications.

[Tomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Translation into Lithuanian: ISBN 978-9955-834-03-8