Good Times in Manovich-Land... and Action Grammar!

Note: I'm not sure if it's a problem that I'm posting so early. I'm swamped with other projects (to include sleeping and visiting with family) over the weekend, and really just wanted to post while Manovich was still fresh.

The second section is well-situated as part of Lev Manovich’s stated desire to “record the ‘research paradigm’ of new-media during its first decade, before it slips in to invisibility” (8). In it, Manovich analyzes how print, cinema, and human-computer-interfaces (HCI's)—which together, form “action-grammars” that comprise the “language of cultural interfaces”—has shaped the content and form of new media. This seems interesting to me, because Manovich is continuing with his argument that the physical limitations, distribution, and production of new media fundamentally altars our perception of its’ meaning. At the same time, I was particularly interested in how the different action-grammars arising from print, film, and HCI orient the user both chronologically and spatially.

As Manovich points out, “in the 1980’s many critics described one of the key effects of ‘postmodernism’ as that of spatialization—privileging space over time” (78). This privileging of space over time seems to form the crux of Manovich’s argument. For instance, print is shown to have influenced the early formation of the web as users scrolled through self-contained “pages” of information. At the same time, Manovich goes on to show how hyper-linking has displaced the (chronological) linearity of print in favor of “spatial wandering” in new media culture’s “infinite flat surface” (70). So, despite the influence of print over new media, the linear nature of the textual argument has been displaced by a spatialized network of free-association. In a similar vein, Manovich goes on to argue that the conventions of cinema are ascendant within new media, as the fundamentally spatial representations of the web are “subjected to the camera’s particular grammar of data access” when people “interact with data spaces, models, objects and bodies” (80). It’s hard to disagree with these points. And the implication here is that our orientation towards meaning is increasingly structured by visual as opposed to textual forms of representation. (Or maybe this isn’t all that much of a change. People have always spent more time out-and-about than they have reading.)

I’ll admit to freaking out a bit when Manovich started talking about how “the sheer existence and popularity of hyperlinking exemplifies the continuing decline of the field of rhetoric in the modern era” (77). And yes, I was also a little annoyed when he negatively represented the purpose of rhetoric by talking about the “seduction” (such a loaded term) of a “user through a careful arrangement of arguments and examples” (77). I’m not clear why Manovich linked rhetoric to a classical view—which I agree is hierarchical and linear—that hasn’t really been operative since the 1960’s. At the same time, I understand that our differences in definition aren’t exactly crucial to my understanding or even appreciating Manovich’s central point in regards to chronology and spatialization. When it comes to new media, “time has [become] a flat image or a landscape” and any “new media rhetoric or aesthetic” should conceivably have “less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or an orator, and more with spatial wandering” (78).

This all seems… just a little abstract… so I tried thinking through it by using my prezi as an example. (It’s uneven, so I don’t feel like re-embedding it here). In this work, I had structured my um, “argument,” chronologically, in terms that are familiar to me as an author. My prezi sort of works if the user just hits the forward button—in other words, if the user approached the work precisely as they would an essay. In contrast, I’m currently wondering what the structure of a novel or even a magazine article would look like if it were published using the actual potential of visual representation—that is, if the user were invited to explore the features of an argument in a non-linear way, though they may perhaps be guided using visual elements. As a rudimentary example of this, I found a prezi titled “Math is Not Linear:”

Math is not linear on Prezi

Though a path for there user is suggested here, there also seems to be some room for individual exploration. It seems to me as though this prezi could actually serve as a symbol—however rudimentary or simplified—for the potential of new media. What do you guys think?