New Media and Marshall McLuhan

I’ve been watching a documentary called McLuhan’s Wake about the life and ideas of Marshal McLuhan, which is not on the syllabus but I was hoping—as a cinematic depiction of a man and his ideas of the effects of media on the culture of the “global village”—that I would find relevance to Manovich’s definitions of what New Media means.

The movie is more relevant to Manovich’s stated purpose of writing the book, which is to document the processes and effects of the moments New Media emerge, and less to chapter one, but I anticipate the closeness of connections between the two will become more apparent as we work through the book. McLuhan is a useful yet underutilized observer and critic of New Media in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in that he was doing what Manovich claims no one was: studying how emergent digital media is accepted, used, changed, and changes. Though Manovich states that the greatest developments in media are the cinema and the internet-connected home computer, the intermediate developments of popular radio, television and the leaps in their uses for advertising are not mere innovation. But I accept Manovich’s claim that—to paraphrase—they recontextualized and re-moded how information is made, received, manipulated, shared and stored. From McLuhan we get a theory to understand how new things affect culture.

I can tell from the introduction and chapter one that Manovich is very careful about the terms he uses and how those terms are defined for different uses; and careful about slowly raising the temperature of the water so we reader-frogs cannot leave until we are done.

But a theory of Marshal McLuhan’s I found interesting of hopefully useful to the rest of Manovich is what McLuhan called the “Laws of Media.” All I know of these now is from a Special Feature on the DVD, and I can’t extract …JING!

I take issue with the title “Laws of Media” because I don’t believe all of these objects are media. I propose “Laws of Emergent Modes” to better encapsulate the objectness of the thing and how it affects what came before it. I think it will be useful to think of the technologies Manovich mentions in terms of this Tetrad.

Use these as practice:

Additionally, here are images of fractals that create fern fronds. They were made logarithmicly. I can't remember the name of the fern's characteristic that the whole plant's structure is expressed in each larger stage of its component parts, but these images speak to the necessity of New Media to be scalable which Manovich addresses in the section "Modularity" on page 30.

Barnsley fern

a variation of the Barnsley fern