The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich

After reading a chapter of this book, I have learnt a lot of interesting facts about New Media and what has come and gone in the New Media world over the last decade or so, I was particularly interested in the 1995 era section of his book where he visits St. Petersburg for a festival called “In Search of Third Reality,” he was that there was a young artist, a painter, wearing something called a ‘Nintendo Dataglove’, which he said was transferring data from his hand movements into a synthesizer which then came out as music, after reading this I suddenly thought of the new ‘Nintendo Wii’ console, which allows you to use your movement to control the on screen characters, although the Wii is probably more complex than the Dataglove, it is still pretty astonishing to see that there was all ready something out there before that was similar in ways of use.

He then goes on to talk about the becoming of the Internet and how by the end of the 90’s this was a major part of New Media and that culture was turning into E-culture because of this.

To quote Lev Manovich on something he says further on into the book, ‘I wish that somebody, in 1895, 1897 or at least in 1903, had realized the fundamental significance of cinema's emergence and produced a comprehensive record of the new medium's emergence: interviews with the audiences; a systematic account of the narrative strategies, scenography and camera positions as they developed year by year; an analysis of the connections between the emerging language of cinema and different forms of popular entertainment which coexisted with it. Unfortunately, such records do not exist. Instead, we are left with newspaper reports, diaries of cinema's inventors, programs of film showings and other bits and pieces—a set of random and unevenly distributed historical samples.’

This part really stood out from the parts I read, I understand what the guy means and fully agree with him on the count of having more reference to how it has changed over the last 100 years, I mean of course from watching, for example A Laurel & Hardy film from the 50’s and then watching a film from today, you can see the difference in technology and scripting etc, but we can also buy a DVD version of this film and watch the ‘Making Of..’ in the special features, we cannot do this with films from the golden era of cinema, when it first came about and was a massive success, and it is a that it is like this as it would have gave a very in depth picture of the change over the said years.