Curating Media and Design — Aca-article: What is New Media? - Ten Years after the Language of New Media

Aca-article: What is New Media? - Ten Years after the Language of New Media

A frank assessment to begin: There are very few books on new media worth reading. Just when the naysayers decry the end of the written word, bookstore shelves still overflow with fluff on digital this and digital that. And even as a countervailing chorus emerged that was more skeptical of the widespread adoption of new media - in France, Jacques Chirac once spoke disparagingly about “that Anglo-Saxon network” (for, as anyone knows, in the beginning there was Minitel) - it was evident that the Internet revolution had already taken place in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Like it or not, the new culture is networked and open source, and one is in need of intelligent interventions to evaluate it.

Author: Alexander R Galloway, published in Criticism 2011.

In the years since its original publication in 2001, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media has become one of the most read and cited texts on the topic. It is a key entry in the disciplines of poetics and cultural aesthetics, and has helped define the new field of software studies. The book is not without its limitations, however, and perhaps today one may begin to re-evaluate the text with the fresh eyes of historical distance, and through it reassess the rampant open sourcing of all aspects of cultural and aesthetic life, from our tools to our texts, from our bodies to our social milieus.

A copy of this article can be found on http://readperiodicals.com/201107/2546674281.html and the original is here (but you need to pay for it): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/criticism/v053/53.3.galloway.html