A Critique of Manovich

New media is a term for on-demand and interactive access to media made possible by the proliferation of information and communications technology (ICT) during the recent two decades (Manovich, 2003). In his book, The Language of New Media, Dr. Lev Manovich contrasts narrative as a form of cultural expression with what he calls "database" - his metaphor for the culture of new media.

"As a cultural form, the database represents the world as list of items, and it refuses to order that list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world." (Manovich, 2001)

Contrary to Manovich's claim, structure is a quality of a database. However, new media is characterized by beautifully unstructured free text, free tagging of photographs and video.

 "The new media object consists of one of more interfaces to a database of multimedia material. If only one interface is constructed, the result will be similar to a traditional art object, but this is the exception rather than the norm." (Manovich, 2001)

A great deal of new media is copyrighted. Would copyright owners freely allow others to place different "interfaces" on their precious copyrighted material? Manovich only gives two examples in support of his point: David Blair's Wax Web (1993) and Olga Lialina's Last Real Net Art Museum (1996). Two examples can hardly be considered to be the norm as he claims.

 "It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape. What is more surprising is that the other end of the spectrum - narratives - still exists in new media." (Manovich, 2001)

Manovich's claim of the near extinction of narrative seems odd in light of the work of Rosson and Carroll that stresses the powerfully motivating quality of narratives (2012).

Blair, D., (1993). Wax Web. Available online at http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/wax/.

Lialina, O., (1996). Last Real Net Art Museum. Available online at http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru.

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 218-236.

Manovich, L. (2003), New Media From Borges to HTML. The New Media Reader. Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Montfort, N. (eds.). Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003. 13-25.

Rosson, M.B., & Carroll, J. (2012). Scenario-based design. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. Erlbaum Associates, In press.