Principles of New Media

Based upon Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001)

  1. Numerical representations: can be described mathematically, and are programmable. E.g. photographs are composed of pixels, which are themselves bits.
  2. Modular: collections of discrete components. E.g., a web page can becomposed of text and separate image, sound, and video files.
  3. Creation, distribution, and access to new media can be automated. E.g. applying a filer in Photoshop
  4. Variability: can exist in multiple versions. e.g. database driven web page; periodic updates
  5. Transcoding: content and code; language of media and language of computers