There Is No Digital Media, Only Software

Dead Media Beat: Lev Manovich, "There Is No Digital Media, There Is Only Software" | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com: “It is important to make it clear that I am not saying that today all the differences between different media types – continuous tone images, vector images, simple text, formatted text, 3D models, animations, video, maps, music, etc. – are completely determined by application software. Obviously, these media types have different representational and expressive capabilities; they can produce different emotional effects; they are processed by different sensors and networks of neurons in the brain; and they are likely to correspond to different types of mental processes and mental representations. These differences have been discussed for thousands of years – from ancient philosophy and classical aesthetic theory to modern art and contemporary neuroscience. “What I am arguing is something else. On the one hand, interactive software adds a new set of operations which can be applied to all these media types – which we as users experience as their new ‘properties’. (The examples include separation between data structure and its display, hyperlinking, visualization, and search interface.) On the other hand, the ‘properties’ of a particular media type can vary dramatically depending on the software application used for its authoring and access. Let’s go though one example in detail. “As the example of media type, we will use a photograph. In the analog era, once a photograph was printed, all the information was ‘fixed’. Looking at this photograph at home, in an exhibition, or in a book did not affect this information. Certainly, a photographer could produce a different print with a higher or a lower contrast or use a different paper – but this resulted in a physically different object, i.e., a new photographic print that contained different information. (For example, some details were lost if the contrast was increased.) “So what happens with a digital photograph? We can take a photo with a dedicated digital camera or capture it with a mobile phone, or scan it from an old book. In every case, we end with a file that contains an array of pixels which hold color values, and a file header that specifies image dimensions, color profile, information about the camera and shot conditions such as exposure, and other metadata. In other words, we end up with what is normally called ‘digital media’ – a file containing numbers which represent the details of some scene or an object. . . ."

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