Week 2: Manovich, Bush, Engelbart
Manovich (2001) begins the chapter entitled "The Interface" by discussing how the 1984 Macintosh's Graphical User Interface offered a vision of the future markedly modernist and practical and how its interface has influenced interfaces of contemporary media such as cell phones. He proceeds to his point for this chapter, that the computer interface has become a filter for the way we experience other media and culture. He reappropriates the "content vs. form" argument for new media studies as "content vs. interface" and discusses different theories on the extent to which content does or does not dictate interface. In the next section of the chapter, Manovich coins a new term for discussing the interface's role as a filter for culture, cultural interface: "the ways in which computers present and allow us to interact with cultural data" (p. 70). He suggests three older interfaces influence the current cultural interface: printed text, cinema, and human-computer interfaces. The use of various windows on the same screen to represent different information derives from the different pages of a book. However, he argues texts role in cultural interfaces is weakening since cinema is becoming much more influential. Cultural interfaces, being human-computer interfaces, necessarily remediate other media. In the final section of this chapter, Manovich discusses a relevant concept for analyzing interfaces: the screen. He proposes that there are several types of screens. Classical screens, like paintings, simply offer another three-dimensional world within the subject's already existent space. Dynamic screens, such as cinema, offer an image that changes with time and impose a "viewing regime" (p. 97) which commands the viewer to filter out the world outside the frame. Computer screens eliminate the viewing regime, as multiple windows within the same screen compete for the viewer's attention; VR also eliminates the regime, as the world of the screen and the outside world become one. He concludes the chapter by discussing how even new media, like older media, still restrict the viewer's body, but frescos and mosaics, similar to VR, require the viewer's movement for viewing the image.
In "The Forms," Manovich discusses another dichotomy related to the "content vs. form" issue new media presents: the database and "virtual interactive 3-D space" (p. 214). This is a struggle between "information and 'immersion,'" or in other words, "action and representation" (p. 216). He then proceeds to discuss how these issues become manifest in databases. People can organize information within databases in various ways: the non-linear presentation of data supports post-modern ideas about epistemology. Narratives have a diminished presence in new media: all new media are databases at their core, and their information can be presented in narrative form, but there is nothing inherent about databases leading to narrative form. In new media, content and form are not one: there are many ways of presenting information, some linear, some not, but the content at the core remains the same.
Particularly interesting to me is the parallels between Manovich's discussion of content vs. interface and conversations I've engaged with in the past about content vs. form. Scholars studying the philosophy and rhetoric of science have had debates similar in scope about the extent to which communication in the sciences is presentation/form/rhetoric and how much of the content, if any, exists independently of the form. Many scientists and philosophers of science take the "windowpane" view of language (term coined by Carolyn Miller); there is an objective outside world, and scientists' language conveys information about this world truthfully. In this view, the content of scientific discourse dictates its form, or style. Manovich offers a similar theory from new art: that the content of the work dictates the interface to a point in which content and interface "merge into one entity, and no longer can be taken apart" (p. 67).
Manovich offers other ways of understanding this relationship that could be applicable to rhetoric of science studies. When discussing databases, he suggests at one point that content could exist independently of the interface's form but content does not dictate a specific form; many interfaces are possible for the same database. Borrowing from new media art again, he offers two relevant concepts: the informational and experiential dimensions. In the informational dimension exists the content of the message, the data about the objective world in science and the content of the database in new media. In the experiential dimension exists the presentation of the content leading to a particular user experience or understood meaning on the part of the reader. This theory, applied to science, suggests there is an objective reality, and the data we collect on it could exist independently of the language used to discuss it. However, this language is rhetoric and can take numerous forms, those privileged by scientists and those not often found in specialists' works. This theory seems in line with my own beliefs about the relationship between language, "objective truth," and science. I believe that there is an "objective world" that we perceive to the best of our sensory capabilities. For instance, there really is an outside force (i.e. gravity) that will cause me serious injury if I jump out my window. However, I feel our understanding and discussion of the outside world is shaped by our language and the rhetorical choices we make. There is not a specific form our discourse about science must take; the conventions of scientific discourse are just some of many possible ways we can discuss the outside world.
I do have one criticism of Manovich, which applies to all chapters we've read so far, in not his entire book. He focuses particularly on "visual" media, both old and new, and not so much on auditory media. Clearly new media has important implications for the latter; perhaps Manovich is not interested in music enough, for instance, in order to analyze how media affects our understanding of it. This weakness in Manovich's text is apparent when he classifies music CDs as simply a "collection of individual tracks grouped together" (p. 233), a database. While this may be true for many albums, often there is a narrative implicit within the collection. The order of the tracks is not arbitrary; the pacing of the album is important, and some songs may not have the same impact when stripped of the context of the album. This is a concern I wanted Manovich to address in his chapter on forms. Is new media changing the way we understand albums? With file sharing programs and Itunes, for instance, users often download individual songs, not entire albums. Also, users of Ipods and computer music players often amass a large collection of songs and use the shuffle feature to randomly select songs from their library. The new technology seems to encourage music listeners to listen to songs outside of the context of the album in which the artist created it. While listeners have been able to buy singles instead of entire albums for years, the new technology seems focuses listeners even more on individual songs. New media may deemphasize narrative.
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Bush (2003) and Engelbart (2003), writing a half-century before Manovich nearly as long before the advent of the internet, anticipate the advent of non-linear database technology and the post-modern view of epistemology, presented by Manovich, that new media presents. Both argue that the human mind operates based on the associative model: we may use sequential processes in arguments (Engelbart, 2003), but all theses derive from "conceptual chains" (p. 103), or "associative indexing" (Bush, 2003, p. 45). Bush begins by noting that scholars are producing a great deal of information, but as specialization increases conversation about each others' ideas diminishes. The current means for communicating new findings are also too slow. Scholars can assess published reports, but their access is limited. He proposes many ideas for speeding up the research and recording process, such as dry photography, microphotography, and page compression (our current technologies, of course, have made these concepts a reality). Bush also proposes a machine he calls the memex, a sort of storage device, or database, of information such as papers, books, and photos through which the user can access the information quickly. The information will be grouped based on the principles of associative indexing: links can be created between related data, and the user can save the the "trails" one follows in progressing from one datum to the next in the associative web.
Engelbart applauds Bush's memex as a means for augmenting the human intellect, or "increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems" (p. 95), and he feels this new technology must give the user the ability to save associative trails produced when searching the system. He imagines the "augmented architect" of the future using computer technology to manipulate a model of a building to his choosing. Next, he explains his own experiment in which he created a system like the memex using note cards, concluding that a mechanical system is too cumbersome but an electronic system for performing this task could be successful (anticipating the computer database). To help readers imagine how the system works, he offers a narrative for analogy in which a mentor walks readers through an argument writing workshop. They divide up all of the ideas presented in the argument, then rearrange them into a more appropriate order. They then create links between ideas presented at one section of the argument to related antecedents and to other related information not even explicitly presented in the argument. The reader could determine what links to follow, what new information to focus on, what new information is not relevant. Engelbart concludes that once one starts writing this way, it is hard to approach texts in the same linear fashion as before.
What particularly strikes me about Bush and Engelbart's papers are they way they anticipate the non-linear approach to knowledge supported by new media. Both see only positives in this new approach to research and information processing. Are they drawbacks to the non-linear approach to knowledge-creating? For instance, children are growing up with new media, and perhaps it encourages them to think in a non-linear manner. As Engelbart notes, it is difficult to write texts in a linear fashion once you embrace non-linearity. Children also spend more time on the internet and less time reading books for pleasure. However, a great deal of our educational system, both K-12 and college, asks students to employ non-linear thinking. They must read texts across the curriculum presented in a linear manner, such as extended narratives (literature) and textbooks. To what degree can educators adjust the presentation of class material to work with students' changing learning style in a non-linear world? Does the internet decrease students' abilities to engage in the type of literacy tasks our educational system demands of them? A recent NY Times article (Rich 2008)--my Wiki contribution this week--discusses these issues, presenting research from education and psychology researchers about the effects extensive internet use may have on students' literacy skills applicable to school. According to the article, the negative effects of the internet on these skills, if any, are still up for debate: findings are mixed. At the same time, educators are contemplating adding internet literacy sections to standardized tests, recognizing its value: other countries have adopted this approach, though the U.S. has not.