New media objects are rarely created completely from scratch; usually
they are assembled from ready-made parts. Put differently, in computer
culture authentic creation has been replaced by selection from a menu.
In the process of creating a new media object, the designer selects from
libraries of 3D models and texture maps, sounds and behaviors,
background images and buttons, filters and transitions. Every authoring
and editing software comes with such libraries. In addition, both
software manufacturers and third parties sell separate collections which
work as "plug-ins," i.e. they appear as additional commands and ready-to-
use media elements under software's menus. The Web provides a further
source of plug-ins and media elements, with numerous collections
available for free.

While computer software "naturalizes" the model of authorship as
selection from libraries of pre-defined objects, we can already find
this model at work with old media, such as magic lantern slides shows.
As film historian Charles Musser points out, in contrast to modern
cinema where the authorship extends from pre-production to post-
production but does not cover exhibition (i.e., the theatrical
presentation of a film is completely standardized and does not involve
making creative decisions), in magic lantern slide shows the exhibition
was a highly creative act. The magic lantern exhibitioner was in fact an
artist who skillfully arranged a presentation of slides which he bought
from the distributors. This is a perfect example of authorship as
selection: an author puts together an object from the elements which
she herself did not create. The creative energy of the author goes into
selection and sequencing of elements, rather than into their original
design.

Although not all modern media arts follow this authorship model, the
technological logic of analog media strongly supports it. Stored using
industrially manufactured materials such as film stock or magnetic tape,
media elements can be more easily copied, isolated and assembled in new
combinations. In addition, various media manipulation machines, such as
a tape recorder and a film slicer, make the operations of selection and
combination easier to perform. In parallel, we witness the development
of archives of various media which enable the authors to draw on already
existing media elements rather than always having to record new elements
themselves. For instance, in the 1930s German photojournalist Dr. Otto
Bettmann started what latter became known as the Bettmann Archive; at
the time of its acquisition by Bill Gates's Corbis Corporation in 1995
it contained 16 million photographs, including some of most frequently
used images of this century. Similar archives were created for film and
audio media. Using "stock" photographs, movie clips and audio recording
become the standard practice of modern media production.

To summarize: the practice of putting together a media object from
already existing and commercially distributed media elements already
existed with old media, but new media technology further standardizes it
and makes it much easier to perform. What before involved scissors and
glue now involves simply clicking on "cut" and "paste." And, by encoding
the operations of selection and combination into the very interfaces of
authoring and editing software, new media "legitimizes" them. Pulling
elements from databases and libraries becomes the default; creating them
from scratch becomes an exception. The Web acts as a perfect
materialization of this logic. It is one gigantic library of graphics,
photographs, video, audio, design layouts, software code and texts; and
each and every element is free since it can be saved to a user's
computer with a single mouse click.

It is not accidental that the development of the GUI [Graphical User
Interface], which legitimized "cut and paste" logic as well as media
manipulation software such as Photoshop, itself popularizing the plug-in
architecture, took place during the 1980s–the same decade when
contemporary culture became "post-modern." In evoking this term I follow
Fredric Jameson's usage of post-modernism as "a periodizing concept whose
function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture
with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic
order." As it became apparent by the early 1980s for critics such as
Jameson, culture no longer tried to "make it new." Rather, endless
recycling and quoting of the past media content, artistic styles and
forms became the new "international style" and the new cultural logic of
modern society. Rather than assembling more media recordings of reality,
culture is now busy re-working, recombining and analyzing the already
accumulated media material. Invoking the metaphor of Plato's cave,
Jameson writes that post-modern cultural production "can no longer look
directly out of its eyes at the real word but must, as in Plato's cave,
trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls."

In my view, this new cultural condition found its perfect reflection in
the emerging computer software of the 1980s which privileged the
selection from already existing media elements over creating them from
scratch. And at the same time, to large extent it is this software which
made post-modernism possible. The shift of all cultural production to
first electronic tools such as switchers and DVEs (1980s) and then to
computer-based tools (1990s) greatly eased the practice of relying on
old media content in creating new productions. It also made the media
universe much more self-referential, because when all media objects are
designed, stored and distributed using a single machine–the computer–
it becomes much easier to borrow elements from already existing objects.
Here again the Web became the perfect expression of this logic, since
new Web pages are routinely created by copying and modifying already
existing Web pages. This applies both for home users creating their home
pages and for professional Web, hypermedia, and game development
companies.

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This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book "The Language of New
Media" (MIT Press, Fall 2000).