["The Language of New Media" is a new book by Lev Manovich,
Rhizome regional editor and a frequent Rhizome contributor. The
book will appear from The MIT Press in the first part of 2001.
Rhizome is presenting selections from the book, including this
excerpt from Chapter 3, "The Operations."]

Radical as they may be, an interactive narrative, a digital film, a
virtual world or a typical Web site is still something we can deal with
using traditional aesthetic theory. These are still objects created by
authors for cultural consumption by users. No new media objects are
being generated when the user follows a hyperlink to another Web site,
or uses telepresence to observe or act in a remote location, or
communicates in real time with other users using Internet chat, or just
makes a plain old-fashioned telephone call. In short, once we begin
dealing with verbs and nouns which start with "tele," we no longer deal
with the traditional cultural domain of representation. Instead, we
enter a new conceptual space - telecommunication. How can we start
navigating it?

When we think of the decade of the 1890s, we think of the birth of
cinema. In the preceding decades, and the one which immediately followed
the 1890s, most other modern media technologies were developed, enabling
the recording of still images of visible reality (photography) and sound
(the phonograph), as well as real-time transmission of images, sounds,
and text (telegraph, television, the fax, telephone and radio). Yet,
more than any of these other inventions, it was the introduction of
cinema which impressed itself most strongly on public memory. The year
which we remember and celebrate is 1895; it is not 1875 (first
television experiments of Carey) or 1907 (the introduction of the fax).
Clearly, we are more impressed (or at least, we have been until the
Internet) with modern media's ability to record aspects of reality and
then use these recordings to simulate it for our senses, than with its
real-time communication aspect. If we had a choice to be among the
Lumiere's first audience or be the among the first users of the
telephone, we would choose the former. Why?

The reason is that the new recording technologies led to the development
of new arts in a way that real-time communication did not. The fact that
aspects of sensible reality can be recorded and that these recordings
can be later combined, re-shaped and manipulated–in short, edited–made
possible the new media-based arts which were soon to dominate the
twentieth century: fiction films, radio concerts and music programs,
television serials and news programs. Despite persistent experiments of
the avant-garde artists with modern technologies of real-time
communication–radio in the 1920s, video in the 1970s, Internet in the
1990s–the ability to communicate over a physical distance in real-time
by itself did not seem to inspire fundamentally new aesthetic principles
the way film or tape recording did.

Since their beginning in the nineteenth century, modern media
technologies have developed along two distinct trajectories. The first
is representational technologies: film, audio and video magnetic tape,
various digital storage formats. The second is real-time communication
technologies, i.e. everything which begins with "tele": telegraph,
telephone, telex, television, telepresence. Such new twentieth century
cultural forms as radio and later television emerge at the intersections
of these two trajectories. In this meeting, the technologies of real-
time communication became subordinated to technologies of
representation. Telecommunication was used for distribution, as with
broadcasting which enabled a twentieth century radio listener or
television viewer to receive a transmission in real time. But a typical
program being broadcast, be it a film, a play or a musical performance,
was a traditional aesthetic object, i.e. a construction which utilizes
elements of familiar reality and which was created by professionals
before the transmission. For instance, although following the adaptation
of video tape recorders television retained some live programs such as
news and talk shows, the majority of programming came to be pre-
recorded.

The attempts of some artists from the 1960s onward to substitute a
traditionally defined aesthetic object by other concepts such as
"process," "practice," and "concept" only highlight the strong hold of
the traditional concept on our cultural imagination. The concept of an
aesthetic object as an object, i.e. as a self-contained structure
limited in space and/or time, is fundamental to all modern thinking
about aesthetics. For instance, in his "Languages of Art" (1976), one of
the most influential aesthetic theories of the last decades, philosopher
Nelson Goodman names the following four symptoms of the aesthetic:
syntactic density, semantic density, syntactic repleteness and the
ability to exemplify. These characteristics assume a finite object in
space and/or time: a literary text, a musical or dance performance, a
painting, a work of architecture. For another example of how modern
aesthetic theory relies on the concept of a fixed object we can look at
the very influential article "From Work to Text" by Roland Barthes. In
this article Barthes establishes an opposition between a traditional
notion of a "work" and a new notion of "text," about which he advances
seven "propositions." As can be seen from these propositions, Barthes's
notion of a "text" is an attempt to go beyond the traditional aesthetic
object understood as something clearly delineated from other objects
semantically and physically–and yet ultimately Barthes retains the
traditional concept. Proposition (1) states: "The work can be held in
hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of
discourse." "Text" is ruled by metonymy (3) (think of hyperlinking); it
aims at dissemination of meanings and is fundamentally intertextual (4);
it does not have a single Author (5); it "requires that one try to
abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing
and reading" (6), the distance which, as Barthes notes, is a recent
historical invention. Like a post-serial musical score which makes a
performer into its co-author, "text" "asks of the reader a practical
collaboration" (6). Given this last proposition in particular, many
interactive new media objects qualify as "texts" in Barthes's
definition. Yet his notion of a "text" still assumes a reader "reading,"
in most general sense, something which was previously "written." In
short, while a "text" is interactive, hypertextual, distributed, and
dynamic (to translate Barthes's propositions into new media terms), it
is still a finite object.

By foregrounding telecommunication, both real-time and asynchronous, as
a fundamental cultural activity, IT culture asks us to reconsider the
very paradigm of what an aesthetic object is. Is it necessary for the
concept of the aesthetics to assume representation? Does art necessary
involve a finite object? Can telecommunication between users by itself
be the subject of an aesthetic? Similarly, can the user's search for
information be understood aesthetically? In short, if a user accessing
information and a user telecommunicating with other(s) are as common in
computer culture as a user interacting with a representation, can we
expand our aesthetic theories to include these two new situations?