The Language of New Media

Lev Manovich’s attempt to record the emergence of new media before it is lost. He draws various analogies between new media and the cinema (new media for 21st century)
While cinema was emerging and taking shape no one recorded the development as it happened year by year and all what we were left with was newspaper report, diaries of cinema’s inventors and other bits and pieces. Historians had to reconstruct ‘How cinema evolved’ painstakingly.

One significant difference that he draws between new media and old is that new media is build up of discreet blocks where as old media was continuous. Cinema sampled time (24 frames in one second) and new media samples both time and space.
This sampling in my view restricts the resolution of both space and time. The plus point is that this modular approach makes it easy to re-use the discreet objects. But it looses the details.
Then again brain cannot register frame rate faster then 24 per second. So why bother increasing the frame rate when the mind will eventually skip those minute fragments of time.
Talking about space, vector drawing can be zoomed in without loosing the sharpness but that is not true with raster objects where pixels get muddy if you zoom in.

Because we are so used to discreet approach now it is hard to turn back and start again using continuous spectrum. But that is just my thought.