Principles

Although Lev Manovich's "The langage of New Media" emphasis is primarily on cinema rather than electronic literature, his "five principles of new media" have helped to define the distinctiveness of new media forms in contrast to print and other electronic media such as broadband television.

Four of the five follow in straightforward fashion, respectively, from the binary basis for digital computers (numerical representation), object-oriented programming (modularity and variability), and networked architectures with sensors and actuators (automation). The deepest and most provocative for electronic literature is the fifth principle of "transcoding," by which Manovich means the importation of ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the "cultural layer" to the "computer layer" . Although it is too simplistic to posit these "layers" as distinct phenomena (because they are in constant interaction and recursive feedback with one another), the idea of transcoding nevertheless makes the crucial point that computation has become a powerful means by which preconscious assumptions move from such traditional cultural transmission vehicles as political rhetoric, religious and other rituals, gestures and postures, literary narratives, historical accounts, and other purveyors of ideology into the material operations of computational devices. This is such an important insight that, although space does not allow me to develop it fully here, I will return to it later to indicate briefly some of the ways in which it is being explored.

_________________________________________________________________

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts.

Logical structure

As David Kolb puts it, the key to using hypertext to show logical structure is to be willing to mix presentation of structure within a single writing space, and hypertext links to other writing spaces.

Let single writing spaces present passages of argument, diagrammed or analyzed however is convenient. Let hypertext links take the reader to the arguments that support the parts of the argument presented on the page. Don't try to show all the structure either on the page or in the hypertext links. The single writing space would show fine structure where individual propositions relate to one another over a relatively small span that does not tax the reader's short-term memory. The hypertext links would show how larger blocks of argument relate to one another. Such a mixed presentation would take advantage of the power of prose paragraphs to present fine structure, and also of hypertext's ability to lay out typed relations between blocks of prose.

By not using hypertext to model every move, we would assist perception rather than burdening it. (from Socrates In the Labyrinth).

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Enter Hypertextual as a member