New digital media differ from the old ones specifically because they are active instead of passive, according to Mark Poster. He also thinks that in media, when we talk about broadcasting, we talk about an Elite that controls and shape broadcasting. This enabled fascism and dictatorships to develop. Within new media, however, being the user more active, they can control the information they give, and they can give other information too. They have more choice, and this is what new media are about.
Lev Manovich wanted to analyze this new media; for doing this, he wrote a book through which he wants to give the world a tool to understand new media (Mapping New Media). He organized the book with ordered chapters, and each chapter would be essential to the understanding of the next one. In his opera, he analyzes what are the new media, what is the interface, what are the operations, the illusion, and the forms within. Then, during his book, he uses three main terms: language, object, representation. When he talks about ‘language’ he talks about new media in relationship to other cultures, creating a big visual culture. When he talks about ‘object,’ he talks about the new media object which could be any content originated or distributed by any media. When he talks about representation, he means everything that represents something that exists within another context. For example, a videogame could be a representation of reality. Manovich, however, underlines that any representation is necessarily biased. When we see something represented within a certain language (could be a frame, could be a text, could be a picture, etc), we do not see it from any other perspective. When we see an image of the apple, we don’t see if there were people in the room when the picture was taken. We don’t see if the photographer was naked or not. We do not see if there were other fruits outside the frame. The photographer decided to show us something within a frame. As we see in Vertov’s dataset, a cameraman Is like a surgeon. He takes and extrapolates from the world what he wants.
This is exactly what happens with political propaganda. Politicians take the picture they want, they select what to put in a frame, and the decision they take will deliver the narrative they want. Last semester, in the class of Visual Communication, the professor showed us a picture of a black child that was swimming during a flood after the Hurrican Katrina with a black sack. In the picture, we were just seeing a guy with a sack that was swimming in a flood. Nothing more. We had no other pictures, no context, no story. We had just that picture. The professor told us that right-wing politicians took advantage of this lack of information to create their narrative. They used the image under an article that said, “young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store.” The paradigmatic and syntagmatic choices the writer had changed the interpretation of the picture. The frame gave us some elements, and the politicians added their meaning, creating a very specific message. Reality and representation are two very different things, this is what Manovich wanted to say. No media could ever represent fairly reality or any other object: representation implies a narrator, and a narrator is a funnel that necessarily selects what to tell.
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