Information Age Essays - Media Technology, Digital Media

Information Age INFORMATION AGE The 20th century has seen extraordinary growth in technology; however, it has only been in the last decade that this boom in information has been accessible to the entire world through new technologies like computers and the Internet. These new technologies have found their way into areas of modern culture, such as photography, print, and film, enhancing its potential through its creation of CD-ROMs, websites, and computer games, terming the phrase new media which represents the new cultural forms that depend on digital computers for distribution. Consequently, the challenge not only becomes how to accommodate increasing information, but also how to organize information in new media. Through examples given in lecture, it is shown that the strategies in organizing information in this new media are not new, but have drawn from the techniques seen in more traditional forms of media. Focusing specifically on the organizational methods used in graphical user interfaces and the Web, the sa me techniques can be traced to modern art and video because, as a whole, culture and human behavior does not change. As Manovich said in his lecture, While we now rely on computers to create, store, distribute and access culture, we are still using the same techniques developed in the 1920s. The avant-garde of the 1920s has become the standard computer technology of today. These techniques have become materialized through the computer and its interface. For example, the avant-garde cinematic techniques of temporal montage and montage within a shot found its way into new media and became the key feature of all computer interfaces, known as windows. Like shots of a film, interface windows containing information could be presented all at once within the screen (montage within a shot). However, since the windows are opaque, users are forced to see one window at a time (temporal montage). Both techniques are at play in the Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) in todays computers. I believe that the montage was so revolutionary because it presented a new way of seeing the world. Early filmmakers presented hum ans with the option of two pleasures, getting as much information as possible, and a way to absorb it in an organized manner. And in this age of increased information, human behavior has remained unchanged only to become stronger. Society wants more information and more control. As a result, GUIs inherit the characteristics of the montage to provide overlapping and resizable windows of unlimited amounts of information all at the users fingertips. Another area of modern culture that has influenced the techniques of organizing information in new media is video. For example, in Lynnfields lecture, he presents a video by Gary Hill called Site Recite. Lunenfield describes it as a continuous movement through a dataspace. In short, users are taken on a fluid experience where series of objects are revealed and users are presented with infinite scenarios and possibilities in which choices are expected to be made. This video, as described by Lynnfield, plays on humans need for exploration, visual stimulation, and interaction. Evidence of this can be seen in the success of film and video games. This is a reason why information on the Web is presented and organized as it is. There are millions of websites on the World Wide Web, full of information and loaded with imagery and visuals. More importantly, the web is connected by links in a way that there is not starting point or ending point on the Internet. Through hypertext and hypermedia, infinite amounts of information are linked together in a space only activated my user interaction. With these techniques, users of the Internet are emerged in a seemingly endless environment where humans can achieve the have satisfaction exploring new worlds and gaining new information with just one click of a button. As human behavior and culture remain constant, accessing and organizing information in areas of modern culture or in new media will also remain unchanged, only to see growth in technology and information. Alfredo H. Vilano Jr. ICAM 110 Spring 2000 May 10, 2000 Prof. Manovich PAPER # 2 NEW TECHNOLOGY, NEW POSSIBILITES The growth of the Internet of over the past couple years has dramatically changed the way humans communicate, learn, entertain, do business, and shop just to name a few. It has