Core Response: New Media vs. Cyberculture

Overall, this week’s texts emphasized the critical roles of identity, interaction, and expression on digital platforms. Interestingly, in Lev’s Manovich’s introduction to The New Media Reader, he draws a line between new media and cyberculture: “Notice that the emphasis is on the social phenomena; cyberculture does not directly deal with new cultural objects enabled by network communication technologies. The study of these objects is the domain of new media.” (Manovich, 16). This distinction raises the question: is it possible to separate new media from their cultural complexes? Besides this explicit claim, Manovich’s own analysis fails to disentangle new media from the social relations that produce them, not to mention from their modes of engagement and the resulting transformations. For instance, throughout his definitions of new media, he cites the influence of strategies developed in the avant-garde art movements of the 1920s, the congruence of post-war instructional art practices, and the impact on postmodern aesthetics. The other authors insist on the interdependence of culture and technology, in fact, they structure their entire arguments around it. In her complementary introduction to The New Media Reader, “Inventing the Medium,” Janet Murray focuses on the tension between engineers and humanists, and how their disagreements and collaborations ultimately produce epistemic change. In this way, she foregrounds the formative role of discourse. Bolter and Grusin outline how three strategies of media production—immediate transparency, hypermedia, and remediation—encode longstanding cultural values related to continuity, resistance, and awareness. Likewise, In Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?, Allucquère Rosanne Stone leads off with an admission that “technology and culture constitute each other” (Stone, 1). While she explores the potential changes to gender expression that new media introduces, her examination of how VR engineers embed their personal biases and desires in the technology they are producing, affirms the argument that new media objects are also always contingent on identity. Finally, in “The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier (or The Chicano Interneta),” Guillermo Gómez-Peña balks at the assertion that the digital somehow transcends issues of identity and politics: “When we began to dialogue with US artists working with new technologies, we were perplexed by the fact that when referring to cyber-space or the net, they spoke of a politically neutral / raceless / genderless and classless "territory" which provided us all with "equal access", and unlimited possibilities of participation, interaction and belonging, specially "belonging"(in a time in which no one feels that they "belong" anywhere).” (Gómez-Peña, 7). Returning to Manovich’s delineation, is it useful to evaluate new media outside of the dynamics of social networks? If so, for who and to what end?