Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2007

During the last decade, many studies have reconsidered the definition of media, frequently emphasizing how new Digital media may be reproducing or reformulating old analogue media. Through a critical examination of two key contributions Bolter and Grusin (1999) on remediation and Manovich (2001) on the language of new media this article suggests that much current work under a heading of digital aesthetics, approaching media as modes of representing reality, rather than as resources for acting in and on reality, is missing not one, but two opportunities one of exploring interactivity at the level of meaning as received and interpreted, the other of specifying how the discourses of digital media enter into social interaction beyond the interface. Digital media should be understood in the wider context of general communication theory, including issues of mediated and unmediated social interaction.

Many new-media enthusiasts have inherited from modernist aesthetic theory the assumptions of essentialism and absolute originality. They assume that each medium is constituted by a unique set of essential characteristics and that the task of designers is to explore these characteristics by creating artefacts that will define the medium. Bolter and Grusin's Remediation is a study of intermedial relationships that rejects modernist aesthetics and calls these assumptions into question. Manovich's The Language of New Media does not simply accept these assumptions, but it does seek to derive new-media artistic practice from modernism.

While new-media theorists have spend considerable efforts in trying to understand the relationships between digital media and older physical and electronic media, the important sources the writing and projects by Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Englebart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and other pioneers working in the 1960s and 1970s remain largely unexamined. What were their reasons for inventing the concepts and techniques that today make it possible for computers to represent, or remediate other media? I suggest that Kay and others aimed to create a particular kind of new media rather than merely simulating the appearances of old ones. These new media use already existing representational formats as their building blocks, while adding many new previously non-existent properties. At the same time, as envisioned by Kay, these media are expandable that is, users themselves should be able to easily add new properties, as well as to invent new media. Accordingly, Kay calls computers the first metamedium whose content is a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.

Prophecies of media convergence have been a key component of recent discussions of digitalization. It has been claimed that the manipulability of digital data facilitates convergence and allows an erosion of differences between media. This article questions these assumptions by showing how there are also considerable obstacles against such manipulability, as well as against the erasure of differences between media. By examining empirical developments, as well as arguments put forward by theorists like Friedrich Kittler, Jay Bolter, Lev Manovich and Rosalind Krauss, it is maintained that what we are seeing is more a proliferations of media than a convergence leading to their unification. In part, this is due to our affection for a multiplicity of media. However, one way in which media do become similar is by increasingly being remediated on a digital platform. Thereby they become subject to a globalization effect by having their functionalities augmented by basic traits of the computer.

Taking as a point of departure that the website constitutes an important analytical unit for the analysis of Internet activities, this article discusses to what extent the work of Bolter and Manovich can contribute to the clarification of what characterizes the website as a phenomenon in its own right. Focus is on the second edition of Bolter's Writing Space and on Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, both from 2001. After a short outline of some of the overriding similarities and differences between these texts, it is demonstrated how the understanding of the website oscillates between two poles: fragmentation/modulization vs. some kind of coherence. Finally, on the basis of a conceptual framework centred on the textual and paratextual being of the website, it is argued that the oscillation between fragmentation/modulization and coherence in the vast majority of cases will prove to be to the advantage of coherence.

The primary mode of reception in computer games is play. This implies that the agency performed by computer players does not limit itself to the process of reading, but is constituted by a creative enactment of the structures of interactive actions and events inherent in the game. As such, gameplay may be regarded as a kind of (unpaid) immaterial labour, implying players' socialization, creativity, and a general intellect, that is, the ability to appropriate and rework the computer game as a work of culture. This article investigates the immaterial labour of computer players and discusses how this is being put to work by the game industry at different levels as a means of producing fascinating game experiences and by means of including player agency as a productive force in gamedesign processes thus connecting it to the economy of computer-game production.

This article will identify and define the concept of transdiegetic sound space in computer games, and discuss the relationship of this space to action and events in the game. The point of departure for the article is based on discussions of the diegetic space in film theory, but the argument will be supported by writings on the role of sound for usability purposes in web applications and software, as well as views on games as a framing of a separate field of action and how computer games interpret this. Although sound is in focus in this article, it should be noted that transdiegeticity is relevant for a greater understanding of spatial relationships in computer games in general.

This article is a comparative analysis of the websites of four of the most powerful leaders in the world: two presidents (George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac) and two prime ministers (Angela Merkel and Tony Blair). The analysis focuses on the structure and content of the websites; the relation between textual elements, visual and other elements; the types of information given; the way it addresses users; and to what degree and in what forms interactive potentials for dialogue are constructed. The ways in which the relation between the official, political person, the representative of the nation and the more personal aspects of these politicians are constructed are key focus points seen in the more theoretical context of mediated politics and the mediation of the political personae in the present media-saturated society. The comparative analysis shows significant national differences in the way the political leaders are linked to national symbols and national cultural identity. The last part of the article discusses the empirical data on the rising importance of political websites for the general population.

Jay Bolter, Lev Manovich, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Arild Fetveit, and Gitte Stald