History and the Avant-Garde  of Web Poetry 
 
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ELEMENTS OF AN AVANT-GARDE WEB POETICS: LEV MANOVICH

by George Hartley

 

Lev Manovich provides the following list of elements of what he calls "New Media":

 

1.    Numerical Representaion

2.    Modularity

3.    Automation

4.    Variability

5.    Transcoding

Interestingly, manovich also provides a list of qualifications of the New Media:

 

1.    New Media is not new (its key elements were anticipated by cinema)

2.    Digitization at this moment is neither the boon nor threat that it has been claimed to be

3.    interactivity as a notion, because it is so broad, must be precisely defined in context

 

This last point offers an implicit critique of Landow’s democratic Utopianism. Rather than the opening up of new democratic vistas of choice and nonhierarchical associations, hypertextuality repositions the reader within an objectified structure of preprogrammed networks and externalized processes of association:

 

Interactive computer media perfectly fits this trend to externalize and objectify the mind’s operations. The very principle of hyperlinking, which is the basis of most of interactive media, can be said to objectify the process of association often taken to be central to human thinking. Mental processes of reflection, problem solving, recall and association are externalized, equated with following a link, moving to a new page, choosing a new image, jumping to a new scene. Before we would look at an image and mentally follow our own private associations to other images. Now interactive computer media asks us instead to click on this image in order to go to another image. Before we would read a sentence of a story or a line of a poem and think of other lines, images, memories. Now we asked to click on the highlighted sentnce to go to another sentence. Thus we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations. In short, in what can be read as a new updated version of French philosopher Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation," we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody's else mind for our own. (The Language of New Media 61)