Re: [-empyre-] New Media Reader

[Nick Montfort <nickm@linc.cis.upenn.edu>]

                                        Philadelphia

Jim, thanks for the quote, question, and pointer to the NMR site.

> What is at stake, do you think, in the notion of 'new media'
> constituting a 'field'?

If I were to say "new media is a field" it would just be a shorthand for
saying that the topic deserves to be studied on its own terms, with
methodologies and appaoches that are native to new media. New media is
important enough to our lives and our culture, and different new media
works and systems are related enough to one another, that we should
consider new media this way.

These are the same things that some people in game studies have been
saying about games (I think most game studies scholars refer to video
games specifically), by the way. And I agree that game studies should also
be a field.

What isn't at stake is whether or not the creative, artistic, literary,
communicative uses of the computer will be studied or not. They certainly
will be. Video games have been studied for decades, but originally they
were studied in communication programs because people wanted to prove that
they made children violent. The question is whether we will only approach
new media from existing disciplines -- such as cultural studies, film
studies, media studies, art, computer science, and English literature --
or whether will we develop a new way of understanding these comptuer
creations that draws on existing approaches to develop new and powerful
ways of thinking about new media.

-Nick Montfort
 http://nickm.com  nickm@nickm.com
 My new book, Twisty Little Passages: http://nickm.com/twisty


On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Jim Andrews wrote:

> Have not seen the url of The New Media Reader, edited by Noah and Nick on
> empyre yet. Here it is: http://www.newmediareader.com
>
> Check out the 'Book Contents', 'CD Contents', and 'Excerpts' sections. Very
> impressive!
>
> What is at stake, do you think, in the notion of 'new media' constituting a
> 'field'?
>
> ja
>
> PS: Nick and Noah, you probably know this quote from Apollinaire:
>
> "Typographical artifices worked out with great audacity have the advantage
> of bringing to life a visual lyricism which was almost unknown before our
> age. These artifices can still go much further and achieve the synthesis of
> the arts, of music, painting, and literature ... One should not be
> astonished if, with only the means they have now at their disposal, they set
> themselves to preparing this new art (vaster than the plain art of words) in
> which, like conductors of an orchestra of unbelievable scope they will have
> at their disposal the entire world, its noises and its appearances, the
> thought and language of man, song, dance, all the arts and all the
> artifices, still more mirages than Morgane could summon up on the hill of
> Gibel with which to compose the visible and unfolded book of the future....
> Even if it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, the new spirit
> does not refrain from discovering new profundities in all this that is not
> new under the sun. Good sense is its guide, and this guide leads it into
> corners, if not new, at least unknown. But is there nothing new under the
> sun? It remains to be seen."
> from "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poetès" (1917)
>
>
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