W9: Manovich and the Cultural Value of New and Old Media

This week’s reading was on Manovich’s “Database as Symbolic Form”.

He suggests that we have moved away from old media objects such as the novel, the cinema etc. which have some sort of romanticism tied to it and are the quintessential expression of a cultural narrative. The new age, modern equivalent: the database. Manovich argues that we undoubtedly want to “develop the poetics, aesthetics and ethics of this database” such that it isn’t just a cold, culture-less proliferation of texts, images and other data that are void of structure.

I think it’s interesting how as a society of people we feel compelled to do this in order to determine and appoint a cultural value to something. It’s not enough for it to exist in an unstructured way, things have to have solid meaning and cultural value.

It sort of links back to what Adrian was saying the lecture in Week 7, about how publishing as an industry will not die. It will become governemnt-subsidised like all  other industries that have some kind of cultural value yet are seemingly less commercially viable e.g. the theatre, opera. At the time I though well sure, that’s true for things like books and theatre and opera which have a romantic sort of past. But then in class (that same day if I’m right), we took a look at CowBird. This site was particularly unique in that it preserved the open web format for sharing stories and doesn’t have an app (shock! horror!). The site claims that Apps are destined for obsolescence and will be the CD-ROMs of tomorrow.

But why? Why does one form of new technology (CD-ROMs being relatively new) cultivate less cultural importance than others? Why are open web formats more culturally important or romantic than apps and CD-ROMs. And why do we feel we need to arrange databases in an attempt to adorn it with such meaning?

I’ve been thinking about it over the last couple of weeks and I can’t think of an answer just yet. It may be one of those “only time will tell matters” or I may need to sharpen my ‘speculative think’ tools :/