Database as Symbolic form

Manovich

After the key form of cultural expression of the modern age used to be the novel and cinema narrative, nowadays its correlate is database in this computer age we live in.

Nowadays new media objects are collections of individual items that do not have nay thematic connection or formal development.

New media favours database form over thematic and narrative form.

Not all new media objects are explicitly databases. Ie. Computer games.

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list.

Database is the centre of the creative process in the computer age.

With new media the content of the work and the interface becomes separate.

Modern media is the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative.