– in this essay Manovich is interested in the notion of database as a cultural form of its own and in the new way it is structuring our experience of ourselves and the world

– he is comparing and analyzing two opposite/competative forms of cultural expression: – the narrative (key form of cultural expression of the modern age, privileged by novel and cinema) – the database (structured collection of individual items/data, where every item has the same significance as any other, privileged by the computer age)

– the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develops poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.