New Media 5-6

In chapter 5, I was really interested in reading about video games that I am familiar with. Growing up with a brother that plays them, I understood the detail that he gave about them. According to Manovich, the most important forms of new media are database and navigable space. Databases permeate modern life as everybody is engaged in indexing and organizing data. Stating that each medium imposes certain knowledge structures, Manovich compares 20th century cinema, which employs narrative, to the computer age, which uses the database as general organizing structure of sense-making. Differently from narrative, the database does not create a story for which sequential cause-effect relations and actor's experience of events are crucial. Although, it was an interesting read, it was also a little technical and I found myself having a difficult time on some sections of the chapter.

Overall, I definitely thought that this book was an interesting read. I enjoyed the historical references as well as his precise observations about technologies today. He describes most of his arguments very well by providing examples from his own practical workings rather than images. Sometimes, it would help in certain explanations, but in others it would have been helpful with an image to picture the world he was describing. Although sometimes he was a bit philisophical, some of the technical parts were refreshing.