10 key Principles of New Media

10 key Principles of New Media : Based off Lev Manovich's The language of New Media

1) The possibilities of how the audience interacts or is brought into computer based media is limited to the possibilities given to them as society is able to understand how things work. “In contrast to cinema, where most ‘users’ are able to ‘understand’ cinematic language but not ‘speak’ it… all computer users can ‘speak’ the language of the interface.”

2) The visual realm that one witnesses is as important as the key factor of the scene including the main character. “Directing the virtual camera becomes as important as controlling the hero’s actions…cinematic perception functions as the subject in its own right.”

3) Controlling what is left out or unseen is extremely important in completing the illusion of another world or reality. “Editing, or montage, is the key twentieth-century technology for creating fake realities.”

4) In creating and editing it is possible to tell a larger truth or change the truth by showing a lie. “Film can overcome its indexical nature through montage, by presenting a viewer with objects that never existed in reality.” Lev Manovich “Seeing is believing”

5) The camera can be used to bring the audience into the film and make them part of the action. The cameraman’s “camera zooms in order to ‘pry an object from its shell.’ Due to its new mobility, glorified in such films as Man with a Movie Camera, the camera can be anywhere, and with its superhuman vision it can obtain a close-up of any object.” “In this meta film, the camera, part of cinema’s apparatus, becomes the main character.”

6) Combining images lets us compare and contrast them to each other forcing the need for a soundness of space to be needed. “When photographs are brought together within a single magazine or newsreel, both the scale and unique locations of the objects are discarded- thus answering the demand of a mass society for a ‘universal equality of things.’”

7) In order to create the idea of normalcy the media should not repeat and conclude overall, there must be uniqueness throughout. “A ‘normal’ avant-garde film still proposes a coherent language different from the language of mainstream cinema… Man with a Movie Camera never arrives at anything like a well-defined language. Rather it proposes an untamed, and apparently endless, unwinding of techniques, or… ‘Effects’.”

8) Effects and special techniques should be used in an attempt to add something to the media rather then to just alter it. “It is possible to turn ‘effects’ into a meaningful artistic language….as the film progresses, straight footage fives way to manipulated footage; newer techniques appear on after another, reaching a roller-coaster intensity by the film’s end- a true orgy of cinematography… the normally static and ‘objective’ form, becomes dynamic and subjective.”

9) Repetition and reemergence of objects and moments can be used to make a point more effective and stronger over all. “Programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures, such as ‘if/then’ and ‘repeat/while’.”

10) The goal of new media is to use technology to allow interactivity and visualization of a world without the limitations of human possibilities. “Aim to go beyond simple human navigation through physical space.”