“The content of a medium is always another medium”
The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the
content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is
asked, “What is the content of speech?,” it is necessary to say, “It is
an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.” An
abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative
thought processes as they might appear in computer designs.
'The coding and structure of a media to allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation. Human intentionality can be removed from the creative process.'
New media should be something that can exist in an infinite amount of ways.
New media allows for the same information to be portrayed in different ways but not exact copies and requires less help from humans and rather done by machines.
Variability is only accessibility using digital media due to rather than the media being fixed its broken down into little parts and so something like an image for example can be broken down to pixels then reformed into the image quickly. Therefore allowing production on demand.
Global Village
Electronic media remove the distance between us, such that local
or national boundaries dissolve, and – like a village – the affairs of
everyone are known, discussed etc… We are connected whether
we like it or not.
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/
Post-literate Age
Aside from the obvious falsity that since 1970s our world has
become ever more laden with images, the analogy of tribalism has
significant weight.
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/electric-age/1970-living-inan-acoustic-world/
To "transcode" is to translate it into another format. The computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all categories and concepts. That is, cultural categories and concepts [I might say practices too] are substituted, on a level of meaning and/or language, by new ones from the computer's ontology, epistemology and pragmatics. - Manovich, Lev (2001) “Numerical Representation” in The Language of New Media.MITPress London England
McLuhan’s Legacy for media theory, art and design
They key ideas McLuhan gives us then are that:
• media technologies themselves act upon us (not just the content);
• they are perhaps the most important factor characterising any era;
• they alter our sense perceptions, character, attitudes, society, culture, politics, economy...
• they do all the above invisibly;
Media technologies also work as filters, modulating the meaning of the messages they relay. Which is why it’s important to understand the medium specificity of different media:
• sculpture is one medium
• photography another
• print journalism another (that includes photography)
• and the web another
– but Michelangelo's David is not the same represented in each case: the medium
modulates (changes) the message in each case.
… media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of the
repressed, the forgotten, or the past, but it extends itself into an artistic
method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware
hacking, and other exercises that are closely related to the political economy
of information technology. (Hertz and Parikka, 2012: 2)
‘The arche in [media] archaeology is not about origins in the first place, it’s not
about the past, but about discovering principles, the rules that govern media
operativity both as hard and as software. Thus media archaeology is a reduction
of complex techno-mathematics to the essentials.’ (Ernst, 2012:6)