The New Code. - Review - book review

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Paul Andre Harris

The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media

edited by Peter Lunenfeld

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999

298 pp./$35.00 (hb)

Ever since cyberspace entered the public imagination and the personal computer began to dominate the public domain, media theorists have gone to great lengths to differentiate between the electronic medium and that of print. However, transitional times demand mediation--we live in an environment teeming with hybrids, from screens that mimic desktops to print magazines whose formats simulate the computer screen. The appearance of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media marks a major contribution to understanding the complex imbrications that characterize our ever more mediated culture. Featuring elegant graphic design and essays by prominent practitioners in several media-related fields, this may be the first printed book you read about the virtual world that does not merely describe it, but puts you there.

This participatory sense arises directly from the volume's aim at a form of mediation of its own. As editor Peter Lunenfeld explains in his introduction, "The digital dialectic goes beyond examining what is happening to our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media and art forms; it grounds the insights of theory in the constraints of practice." Aware that "a critical theory of technological media will always be in inherent conflict with the practice of creating these very media," Lunenfeld has carefully assembled authors with backgrounds that range from fine art and film to philosophy and literary theory. These different voices are orchestrated into discussions of theory and practice that Lunenfeld has organized into four sections.

Part I, "The Real and the Ideal," opens with Lunenfeld's essay, "Unfinished Business." Lunenfeld's eye for the big picture and ear for the pithy phrase mesh in observations such as: "It is a curious thing that a calculating machine we forced to become a typewriter only a decade and a half ago now combines the creation, distribution, and spectatorial functions of a vast variety of other media within one box--albeit tied into a network." Lunenfeld's piece describes new media as being in a state/process of "unfinish," characterized by the sense that work gets suspended rather than completed in a world of ever-changing tools. Lunenfeld explores "unfinish" in terms of space, time and story. The other essays in this section betray a bias for the theoretical side of the digital dialectic at the expense of practice. Both Michael Heim's "The Cyberspace Dialectic" and Carol Gigliotti's "The Ethical Life of the Digital Aesthetic" take up controversial examples of public digital information as a way of exploring politic al issues. However, Heim's discussion of the Unabomber and Gigliotti's look at Internet pornography never delineate a sociopolitical position. Instead, they mark a path for discussion and identify key questions that must be considered as the dialectic develops. While Heim wisely walks a middle road between Luddite fear and technophilia, he never takes a stand on the Unabomber's views. Similarly, even as she marks embodiment and cultural identity as contested ground in media today, Gigliotti leaves these matters to be decided by future practice.

The essays in Part II, "The Body and the Machine," exemplify the wide differences in methodology in new media studies. Literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles argues in "The Condition of Virtuality" that, "Virtuality is not about living in an immaterial realm of information, but about the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated with informational patterns." Hayles traces this interpenetration in discussions of the foundations of cybernetics and digital artworks that incorporate print media and concludes that "we already are cyborgs." In "From Cybernation to Interaction: A Contribution to an Archeology of Interactivity," media researcher and curator Erkki Huhtamo persuasively combats the "technorationalist" tendency toward ahistorical consciousness by tracking how automata and automation morphed into the computer and interaction. In an almost ironic juxtaposition, architect William J. Mitchell's "Replacing Place" simply leaves the past behind in order to surf several virtual environments w here users choose avatars, navigate shared spaces and orient themselves to the textures of cyberspace. In providing a guided tour of Web sites, Mitchell fails to invest the digital dialectic with either analytic depth or synthetic vision.

Part Ill, "The Medium and the Message," reworks Marshall McLuhan's famous adage to examine how the medium and the message function across the practices of reading, hyper-linking and cinema. Media professor and publisher Florian Brody speculates about what "the new book" might turn out to be by reflecting on how books serve as extensions of personal memory in his essay, "The Medium Is the Memory." Evoking Marcel Proust and Sergei Eisenstein, medieval books of hours and plastic coffee cup lids, Brody's essay itself is a kind of memory technique indicative of the eclecticism at play in new media mnemonics. In "Hypertext as Collage-Writing," literary critic and art historian George P. Landow offers what is essentially a remix of his scholarly work, guided by the premise that "hypertext writing [i]s a mode that both emphasizes and bridges gaps, and ... becomes an art of assemblage in which appropriation and catachresis rule." In addressing the question "What is Digital Cinema?" new media critic Lev Manovich propo ses that digital technologies bring cinema back to its roots in animation. Carefully historicizing the development of cinematic tools and techniques, Manovich breaks down the digital medium to show how it enables a kind of "painting in time," of which cinema is only one possible product.