Lev Manovich defines New Media through existing concepts found in cinema theory, art history, literary studies, and computer science in his book The Language of New Media. Manovich includes a website for the reader, with over 300 illustrations of artwork and commercial projects detailed in the book. Concerning the Architecture of the Internet and the Graphical User Interface, especially in regards to hyperlinks, Lev Manovich writes the following:
In short, time became a flat image or a landscape, something to look at or navigate through. If there is a new rhetoric or aesthetic possible here, it may have less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or author, and more with spatial wandering. The hypertext reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigation journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know; leaving imprints that, like computer hyperlinks, follow from one found object to another (p. 78).
Indeed, in contrast to older action-enabling representational technologies, real-time image instruments literally allow us to touch objects over distance, thus making possible their easy destruction as well. The potential aggressiveness of looking turns out to be rather more innocent than the actual aggressiveness of looking turns out to be rather more innocent than the actual aggression of electronically enabled touch (p. 175).
The Official Website of The Language of New Media.
Manovich, Lev. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
