This week’s readings have really illuminated some important trends in media studies and it’s nice to get a background on the internal debate in the field via James Hodge. Following Hodge’s critique of emerging trends, and reading Manovich in such a context, I want to track two premises that seem relevant to our own survey of media, both new and old: 1) a theoretical bifurcation occurs within the study of media that differentiates the exteriorized topos of writing ala post-structuralism, as well as the phenomenological analysis of media, from the newly emerged techno-philic, software-studies schism (please excuse the religio- terminology), 2) Hodge’s contention with software studies is that it omits the importance of writing, which in Kittler’s terms allows for the creation of history, where autonomous writing seizes history from being made, and thus “throws out the baby with the bathwater” when creating new forms of analysis and language as a discipline.

I suppose Manovich is at the helm of this shift from attention to experience and history to meaning-making (as Joe puts it) and tech-literacy. For Hodge, Manovich’s The Language of New Media marks the point of departure between two methodologies of description, but is not it’s primary and explicit source. Manovich is an interesting figure, in that he tracks the aesthetic movements that have evolved, in and alongside, our new digital milieu. Hodge is looking for a balance between techno-literacy and methods that employ sustained attention (and attentiveness) to the human experience of technology, and I feel that Manovich comes close to striking such a balance. Indeed, as we see at the end of the first chapter, computer media often mirror habits of mind, “externalizing” and “objectifying” its operations, and “are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations” (61). If this leads to new identifications (false or otherwise), is this not a form of address by such media?