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1. The Ends of Publishing

   If the media was the message for McLuhan in the 1960s, then audio-visual publishing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have become a message today. In his 1998 article entitled “Database as Symbolic Form,” Lev Manovich fails to foresee the socially hypermediated turn of the new century when he argues that “database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (p. 7). From a purely mathematical, logical viewpoint, they do at first seem at odds, since the database is the superstructure and the narrative media files are the objects oriented within. For example, a database might house narrative-less stock photos or sound effects as easily as it does an audio-visual story. The (early) media database seems indifferent to its contents and does not seem to be able to tell a story. Likewise, the narrative within a digital movie file is indifferent to its matrix-host, because the “story” operates regardless of whether you play the film on a DVD player, digital projector, or a YouTube download.

   Hannah Ackermans - 28.11.2015 - 13:51