In his book The Language of the New Media, Manovich says that the popular understanding of new media identifies it with the use of a computer for distribution and exhibition rather than production. For example, photographs on a display are considered new media, whereas those printed in a book are not. Manovich thinks it is too limiting to privilege the computer over other media. He thinks the fundamental difference between the new and old media is that the process of the old media tends to be continuous, while the new media can be both continuous and discrete. Since new media can often be edited digitally, the data that made up the new media art could be sampled, quantified, and discrete in various ways, which old media could never do. 

Another difference between old and new media is that new media can be copied endlessly without degradation, while old media loses quality with each successive copy. Old media can also be converted into a numerical representation and turned into new media in a process called digitalization. However, this digitalization has a drawback: it causes a loss of information and usually contains a fixed amount of information.

Personally, I really like what he says at the end of the chapter, “interactive computer media perfectly fits this trend to externalize and objectify the mind’s operations.” The idea that brings the unobservable and interior processes of creating art to the public is what makes the new media charming. I think it’s because of this discrete characteristic of new media, which allows us to reassemble our mindedness process and place it outside. New media becomes a new language that help us to speak out the stuff that were never reveal in the past human history. I want to end this blog with another quote: “Mental processes of reflection, problem-solving, recall, and association are externalized, equated with following a link, moving to a new page, choosing a new image, or a new scene.” We are now entering into a new phase, where people are free to share their minds and story with no boundreis and limits.