Today, I watched the docufilm These Amazing Shadows made in 2011. It struck me because the film relates the views of actors, directors, and film critics to name of few about preserving the movies for the generations to come. The reasoning behind preserving these movies lies in the fact that films are “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” (These Amazing Shadows, 2011). They are per the documentary the art of the 20th Century.
Murray, Manovich and our book are preserving the history, the aesthetic significance and the culture behind what is now New Media. It’s true each one of the views comes from a different perspective but they all meet at the final destination, which is the unknown future of new media because it will always improve and become new again.
Murray and Manovich and our book have a common ground in recording history and believing that New Media and Technical Communications are the basis for what comes in the future. Murray sees New Media as the pathway to solving world problems through creativity for everyone, while Manovich sees it as the open window for artists to improve and change the world. Manovich claims that “computer programing, hypertext and computers multimedia networking “ are “the greatest artworks of today” (P.15). As for our book it believes that we the people can affect and change what New Media will be because of how accessible the technology has become. Per the New Media text “Users can now create and disseminate their own content, bypassing the traditional mass media corporations” (P. 28). Anyone anywhere can create his or her own mass media communication. The three views have shown that from paper to computers media has been constantly changing and it will always be new.
The three views differ in their analysis of how we got to the New Media of today. Murray sees it arriving from science, numbers and algorithms, Manovich believes it was created Post the World War II era, and the New Media text sees it as the new and improved old media.
Just like the documentary I saw today, I believe one day we will have another documentary explaining to the future generations why we preserved and recorded the history of New Media the art of the 21st century; just likethe documentary These Amazing Shadows related to our generation why the National Film Preservation Act was created to preserve and document the films because they were the art of the 20th century.
References
Chalkley, T., Brown, A., Cinque, T., Warren, B., Hobbs, M., & Finn, M. (2012). Communication, new media and everyday life. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.
Manovich, L. (2003). New media from Borges to HTML. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The new media reader (pp. 13-25). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Murray, J. H. (2003). Inventing the medium. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The new media reader (pp. 3-11). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
These Amazing Shadows, January 22, 2011. Directors: Paul Mariano, Kurt Norton
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