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Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 50-64

I wouldn’t be typing this if it wasn’t for Turing. I’d be carving it in stone. A bit over the top, but comparatively that’s how you could look at it. He makes some excellent points about machine intelligence, but he doesn’t write as if he is the end-all-be-all subject matter expert. His last line:

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty that needs to be done.

sort of sums up the machine intelligence situation, even today. Computers are faster, store more, are more versatile, more affordable, and more commonplace, but put a human and machine next to each other (in such an experiment as The Imitation Game) and you can still tell them apart quite easily. Computers can do a very good job of fooling us humans, but they still need to be led around by programmers, hands held, and being told what to do. Once a computer can actually learn, and not just imitate, will machine intelligence be a formidable opponent for humans.

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Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 37-47

I started to trail off reading everything Bush had to say, since after the first little bit I could see where he was going.

Bush seems like one of those crazy old guys standing on a soap box yelling at the passersby. Except he’s not crazy, but very smart. He identified the problems of the day, and envisioned ways to fix them. The sheer radical nature of his ideas (at the time) could make him seem like that crazy soap box man, but in reality, all of the problems he described have been solved. Not necessarily by the ways he describes, but along the same lines. Bush had the problems of current media in his head, and the ways to fix them. Now, in a time of ‘new media’ we see his visions put into practice, although not always in the literal sense.

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Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003.30-34

Upon reading this, I’m glad I did, but not because of the minor reference to new media, but because of the connection of this story to the Many World Interpretation. It’s a quick read and the author gets out the points he wants to make quickly. I get the feeling that the people in the class unfamiliar with MWI will not enjoy the ‘fiction’ as much as I did.

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Manovich, Lev. “New Media from Borges to HTML.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 13-25

The second introduction essay to “The New Media Reader” is Manovich’s essay. I enjoyed reading this less than Murray’s, and as a result, quickly glanced over sections instead of fully reading them. From what I did read and browse, I came to the following conclusions:

1. Manovich thinks quite highly of himself. He referenced his own work more often than anybody else it seemed. Regardless of whether or not this is true (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to actually count things), that’s the impression I got, and that’s what counts.


2. He believes that ‘new media’ is not necessarily new, but just different. Many of his examples and references seem to imply that ‘new media’ does what we’ve always done, just better and faster. The most obvious example is his point number six, in which he explains that ‘new media’ (computers) allows for faster execution of algorithms we all know and love.

Manovich gives a different history lesson than Murray does, and seems a tad depressed that both Europe and North America had their slow points in adopting ‘new media’.

My favorite part, if you want to call it that, is this section:

Let us take as the example contemporary Hollywood film production. Logically we could have expected something like the following scenario. An individual viewer receives a customized version of the filem that takes into account her/his previous viewing preferences, current preferences, and marketing profile. The film is completely assembled on the fly by AI software using pre-defined scripts schemas. The software also generates, again on the fly, characters, dialog, and sets (this makes product placement particularly easy) that are taken from a massive “assets” database.

What? Really? It was at this point I sort of stopped caring. Maybe it’s just me being in 2008, and this essay being written in 2003 (but really, that’s not that big of a time difference), but that is so out to lunch I don’t know what to say. This makes Manovich seem like he is merely speculating and really has no idea what he was saying when he wrote that paragraph. If you get past that little slip, the essay is bearable.

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Murray, Janet H. “Inventing the Medium.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 3-11

“Inventing the Medium” is one of two essays serving as the introduction to “The New Media Reader.” It’s well written and reads much like a historical philosophy lesson. Or would that be a philosophical history lesson? Regardless of how you look at it, the reader gets a solid picture from both the historical and philosophical frames of reference, of the uprising of ‘new media’. In this context we are referring to the ‘computer’, so the essay presents items from the 40’s all the way up to more recent events, such as the Free Software Foundation and Microsoft. While Murray doesn’t go in depth, she provides enough information to hook you and make you want to read more. It sets up the rest of the book nicely, so that you have context for the articles and essays you are reading.

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