Blog 5

Manovich describes the shift between computers being cultural invisible to becoming a new engine of culture in many interesting ways. The shift happens in the last 10 years as computers only being a good fraction of everything, to now we can’t go a day without a computer. It’s IMPOSSIBLE…. Well that’s what businesses and every one that uses only computers for their jobs, classes, cars, factories, and so on. Technology is all around us as Manovich points out. It is like the coffee to your morning, the key to your car, the pencil to your notes. The success of our culture is based off new technology every day, when in the past it was based of statistics or new equipment to better our lives.

The inventors of computational media are Liicklider, Sutherland, Nelson, Kay, Negroponte and Engelbart (Many others have helped to contribute to the technology). We don’t seem to know more about them because the history of computational media is a bit blurry. The name most known is Guttenberg (printing press), but we are still unaware of the exact history of the inventors of this cultural software.
“Since most theorists so far have not considered cultural software as a subject of its own, distinct from “new media,” media art,” “internet,” “cyberspace,” “cyberculture” and “code,” we lack not only a conceptual history of media editing software but also systematic investigations of its roles in cultural production,” (Manovich 21). Just like that, Manovich says that the conception of the software is cultural but also systematic.

These specific inventions have spawned the experimental, unfixed and democratic visual culture by processing more developments to form our new culture today in this so called “new engine”. They have been consumers to new technology and a huge expansion of our society. Our ideas make our life change every day. Just in my 23 years of my life I have had computers, email, cell phones, text messaging, newer computerized cars, I pod, I pad, mp3 players, and much more. It makes me wonder in such a short time of my life, what’s the rest of my life going to bring. The experimental culture will keep growing and develop such an industry where one day we will never remember what it was like to live without technology. I just hope that Manovich’s “new engine” doesn’t go up and over our heads. We already seem to be in that area where you can’t function all the new materials with a 3 year old computer.

-Kelsey K