The readings for this week were not, in my mind, worthwhile. Personally, I feel as if I could have skipped the formal introduction and just gone straight for the meat and potatoes of the subject. However, the articles, especially from “The New Media Reader” did bring up some interesting points, such as the definition of New Media. It was to my understanding after reading the Lev Manovich article, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” that we are still not quite sure how to define new media, but we as the reader should have a much better understanding after reading the rest of the articles in this book. To quote him directly at the end of the article, “The emergence of new media studies as a field testifies to our recognition of the key cultural role played by digital computers and computer-enabled networking in our global society. For a field in its infancy, we are very lucky to now have such a comprehensive record of its origins as the one provided by ‘The New Media Reader.’ I believe that its readers will continue to think about both the ideas in its individual texts and the endless connections which can be found between different texts for many years to come.” (Pg. 25) And here is where I disagree with him. I have never, until this class, even heard of the term new media and, secondly, I do not understand why we have to spend so much time defining it anyway. To me it would be much simpler to just leave it as it is, as an anomaly, and start reading the other articles in the texts so maybe we can define this elusive term. I felt both articles spent a substantial amount of time describing the other works in the books, which consequently made me want to skip the rest of the introduction and read all the other articles.

As for the PDF, I really liked the exercise of going around the room and picking out what we liked about the article and what we disliked. I thought we all came up with some well thought out points and I was eager to discuss them thoroughly in class. Unfortunately, we just skimmed the surface, and did not get to discuss them in full. I did, however, write down most of the good arguments in my notebook. My own personal argument with the article was something very subtle and inconsequential, but here it is any way. I disagreed with the section in the article about how film is starting to become the slaves of computers. Now it might just be that I do not like my one passion in life described as a slave to anything, let alone computers or it might be something else but I really disagreed with this comment. If anything film was here well before computers and hence it is not fully dependent on computers. There are many other factors that go into making a film and although computers help facilitate the process; they are in no need what makes the film, good or even great. There are many other factors including directing, acting and plot that actually make a film worth watching. Secondly, I feel like films are so much more organic and personal than computers.

The thing I singled out as the most important idea in the article was also very small and inconsequential, but here it is just the same. It was on page 34 about how AI tricks us into thinking they are smarter than they are by limiting our knowledge. I found this statement frightening, and it jolted me straight out of the article. To think that something we made is meant to trick us is so scary - it is almost too hard to comprehend. But are computer games really made to trick us, or do we get so entranced with them that we forget we are playing? Whichever way you spin it, the computer is doing its job.