We discussed this essay in class but I wanted to delve deeper into my "disagreement" with Manovich. I said in class that I disagreed with one of the points Manovich makes at the end of his paper where he talks about the myth of the digital.

To me the most interesting part of Vannevar Bush’s piece is the optimism about the progress of technology and society that practically seeps through the pages. He writes not just about the great need for easy access for information, but also about how it would benefit society. We would learn from our mistakes and be better people because of it. Now we have access to an almost unlimited amount of information, in a form that Bush could only have imagined, but it seems to me that human society hasn’t changed.

I still think that the definition of the difference of “new media” and “old media” is really unclear.

After this last week’s discussions of what new media is, I feel some what clear and unclear as to what digital media is. One thing that was debated was the concept of interactivity. The selections from The New Media Reader seemed to agree that new media could be truly interactive where as the Manovich essay argued that new media was not interactive but allows us experience the thoughts of another person. I have to disagree with Manovich in that while one may be bound by the rules of a video game or what links a person my go to, nothing dictates necessarily the order in which I do things.