The Manovich reading  seemed to bring be a full circle back to one of Adrian’s first lecture’s where he spoke about stories not requiring a beginning, middle and end to exist and that our narratives or recognisable forms are the merely the result of the mediums we use to share them.

Manovich notes that media objects have let go of those forms altogether and are more like “collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.”

However, they are grouped thematically and used a platform for searching, navigating and viewing information and media we need. In this, we as users experience something very different from reading a book or watching a film as the information within a database can be standalone.

As the world still appears to us as an “endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records”, it is only natural that we should seek to collate them in a ordered manner and that results in a database. However, he goes further to assert that the database is a form in which we seek to enhance the “poetics, aesthetics, and ethics.”

The idea behind a database to help us make sense o the world, but being a jumble of separate things, it perhaps has less appeal that the cause and effect nature of narrative to which we are so accustomed.

The database represents the world as a “list of items” but refuses to order that list for us in anyway which can become confusing and frustrating when we have a tendency to depend on things evolving in a linear fashion. The idea of a database of information works against our notion if time.

Manovich argues it’s simply a matter of finding the right ‘algorithm’, the right way of reading a database for it to become as normal to us as narrative.

Must say I think there’s a long way to go before people can accept a non-determinist standpoint.

Source: thedigitallifeshow