Looking at the open nature of web, this week’s reading looks at databases and the contemporary contexts it fortifies. Breaking it down as a cultural form, Manovich discusses operations, addressing the context of a ‘computerised society‘ as a ‘new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world.’ 

While the reading identifies database with a set amount of algorithms and networks, the hierarchy of data becomes nonlinear and concreted in an antenarrative logic. Taking away meaning from this, the database in itself is always growing, and, like hypertext, becomes increasingly more connected and is never complete. There is no beginning in certain databases, nor is there a final link. Simply put in the words of Manovich himself, ‘how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?’

Apart from mediums with data limitations like video games, due to the changing mould of databases there is an unlimited amount of creativity to be harnessed. New media can manifest itself across different interfaces, be modified and connected uniquely in it’s exception. As hypertext and databases challenge linearity, hyper-narrative emerges in a way to describe objects and ideas not yet fully understood. Like a montage, the database supports itself and it’s opposite linear narratives, ordering through collections and networks. Simply put, all the information is ‘competing to make meaning out of the world, database and narrative [to] produce endless hybrids.’ We have yet to completely uncover this and probably never will.