I usually have a difficult time coming up with topics to blog about, so I was excited when Manovich, in the “Modularity” section of his first chapter, talked about…well, modularity. When he said that a multimedia “movie” created in Macromedia Director was comprised of modular elements that were stored independently of each other, and then said the same thing about “objects” used in MS Office, and then again about HTML documents and the Web as a whole, I thought, “Awesome! That’s kind of like what coding does! Because functions are stored independently and can be modified independent of each other, JavaScript can be thought of as modular! I have something to blog about!” Then, two paragraphs later, Manovich suggests that “we can also make an analogy between the modularity of new media and structured computer programming” (31). Son of a bitch stole my idea.

Instead, then, I’d like to talk about Manovich’s discussion of variability in the context of Haraway’s cyborg. “New media,” Manovich says, “is characterized by variability” (36). If I have it right, part of Haraway’s argument was that, rejecting traditional identity categories, she wanted new classifications or categories for identities. Put another way, she was suggesting new variables. Manovich further observes: >Variability would…not be possible without modularity. Stored digitally, rather than in a fixed medium, media elements maintain their separate identities and can be assembled into numerous sequences under program control. In addition, because the elements themselves are broken into discrete samples…they can be created and customized on the fly. (36).

This is something that I think would interest Haraway. In Cyborg, she argues that “there has…been a growing recognition of another response through coalition—affinity, not identity” (296). If identities can be constructed through affinity, then that fragments identity and creates smaller categories or, in other words, modules. Like Manovich’s new media, Haraway’s cyborg would have stored modules that could be accessed at any time—“created and customized on the fly,” as it were. This suggests a fluid identity—one that could be changed or modified in order to forge new affinities with different groups “on the fly.” I don’t know if it’s a mistake to put Haraway in conversation with Manovich. It seems like they’re doing two totally different things. However, in Manovich’s second chapter, he does gesture toward the increasing slipperiness of the human-computer interface, suggesting that mediation between the two is increasingly blurry. Still, critiquing virtual reality environments isn’t really the same as theorizing identity politics.

I was just looking through other people’s blogs to find something to link to, and it looks like Joe also related Manovich to Haraway. He’s talking about them in terms of transcoding, though, and I haven’t gotten that far in the reading. Since I probably won’t be able to until tomorrow, maybe I’ll edit this post later and see if I can’t come up with something to say about it.