The 20th century has seen extraordinary growth in technology; however, it has only been in the last decade that this boom in information has been accessible to the entire world through new technologies like computers and the Internet. These new technologies have found their way into areas of modern culture, such as photography, print, and film, enhancing its potential through its creation of CD-ROMs, websites, and computer games, terming the phrase “new media” which “represents the new cultural forms that depend on digital computers for distribution.” Consequently, the challenge not only becomes how to accommodate increasing information, but also how to organize information in new media. Through examples given in lecture, it is shown that the strategies in organizing information in this “new media” are not new, but have drawn from the techniques seen in more traditional forms of media. Focusing specifically on the organizational methods used in graphical user interfaces and the Web, the same techniques can be traced to modern art and video because, as a whole, culture and human behavior does not change.As Manovich said in his lecture, “While we now rely on computers to create, store, distribute and access culture, we are still using the same techniques developed in the 1920’s.” The avant-garde of the 1920’s has become the standard computer technology of today. These techniques have become materialized through the computer and its interface. For example, the avant-garde cinematic techniques of temporal montage and montage within a shot found its way into new media and became the key feature of all computer interfaces, known as windows. Like shots of a film, interface windows containing information could be presented all at once within the screen (montage within a shot). However, since the windows are opaque, users are forced to see one window at a time (temporal mon...
