aurea mediocritas

My last week reading of Manovich had a therapeutic effect of not letting me too enthusiastic about the new media technologies. Usually, especially in graduate school, when you are subjected to the prospect of learning something totally new, there is a wave of irrational enthusiasm which is seldom to result into a Mega-project of the same scale. Nevertheless, the soft grounding may result in a series of small but not less important projects. Still, I do not exclude the fact that after a series of other refreshing readings my current mindset will bet on the further minimalism.

So far, the readings for this week have managed to revive a sort of enthusiasm, and at the same, to keep the skepticism alive. Starting with the promise for a lucrative combination of new and analogue media, continuing with a retrospective and some prospects of the digital history and, at last but not least, the survey of certain practical issues which are encountered by historians in their taming of the new media.

The most interesting idea for me is how along with the developments of the new technologies and of infinite possibilities of the computation, historians are confronted with the prospects of creating or reinventing the total master narratives, which in addition to written-based scriptural illusion of the past would also speculate on the "total reproduction of the past as it was lived by those people" making use of new video and other technologies.

Of course, video and audio materials are not new to any type of totalitarian regimes, and they were used extensively either in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the fact that computer shapes its content according to the will of its user can prove much more dangerous than The Triumph of the Will, because the user-friendly interface will customize its propaganda tools according to the needs of each individual.