About
I originally wanted to do this blog so people can subscribe to it and automatically get feeds with my new articles and drafts of book chapters. But now my feeling is that this may become more than that and may turn into a “real” blog / lifestream.
In his brilliant book Shaping Things Bruce Sterling talks about a possible future where every object broadcast its history, its effects on environment, etc - while people become “wranglers” who follow these objects. I love how Sterling connects design, “internet of things” and sustainability - however, one thing he does not discuss is what kinds of interfaces people will need in a world where every objects has its own blog, so to speak. For instance, if I can follow the lives of 7 billion light bulbs in my city, would I want to do this using Google Reader, NetNewsWire, or Facebook? Probably not. Similarly, if a grid of images, a photo book, and a slide show were appropriate interfaces when the numbers of images were small, why would I use them to interact with hundreds of millions of images and videos on Flickr and YouTube? Our interfaces can’t keep up with the exponentially increasing amounts of data they are supposed to reveal.
This is an example of stuff you will find on this blog. Soon this blog will have separate feeds for different content so you can choose what you want to subscribe to: 1) articles and book chapters posting; 2) short posts such as the paragraph above; 3) images only.
Lev
9:59pm, March 14, 2008.
P.S. Since this page is called “about,” here is my official short bio from my web site:
“Lev Manovich is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California -San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2), and a Visiting Research Professor at at Godsmith College (London) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). Currently Manovich is finishing three books: Info-Aesthetics, Software Studies, and Expanded Image.”