In this book I analyze the language of new media by placing it within the history of modern visual and media cultures. What are the ways in which new media relies on older cultural forms and languages and what are the ways in which it breaks with them? What is unique about how new media objects create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space and time? How do conventions and techniques of old media—such as the rectangular frame, mobile viewpoint and montage—operate in new media? If we are to construct an archeology which will connect new computer-based techniques of media creation with previous techniques of representation and simulation, where should we locate the essential historical breaks?

To answer these questions, I look at several areas of new media: Web sites, virtual worlds, VR, multimedia, computer games, interactive installations, computer animation, digital video, cinema, and human-computer interfaces. While the book's main emphasis is on theoretical and historical arguments, I also analyze many key new media objects created during the field’s history, from such American commercial classics as Myst and Doom, Jurassic Park and Titanic, to the works of international new media artists and collectives such as ART+COM, antirom, jodi.org, George Legrady, Olga Lialina, Jeffrey Shaw, and Tamas Waliczky. 

The computerization of culture not only leads to the emergence of new cultural forms such as computer games and virtual worlds; it redefines existing ones such as photography and cinema. I therefore also investigate the effects of the computer revolution on visual culture at large. How does the shift to computer-based media redefine the nature of static and moving images? What is the effect of computerization on the visual languages used by our culture? What are the new aesthetic possibilities which become available to us?

In answering these questions, I draw upon the histories of art, photography, video, telecommunication, design and, last but not least, the key cultural form of the twentieth century—cinema. The theory and history of cinema serve as the key conceptual “lens” though which  I look at new media. The book explores the following topics: the parallels between cinema history and the history of new media; the identity of digital cinema; the relations between the language of multimedia and nineteenth century pre-cinematic cultural forms; the functions of screen, mobile camera and montage in new media as compared to cinema; the historical ties between new media and avant-garde film. 

Most writings on new media are full of speculation about the future. This book analyses new media as it has actually developed up until this point, at the same time pointing to directions for new media artists and designers which have not been yet explored. 

While this book is about the present, it does contain an implicit theory of how new media will develop. This is the advantage of placing new media within a larger historical perspective. We begin to see the long trajectories which lead to new media in its present state; and we can extrapolate these trajectories into the future.

Lev Manovich, November 1999