Remodeling the Old

We have discussed how new media tends to recreate the old media from which it came. This holds true in the case of database narrative. Kinder and Anderson have helped us to see how recent movies, including Kill Bill, Memento, and Pulp Fiction, have adopted some aspects of the database narrative by rejecting linear plots. Other movies incorporate split screens to show various images, whose juxtaposition creates a new feeling within the viewer (such as is done in Manovich’s Soft Cinema).

I would like to show that this remodeling of the old also holds true for a more distant ancestor of the database narrative: print. Newspapers, in particular, very much embody many aspects of new media’s organization, including the hyperlink-like connections to each of the story’s on the front page. Its layout can also be influenced by database narratives. The random generation of new formats (such as in Manovich’s Soft Cinema) can offer new ideas for the aesthetic and emotion-provoking abilities of layouts.

Additionally, traditional forms of summarizing information (mind maps, concept trees, outlines) have also taken on new meaning and new form. I am here thinking about the visualization aspect of Soft Cinema, where there are constantly circling images from three different countries that intersect at various points to show what is on the screen. This is the closest thing to an outline that we get, and its ever-changing quality seems necessary to describe ever-changing literature. It is almost surreal how literature can be so alive.

In addition to movies, print’s aesthetic presentation and organizational structures have also been influenced by database narratives, perpetuating the constant interaction between old and new. You can teach an old dog (past media) new tricks.