Manovich - The practice of everyday media life

Today I read the essay 'The practice of everyday media life' by Lev Manovich, suggested by my tutor, and I took some notes along the way.

"But in the area of consumer economy, the changes have been quite substantial. Strategies and tactics are now often closely linked in an interactive relationship, and often their features are reversed." (Manovich, 2008)


I must say that I have to disagree with how Manovich discribes that 'strategies' and 'tactics' are overlapping one another and are sometimes reversed. Unless the user can code, I think it is quite impossible for him/her to really cross the barrier from tactic to strategies. If anything, a company makes the user THINK they can cross that barrier, but generally they are still within the limits that the designers and developers set.

A user can buy a blog template, change colours, find background images, move the sidebars etc... but always has to abide by the limits set by the template designer/ developer. To truly be able to set a strategy and completely change the web template, a user has to be a developer. They must know html, Javascript etc... they must know how to hack the design. In the same way, a user needs to have some design skills to create an eye-catching colour scheme, background and header.

In order for the user to be able to truly recreate the strategy – they have to be a designer and/or developer themselves.


"In short, while modern artists have so far successfully met the challenges of each generation of media technologies, can professional art survive extreme democratization of media production and access?"


Let's say everyone gives up on art – what will happen? We will be continuously squeezing every last drop of overly reconstructed art – over and over again – until we have nothing, or more of the same thing. The average user can only do so much with 'remixed' art. Yes in this modern day, 'remixing' is in, but for how long are we going to be revisiting elements which have already been created. I think giving up on art just because it is being copied and reused everywhere all the time does not makes sense at all. Most of the time, when this happens, it is free advertising for the artist, and this is never a bad thing.


"While the typical diary video or anime on YouTube may not be that special, enough are. In fact, in all media where the technologies of productions were democratized (video, music, animation, graphic design, etc.), I have came across many projects which not only rival those produced by most well-known commercial companies and most well-known artists but also often explore the new areas not yet touched by those with lots of symbolic capital." (Manovich, 2008)

Most of the time these projects that Manovich mentions are created by artists and designers, albeit not commercial or popular ones. Rarely are they created by someone who isn't the least bit creative (I say creative because I'm not looking at art as visuals, but also as a narrative piece, sound, etc...) So I think the question is not 'is art still possible?' but 'how is art evolving?' Perhaps the bourgeoise art is coming to and end, whilst artists who are not so well-known are rising because of the quality of their art, and not because of who their parents are, or what museum they afford to exhibit in. This is, needless to say, a good thing.


One of the questions our tutor put on the wiki was : How do you respond to Manovich’s final statement, ‘ The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of Web 2.0 culture – its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability.’?

I don’t think this is a challenge at all – to me this is a breath of fresh air, and for most artists, who do not want to enclose themselves within an unchanging environment, innovation, energy and unpredictability is brought by other developers and designers anyway, so rather than seeing it as a challenge, we see it as an opportunity. Well, at least I do.