On Designerization of Media Culture in the Age of Software

Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command is an analytical map intended to help both scholars and designers understand the current technological application culture. An earlier version was available much earlier online and is now published in printed form in Bloomsbury’s International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics series. As a nod toward material and media history, the book borrows its name from the famous Siegfried Giedion title Mechanization Takes Command ([1948] 1969). Hence, Manovich has big boots to fill, although he admits that his is a more modest take. Giedion’s massive research on the “anonymous history” of mechanization covered food, industry, art, and much more. Despite his announced modesty, Manovich also aims to offer a broad perspective into the role software plays across cultural domains, but he mostly focuses on “media” software. After the fame of Manovich’s The Language of New Media, readers have high expectations for this book and, in many ways, the author does not fail to deliver. It’s not a book of software theory but offers a key reading on software’s impact on how we understand—and design—audiovisual media content. Manovich has mapped, in a consistent way, the new design practices that software environments have enabled. He places special emphasis on mainstream applications from Photoshop to Maya, as well as other software, including Adobe Acrobat, Final Cut, Internet browsers, and the like. He discusses HTML Markup as well as JavaScript and also engages briefly with programming languages (for instance, Perl and Python) in ways that support his main statement that software is “a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies” (15). Over the past ten years, software studies has ensured that this statement is taken seriously.Manovich’s book is a significant take on the design aspects of software creative practice, including not only a focus on software as technology but also a focus on software as technique. Indeed, in this book, software is understood as both something a little bit less and a little bit more than a “medium”: it enables the existence of media as experience and content (the words, the visuals, and the aesthetic choices that often remediate earlier media forms) and the incorporation of elements, such as location, into applications. These elements sometimes become ways to destabilize the media ecological system and can have cascading effects across an aesthetic and social landscape of designing cultural reality: for instance, location-based systems/applications or use of 3-D space in differing ways.Software history is central to Manovich’s argument, and we need more detailed accounts of the history of this particular situation. He is absolutely correct that we still lack knowledge of significant parts of software history, and such an understanding is crucial to shedding light on the current situation. He is not ready to acknowledge that “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 1999) is the only, or always the best, way to analyze how software environments are hybrid. Manovich does not discuss or mention media archaeology but is partly operating in the same environment, to the degree that he is writing media history anew from the perspective of emerging techniques and technologies, such as software. In Software Takes Command, his main historical interest is in the 1970s and 1980s and in the emergence of the concept of “metamedium” from the work of, especially, Alan Kay. Manovich does not refer to Casey Alt’s (2011) work on object-oriented programming and on the shift that occurred as computers became media machines, but he offers a similar argument, discussing the implementation of media as part of computers, as well as the shift from Turing-land to Kay-land and from number crunching to design. Kay’s inventive take on computers as creative media and his ideas such as the Dynabook provide a historical context for Manovich, as does the work of Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. Kay and the institutional context of Palo Alto labs (PARC) becomes a significant milestone and a hub in the development of technologies but also a mindset concerning software. Kay’s ideas about the use and usability of the computer as a creative medium are infused by the psychological theories he was interested in (primarily the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, following Jean Piaget). Furthermore, and aptly, Manovich emphasizes that these ideas were not merely about seeing computers as remediating older media but also about the ways in which the borrowing of uses and aesthetic conventions could create possibilities of new combinations and media that never existed: “Approached from the point of view of media history, the computer metamedium contains two different types of media. The first type is simulations of prior physical media extended with new properties, such as ‘electronic paper.’ The second type is a number of new computational media that have no physical precedents” (110).The world of hypertext, navigable 3-D spaces, and interactive multimedia, which has gradually grown over the decades, provides examples of such truly new “new media” that characterize the possibilities of software. Indeed, in Manovich’s implicit overturning of Friedrich Kittler’s “there is no software” (Kittler 1995), everything becomes filtered through software. In Manovich’s bold reversal, “there is only software”—a phrase that is surely going to irritate a range of hardware-oriented theorists: “For users who only interact with media content through application software, the ‘properties’ of digital media are defined by the particular software as opposed to solely being contained in the actual content (i.e., inside digital files)” (152).Software is a technique, but it can be understood as a design-oriented epistemology, as well, a keyhole to the media cultural reality that defines our aesthetic and political parameters. If Software Takes Command would have engaged with other software studies writings and theorists of past years—Friedrich Kittler, Matthew Fuller, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alex Galloway, and many more—it would have strengthened its own theoretical message. Key literature of past years is not consistently referenced, and the book’s historical analysis relies on a narrow base of sources. The book also relies heavily on Wikipedia, rather than engaging in more extensive source work. Perhaps this is a provocation of sorts that speaks to the use of online sources? Even in such a case, the issue is not really addressed, and the explicit source basis of the book remains thin.Manovich’s understanding of software and design is, however, excellent. He is someone who is able to pull practical insights into a clearly written analysis of its implications in a wider aesthetic situation. He is an academic who writes in the midst of software and thinks through techniques of software-based design that feeds into his writing. Manovich knows what to focus on. He is able to pick up on what he sees as crucial neglected elements of software-enabled visual culture—for instance, “view control,” which is the ability to “switch between many different views and kinds of views of the same information,” a feature that cuts across different software from word processors to OS to media software such as AutoCAD, Maya, After Effects, Final Cut, Photoshop, and InDesign (75). This insight into the elements that define software culture leads into illuminating ideas. In a way, we are dealing with a “designerization” of creative media culture, where, for instance, film aesthetics and production becomes embedded with what we usually would have put under the banner of design profession and techniques. The moving image becomes a subset of design, and workflows of different creative industries become more modular design case studies, in addition to the features of any creative piece becoming embedded in variation: objects open up as parameters that can be changed or animated independently (310).Manovich’s approach to software is derived from the design and creative industries. Hence, for instance, the military or surveillance implications of software are not discussed. The book focuses on the connection of aesthetics to software, with the aim of expressing some themes relevant to cultural studies of software society. What is in large part missing is the political economy of software—for instance, labor. In a culture that sees software as an important part of national projects (e.g., software literacy and programming as crucial citizenship skills), and even political empowerment, it is a shame that we do not get to read more about this side of the issue, which is characterized by the entanglement of free time and work, in the office as well as on the move. The labor of software itself provides an interesting case of changes in work cultures, since on the ground level, it often is contradictory to the smooth operations of the software techniques themselves: software, hard work. It’s not that Manovich neglects to mention how, for example, 3-D graphics/3-D modeling have had a major impact on the work of architects, but these short notes are not extended into a more political discussion of the issues of labor or social impact.In terms of architecture-relevant software, the book does address Zaha Hadid’s Istanbul Kartal/Pendik district urban-renewal plan, as one example of software culture’s impact as the “variable grid” style of design. However, the examples are rather formal and, like Hadid’s design, not necessarily well informed about how design more comprehensively contributes—and not always in the most helpful ways—to urban development, whether in Istanbul or, more recently, in Qatar. One could say that the “continuity turn” (314) in digital aesthetics that defines the metamorphosing software forms and projects of design does not really become continuous with the world in which it is supposed to participate—for instance, in architecture. New software-design aesthetics remain star-architect projects with little concern for the issues of context, including labor and the political situation, where design has an impact, whether acknowledged or not. Indeed, despite the celebratory tone of the new historically unique magic (330) in software design, one can ask: why are contemporary mainstream design and software projects still so often so unimaginative when it comes to radical social change?In other words, software has taken command, which is why it deserves further historical excavation, including its political implications. This was Kittler’s message, too: code rules life; hence, we need to try to get a grip on its practice and history (Kittler 2008). Both aspects are important, as Manovich acknowledges. It is significant and important that he focuses on the so-called mainstream of software applications and uses, which is his explicit aim, and I am sure that the book will become required reading for a variety of courses in the field. Let’s just include with it a healthy dose of political analysis that considers how software is programmed and how it programs subjectivities, urban planning, and architectures across various material and social ecologies.The issue of software’s political history becomes explicit in how Software Takes Command relies on the idea of evolution of software. Manovich is right to point out that there is an inflation of the notion of medium due to the various incommensurable definitions, ideas, and uses of the term, in institutional and conceptual contexts. His suggestion that instead of media (and mediums), we should talk of species does not, however, fully satisfy. Manovich is far from naïve and acknowledges the dangers of biological metaphors; he emphasizes that he does not want to claim that biological evolution and software evolution are alike. But Software Takes Command insists that, because of the sheer number and constant variation of such species in the software age, one has to be equipped with new concepts that account for hybridity. The idea of hybrids is, of course, fine when it comes to the new mixes and entanglements of forms of aesthetic creation and expression. But the talk of software evolution is exactly what obfuscates the work and labor put into software in the global political economy. That’s a messier question

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• Mechanization Takes Command

  Sigfried Giedion•Mechanization Takes Command•1969

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• Software Studies

  Matthew Fuller•Software Studies•2008

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