Manovich - Media After Software

a fundamentally new dimension of media – interface (i.e. the ways to represent and control the signal). And this in its turn changes how media functions – its “properties” were no longer solely contained in the data but were now also depend on the interfaces provided by technology manufacturers.

And yet, if we want to really understand the forms of contemporary media nad also what ‘media’ means today, this part is crucial. The part in question is software.

There is no such thing as ‘digital media’. There is only software – as applied to media (or ‘content’).

…most of us always experience content through the layer of applications… The seemingly obvious answer is that adoption of numerical code as the new universal intermediary. I call it intermediary because in order to make media accessible to our senses, it has to be analog

Looking at a such set of numbers [that compose a digital image] with our bare eyes is meaningless. Therfore, we need to employ some technologies to translate them into analog representations acceptable to our senses.

With all data types now encoded as sets of numbers, they can only be efficiently accessed by users via software applications which translates these numbers into sensory representations.

In short: media becomes software.