This is a really interesting excerpt from Nicholas Gane and David Beer's publication titled "New Media" which explores the impact new media has on interactivity. In light of the recent lectures we have had about what defines interactivity from participation, I thought it was a relative topic of conversation:
NB: (The "cool" media which is referred to relates to McLuhan's idea that certain mediums, such as television, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of the viewer to determine meaning. "Hot" media is like the movies, because they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image.)
"Whereas for McLuhan media such as books and cinema are not truly interactive, for Manovich quite the reverse is true: they are more interactive (higher in participation) than digital media forms precisely because they demand us to create a mental accompaniment. Manovich, to a greater extent than McLuhan, sees media such as painting, books and cinema as succeeding by depriving our senses of high-level or complete information. They work because they demand us to fill in the gaps in visual or audio narratives, and to construct our own readings, images or even dialogues through interaction with the medium in question. In other words, non-electronic media are far cooler than McLuhan supposed, for they tend to be 'interactive' by definition. Manovich gives the example of classical and modern art:
Ellipses in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art, and other representational 'shortcuts' require the user to fill in missing information. Theater and painting also rely on techniques of staging and composition to orchestrate the viewers attention over time,requiring her to focus on different parts of the display.
Even sculpture and architecture might be seen as interactive media, for they demand the viewer 'to move her whole body to experience the spatial structure'. The same might be said of those media forms that, for McLuhan, are really 'hot', such as cinema. Cinema is particularly important for Manovich because, he claims, it is 'the key cultural form of the twentieth century', and as such it serves as the 'conceptual lens' through which he analyzes recent changes in media technologies. Again with cinema, we find an argument for the interactivity of older media forms:
Beginning in the 1920s, new narrative techniques such as film montage force audiences to bridge quick the mental gaps between unrelated images. Film cinematography actively guided the viewer to switch from one part of a frame to another. The new representational style of semi-abstraction, which long with photography became the 'international style' of modern visual culture, required the viewer to reconstruct represented objects from a bare minimum - a few patches of color, shadows cast by the objects not represented directly.
In fact, for Manovich, media such as cinema are more interactive than so-called interactive digital media (even those oral based), for they demand us to fill in more, meaning that computerized culture, to use McLuhan's typology, is becoming hotter than cooler."
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