I’ve had a crazy few weeks, and I haven’t participated in this blog or this class nearly as much as I would have liked.  There are several factors that have now come together which will make this easier, though–I have a wireless card installed in my aging Mac, I have FIOS installed in my house, and I have my textbooks.  Weee!

I’ve begun reading Manovich, and I have to say that so far the text seems like it’s aimed directly at me.  It’s a confluence of material/visual culture (and as an Art History grad student this is a perfect extension of my methods and theory studies) and computer science (my previous career as a high level [perl, PHP, javascript, etc.] programmer and web designer gives me a great background to understand and relate to this).  Indeed, just in the introduction Manovich mentions modern artists and within a few paragraphs is talking about the Nintendo Dataglove and Myst.  Perfect!

This reminds me of an interesting article I read, maybe last year.  I’m not sure where, but I may try and find it and post it if I’m successful.  The article was specifically addressing computer games, but is probably true of a variety of new media forms.  Essentially, it said that those of us born between 1978-1982 have always been the target audience for computer games.  We’ve grown up with the industry targeting us specifically, and it continues to do so now that we’re adults.  It was an interesting thing to consider, but oh-so-true.  I remember playing silly racing games on the Atari when I was a toddler, Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo as a pre-teen, RPGs like Final Fantasy III (USA release) as a teenager, and so on.  It seems clear that this must have affected the consciousness of my generation, though I am right now at a loss as to draw a conclusion.  Any thoughts?

I think I’m going to have a lot to say about Manovich, so I’ve decided to break my posts down by chapter in an attempt at succinctness.  Once I’ve caught up somewhat on the reading, I will go back and comment on some of my classmate’s blogs and try and get involved in any discussions there.