Never in history have we had so much data at our disposal about human culture and behavior, says Lev Manovich, but as far as most artists and academics from the humanities are concerned, this data is capitalism, so its considered bad, because money is bad.
Manovich is one of the most important thinkers and researchers in the realms of the internet and digital culture today. His 2001 book The Language of New Media laid the theoretical foundations for what we now call digital studies, and helped create the terms we use to think and talk about culture in the digital age, first and foremost the concept of new media. A professor of computer science at the City University of New Yorks Graduate Center, Manovich says he sees himself not as an academic per se, but rather as an artist whose medium is academic articles. He also doesnt really get why people are still reading a book he published so long ago, and says, maybe the professors are just too lazy to read something else so they keep citing it and tell their students to read it too.
Manovich, 59, is hard to pin down. A self-proclaimed contrarian, hes critical of the academic world, although he has had an impressive run as both an academic and an artist, with a career that has in many senses shadowed the digital revolution he writes about prolifically. He began his career as a graphic designer in the 1980s, but is today credited with being one of the first to extend critical theory to the examination of software and its impact on society, and his interests range from digital aesthetics to cultural analysis of video games and analog radar systems. Hes also a digital artist with a keen interest in cinema, and was one of the first to teach and analyze digital filmmaking.
In recent years, Manovich has written a number of popular and academic studies of what he terms contemporary visual culture, which he defines very widely. This has included studying Instagram, and more recently, setting up a cultural analytics lab (based jointly at CUNY and at Caltech) that works with corporate giants like Google as well as such artistic institutions as the Museum of Modern Art to try to bring know-how from the world of computer science for example, the use of big data to the world of culture.For example, the lab analyzed almost 7.5 million Instagram photos that were shared in Manhattan and crossed-referenced them with demographics data to gauge how factors like inequality are reflected visually, in terms of what images are shared on the social media network. In another project, the lab created an interactive digital installation of the streets of New York City, based on 30 million images and data points collected from Instagram. Manovichs work at the MoMa is perhaps the most representative of his thought, and employs data-visualization methods to 20,000 photos held in the museums photography collection to try and used big data to yield cultural findings related to art history.
The underlying logic of his 30-year career can be seen as the attempt to reconcile two worlds that are seemingly irreconcilable: that of art and high culture, on the one hand, and that of computers and digital culture. Though one may seem aesthetic and artistic, and the other pragmatic and analytic, for Manovich, the digital revolution has linked them together: Computers have become the mediator of all of our cultural consumption, and software has become our artistic tool kit.
In the past, each art form had its own medium for expressing itself the photographer had his camera and the writer, his typewriter. Today, however, many forms of art and human creativity manifest almost exclusively through computer software. For Marshall McLuhan, the medium was the message because there were fundamental differences between television and books and radio. Today we live in a world in which films and television are consumed through Netflix, and music and podcasts through Spotify, both of which are accessed through a computer be it a smartphone app or an internet browser. For Manovich that means there are no longer different media as much as there is the new medium of software.
No human being writes anymore, Friedrich Kittler, the philosopher of technology, wrote in 1982, observing that, Today, human writing runs through inscriptions burnt into silicon.
Identity and politics
Manovich was born in 1960 in the Soviet Union, and raised in a Jewish household in Moscow: My parents were scientists and they were very secular, he says. He moved to the United States in the 1980s to complete his doctorate, at the University of Rochester, in visual and cultural studies. Therefore, one might assume that like other emigres from the USSR a younger member of that same cohort is Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who was born in 1973 Manovich is enamored of American culture. But thats not actually true: With Manovitch, nothing is black or white, and today he has returned to Russia (on sabbatical) to continue his cultural analytics project.
What I find terrifying is that intellectuals in America actually believe what they read in The New York Times, he says, which is to say they treat it as the gospel truth. Russia has many problems, however, Russia is outside of human rationality meanwhile, the U.S. is the most rational place in the world. When I came to America, I felt I was surrounded by robots.
Russia is a very complex country with lots of problems there are many spaces there where people still feel helpless, for example, the court system. But there are also lots of good things. For example, technologically, Moscow is very progressive, it has the best WiFi, Uber works great and Russia is the third-biggest country in terms of Instagram users. So its basically a contemporary country, but its also an authoritarian country so is China, by the way, but China is efficient and Russia is not.
But if you look at The New York Times, they only write about Russia from a negative perspective. So you want to know about the problem with fake news? Its the news is itself that is the problem, because its a very biased view of the world.
To Manovich, journalism is a flawed medium that we shouldnt fetishize. People assume the news is the truth and that fake news corrupted a perfect medium. He says, its not perfect, its flawed because of its business model, which incentivizes negative narratives.
The percentage of negative news is on the rise, he asserts, studies in the 1960s and 70s also found this. Why? Maybe because they need to sell advertisements, but intellectuals and other people think we are living in a time of crisis.
Guys! What crisis? Between 1940 and 1945 there was a crisis there was the Holocaust and the entire world was at war. Now there are only a few local conflicts we live in humanitys best period and every single indicator says so but the media create this sense that thats not true, and so people are depressed.
But nonetheless, the rise of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putins growing global power create the sense that we are on the brink of a social or political crisis and that technology plays a key role in that.
But that has nothing to do with technology! Technology only reflects and permits cultural and social desires.
What do you mean? How does technology reflect social desires?
People want to feel safe, people want to neutralize uncertainty and increase predictability. And into this space, enters technology. Technology is very good at addressing human desires. For example: Authoritarian countries love technology because they love the idea of total control and total surveillance, and in China and Russia theyve embraced the internet more than anyone else.
The problem with this, according to Manovich, is the expectations we have of technology: Dont ask too much of technology and dont try to blame it for everything. In the 1990s, we lived in this optimistic decade, it was the end of the Cold War, the beginning of globalization, etc., and people projected these feelings onto technology and lots of left-wing thinkers, writers and journalists were writing about the internet as being connected to freedom so the internet was seen as a liberation project that works well with left-wing ideas. Twenty-five years later, we are now told that there is a massive social and political crisis, and people now project those feelings onto technology and blame it for that.
So loss of privacy and surveillance are not really a problem?
That is a misunderstanding and a problem of misplaced expectations: People really need to accept the fact that technology is not black or white, but part of our culture and our society. Every technology can be used in thousands of different ways. Just like you go out into the physical world and you see beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. So for me, its the same with technology and the internet and even Facebook.
What is the biggest misunderstanding the general public has about the internet and technology?
Technology is seen as a mechanism that will allow for safety and predictability. So we put cameras everywhere and allow people to read our emails. But what Im trying to say is that the problem is not surveillance, the problem is that people want surveillance. And in some cases it works crime is down in some places because of these cameras. So its not all bad. For example, the Google Assistant does want to help me and make sure I reach my flight on time and it knows I have a flight because it reads my emails. It is in that sense that technology is very good at answering our desires, but the desire for stability and security through technology is the real problem: No one treats the internet as something to experiment with or something that can liberate anymore. Therefore, people are using it to create this very safe and predictable world that is closed and very conventional and it is very depressing.
The problem that occupies Manovich, is the conservative way people look at technology, and the fact that people from the arts and humanities no longer think about computers in creative ways, and even incite against big data instead of finding a way to wrest if from the hands of corporations for their own use.
The 1990s and early 2000s was a very activist period very idealistic, avant-garde, and people created things like Wikipedia. Today we have high-tech and big data but nobody is creating the next Wikipedia perhaps the best of online projects, which gave millions of people access to knowledge. So why is there no new Wikipedia today? Because society has changed and people realize you can make money from technology, not change the world, and thats what they are doing. I love the world, but I feel sad this is very reactionary, the professor says, adding, Think how great the ideas of the early internet thinkers were. People like Ted Nelson who thought about hypertext as a revolutionary force, or even someone like Vanevar Bush, who thought about organizing knowledge in a completely new way.
Both Nelson and Bush wrote texts about technologies that were never realized but that influenced generations of engineers and entrepreneurs. For example, in a seminal text published in The Atlantic in 1945, Bush, who headed headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), suggested creating a desktop system for storing and retrieving the wealth of information created by science. His so-called Memex system (a portmanteau of memory index) is considered a precursor to the desktop computer. Nelson, for his part, coined the term hypertext, as well as the idea of copy/paste, and envisaged a system called Xanadu, with interlinked pages, which foreshadowed the world wide web.
But at the end of the day, the digital revolution didnt actually create a revolution in knowledge like Bush and certainly like Nelson wanted. For example, Wikipedia is written by a relatively small group of predominantly male editors and it seems to me to have recreated many of the biases of the past despite promising to do the exact opposite.
What are you talking about! That is just not true. For millions of people, Wikipedia allowed access to knowledge for the first time. In Russia its used for intellectual debate.Listen, there were always utopian ideas; that is not new and that is not unique to our age and certainly not digital culture. All the problems with Wikipedia, for example, are problems that are related to humanity and have always been there. I wrote some articles on Wikipedia and now I feel ownership over it that is a human issue, not a technological [one].But the internet did something amazing and we in the West either forgot [that] or dont want to talk about that anymore.
China is a good counter example [of a digital revolution]: They built a big firewall, but at the same time, they also developed their own IT industry. They are the only country to do that [built their own discrete internet], and it works for them, and the educated middle class there likes the social credit system, for example [which is intended to give and make public scores on both financial credit and behavior for both individuals and businesses]. From a Western point of view that is very terrifying, but they are clearly saying, we want order and we have to give up some privacy and freedom for that order and at some level they are okay with that.
Life in a photoshopped society
I meet Manovich, a well-built and emotive man, at a stylish hotel in central Tel Aviv. Hes in town its his first time in Israel for the PrintScreen festival, and arrived courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in Israel. Which leads me to ask him if he feels Jewish, and if he had ever wanted to visit here before.
Im a Jew, so obviously I wanted to come to Israel, he says. I even have some family here, so its almost strange that I havent been here yet. But Ill also admit Im one of those Jews whos afraid of other Jews, you know? Like if theres too many of us in one place, someone may try to kill us. But its a strange thing, this idea of Jewish continuity.
Did you feel like you grew up with a Jewish identity?
There is no word I hate more than identity. Personally, yes, Im a proud Jew. My mother raised us to be proud of being Jewish and was proud that our family was living in Moscow from the 19th century, which is rare for Jews. On the other hand, I have never done those genetic tests, and they may be a lie. I dont know what I think about them and if there really is such a thing as a Jewish gene.
Obviously, there is no such thing! Do you not see a connection between genetic testing and identity politics? As if DNA can supply a scientific basis for identity?
Please be careful not to project your own ideas on to me when you write up this interview. I am not one of those intellectuals like [Slavoj] Zizek, who can talk about anything. I dont like talking about things that I havent thought about. But forget that. Im here because I want to fall in love with Tel Aviv and my condition for this interview is that you give me a good recommendation for a place to go out tonight. But I dont want to go to some bar with only teenagers where Ill feel old.
You should go to the Teder [entertainment compound]; its classic Tel Aviv and theres tons of places there, but you may feel old. Im 32 and I also feel a bit old there sometime. But Tel Aviv is amazing.
It feels like you guys are still in the 1990s technology and high-tech are still working for you.
Really? When did digital culture become a cultural force? In the 90s?
The big change came in 2005-2006 with social media. If in the 80s we had maybe 40 people in the entire world doing animation with computers, then today Adobe has 20 million users and there are about one billion photographers on Instagram.
In his 2013 book Software Takes Command, Manovich offers a historical and cultural analysis of software as a creative tool. I look at Photoshop filters like an art historian looks at the Mona Lisa, he says proudly today. Indeed, his book gives a detailed analysis of how Photoshops menu, for example, impacts digital photography ideas that today hes using to critique Instagram.
Do you feel digital culture is by definition a visual culture?
Yes, very much. Today you buy a phone and you are forced to become a photographer. That has both cultural and aesthetic significance. Because now suddenly everyones a photographer and there is an aesthetic that is a direct result of the technological forces behind these new media.
An example of those technological forces can be found in his book, where Manovich recounts how he traveled to South Korea to find the graphic design studio that did the illustrative shots that come with all of Samsungs phones. For him, this small studio in effect created the aesthetic language for an entire generation of photographers who use Samsung phone as a camera.
When I went to Seoul, I met my wife, who was probably the only person in South Korea who had had plastic surgery. When I was there I understood that this is a society that has been photoshopped an airbrushed society and therefore it makes sense they would create this aesthetic because they have this aesthetic of perfection.
Over the past few months, a number of South Korean K-pop stars have committed suicide, most recently Goo Hara, in her case after it was revealed that she had undergone plastic surgery. Is this the price of this aesthetic of perfection?
Maybe, but airbrushing is not new. Photography has always been airbrushed, technology only increases its precision and scale. For example, you look at the photos in old newspapers and they are so airbrushed that for us it looks almost like painting. Photoshop did not invent airbrushing, it only expanded its scale and increased its precision. The Photoshop revolution preserved this aesthetic quality but also made it more wide-scale and more accurate.
The same thing happened with Instagram and camera phones. Photoshop was used only by professional photographers they are the only ones who understood what I was writing about [in the late 1990s] because they felt the change Photoshop created in their field. Meanwhile, Instagram wanted to be used by the general public. But what actually happened? Five, six years into Instagram, all the photos there look super photoshopped everything is filtered and airbrushed, just now its automatic. But Photoshops influence on Instagram is just so clear, and today the goal of Instagram photos is that they look super professional and perfect even though it was set up as an attempt to democratize Photoshop and Flickr, which were scary and intended only for professional photographers.
Do you think Instagram actually democratized photography?
I dont know. If anything, it democratized beauty. But at the aesthetic level, this is a very dangerous thing, people get used to perfection and perfect images. Every picture you see online not to mention in print has been airbrushed and worked on. In the past 20 years, the desire for an aesthetics of perfection has also undergone a process of mass production. Today this aesthetic is actually preserved and enhanced not just through human behavior but also through algorithms and machine learning. When you swipe, you are sorting for the best picture and the algorithm only wants to [reinforce this by showing] you what you will click on, and that creates this situation.
In your most recent works, you have turned your focus to Instagram, attempting to treat it as an arena that is both artistic and big data. You asked: How can I look at a billion photographs at the same time and try to reach some aesthetic or cultural understanding. Do you think the age of human aesthetics is over and now we only have big data aesthetics?
That is not what I think at all and really dont want you to project your own ideas about this post-subject aesthetic onto me. I will give you an answer that will surprise you, because we are both smart Jews: My next text is not about the attempt to look at a million photographs but rather only at one. I want to write about one single Instagram photo and dedicate 60 pages to it.
Why?
Because I want to write about things that move us and I think that today content matters more than ever. Computers cannot see what makes a photograph beautiful and thats what interests me. Today people seem to think that there are too many photos, too many posts, and that content doesnt matter. I think the opposite. Now content matters more than ever before. The single frame, the single post or even a book the perfection of each of these is more important because the competition is so big. People are looking for a point of orientation to grab onto and a book is just such an orienting point.
If I write a book that is good and people read it then that means that it has succeeded despite there being so many blog posts and articles out there. Look at Yuval Noah Harari I dont know if what he writes is actually good scientifically but people are interested in what he has to say, and that is amazing. People read him all over the world.
And what about digital culture and data? Why arent people more interested in that?
Maybe if Id write about money, like [Thomas] Pikkety, and not about culture, people would be more interested and Id be more successful. But forget about that, its not just software and digital culture its data. Ill give you an example. I gave a lecture to PhD students in art and art history; these are the people who are going to go on to become curators at the MoMa and so on. And I tell them about my research into Instagram and they listen politely but at the end of my talk, they ask me: Why are you wasting your time on Instagram, its not art. So I say: What are you talking about, Im interested in contemporary visual culture and thats where its happening.
Do you understand? There are a billion people using Instagram, but for those students, its capitalism and corporations, so its bad and all these people using Instagram are just living in false consciousness. That the only perspective for examining Instagram is not as art or culture, but as an ideology. For them Instagram is just an instrument of ideology, but I hate that bullshit.
Come on, not all of academia is that Marxist. There are social studies that do focus on digital culture.
Of course, but you need to understand that today there are two types or schools of social sciences: the one done at universities, and the one done by corporations. They both miss something, in some sense. Humanities and social sciences only focus on diversity, inclusion and identity trying to challenge the Western canon which is very important and actually great, but its a really bad way to research Instagram and think about software culture. Why? Because it treats these things as capitalistic. And therefore in some strange way, I find myself on the side of the corporations, because they do analysis of human behavior. But there is a massive difference between what Google and Amazon do and what academia does: First of all, they dont publish their results, but more importantly, they have 5,000 data points about every person but they only ask one question: Will they buy something? They look at this data for purely commercial reasons. So Im stuck in this weird position and feel a certain discomfort.
Do you think the digital revolution skipped over the humanities and social sciences?
When did Western society really start thinking critically about itself? Yes, theres Descartes, but during the 18th and 19th centuries, we have this golden age of thought. From Marx to Weber and Freud and Durkheim. All this intellectual output was devoid of data, and toward the 1990s, you start to have this sense that everything that can be thought of has already been thought of. There is this intellectual exhaustion, almost, in academia and in what I call high culture. No one thinks about social structures anymore, no one even thinks about the structure of text anymore. There are no big ontological or social theories anymore except with some giants like [philosopher of science] Bruno Latour, but even he limits himself to talking only about science.
That is the paradox of our time: We can have all the information in the world about everyone with an internet connection, and in the future we will even be able to see what people are reading and even view their brains thinking or reading in real time so you can look at society at scale and in resolutions that in the past were impossible, but it hasnt led to any new theory or research. We have all this big data but we dont really know what to do with it, and we think about it and use it with 19th-century methods. For example, Excel is amazing but spreadsheets have existed since the 19th century and are [an example of] classic capitalistic cognition. I want to tell people to think about data in artistic and creative ways.
You also have a revolutionary project it seems. Do you also want to change the world?
Maybe you are right. My goal is to get people to think about technology differently, to think about digital culture in a less rigid way, and get people to think less in stereotypes. I want to make them see the world in a more complex way because thats the way I see the world. In this sense, I do have a left-wing project but its not connected to changing the world, but rather to a desire to make people more open. In that sense, Im actually more of a contrarian.
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Fake news isn't the real problem news is: One of the world's leading internet researchers explains what went wrong - Haaretz