From Manovich’s The Language of New Media I am most interested in the material both on modularity and on forms. “A new media object has the same modular structure throughout,” (30) and these objects are themselves simply collections of discrete samples appropriate to the type of object itself. An interesting feature of these objects is the combinatory nature made possible only by new media. HTML documents are modular and the World Wide Web itself is merely a collection of collections of objects.

We tend, as Manovich notes, to think of websites as being completely self-contained units of material in support of a given website’s purpose. The eschewing of hierarchical and linear relationships between objects subverts the traditional narrative form as “narration and description have changed roles” (216). The database, itself a collection of objects, “is quite different from a traditional collection of documents” (214). Its difference rests in the ability of the database to quickly access and organize vast amounts of data of varying types—media included.

I suggest this is the promise of the World Wide Web: the ability to quickly engage materials from disparate repositories. A single website should need be the authoritative source or resource on any given topic. The power and promise of the web is not solely about putting data on the web; it is about creating dynamic links between other, related, data, and about opening up and out rather than being buried within a particular web interface.

This is an immersion of data. And with this immersion we are faced with two opposing aspects relative to the technology of new media. The first is that “we have too much information” and our ability to narrate that information is too limited (216). The other is that to “immerse” is to keep a user in a particular universe and to “prevent her from going to other sites” (215). And this is the issue. The power of the web is diminished by both our inability to “narrate” information and by information increasingly becoming monetized, hence, locked away in a single self-contained site.

Manovich unintentionally provides one such example of this. On the topic of modularity he mentions The Netomat browser “which extracts elements of a particular media type from different Web pages . . . and displays them together without identifying the Web sites from which they are drawn” (30). Intrigued by The Netomat browser, I decided to check it out. What began as a network-based art project by Maciej Wisniewski has become a vendor of a “state-of-the-art suite of products that enable your enterprise to deliver its online world to users on thousands of different mobile devices.”

The vision of Tim Berners-Lee’s “Linked Data” seems to be slipping away. Modularity is nothing more than, as Todd notes in his post, objects that are “stored independently of each other.”

Immersion comes with a price. And, the price of admission is so costly that you find yourself locked in a single narrative.