ESSAY: On Totalitarian Interactivity

Lev Manovich

(1996)

Manovich begins his essay with a cotation from the contemporary new media artist Alexei Shulgin who states that "the emergence of new media is characterized by the transition from representation to manipulation (of people)". Manovich reinforces Shulgin's statement by affirming throught his essay that interactive computer schemes represent an advanced form of audience manipulation, since people are asked to follow pre-programmed "objectively existing" associations.

Manovich cleverly distinguish the easter and western view on technology, where while the latter sees it as an abolishment of hierarchies and a functioning wonder, the eastern view does not believe in its redeeming powers nor usefulness. Manovich, an eastern, describes the internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era where no privacy is respected and spying flourishes while classic components are redundantly instantiated.

The lack of flexibility in interacting with the Internet is obvious. We read and follow someone else's trails with little or no margins for manouvering. Although search engines might seem as a counter example for deterministic trails since they present their users with navigation choices, the fact remains that the choices presented stem from their own understanding of the internet content and structure rather than that of the users.

Kerne's non-traditional combinFormation uses learning agents to understand the user's interests in harvesting information and media elements on the internet. Despite such seemingly democratic gesture, combinFormation still enslaves its users to a predefined interaction paradigm to understand their interests, requiring users to "fill in missing information" through a deterministic interaction model augmented by harzard.

The type of new media sought after should not be transluscent to eliminate the ability to track people and to spy on them. Privacy should become an issue of principal importance to protect the people against all types of violations. Moreover, this media should not introduce a third party, such as learning agents or rigid interaction structures, but instead should use transparency to make its own interface disappear, leaving people to mesh with pre-inventive knowledge structures in a personal and subjective manner. Finally, the medium should have the ability of purging itself from "garbage" information as the latter accumulates.