Readings:
Murray , Janet "Inventing the Medium"
Manovich, Lev "New Media from Borges to HTML"
Borges, Jorge Luis "The Garden of Forking Paths"
Bush, Vannevar "As We May Think"

Perhaps because I read it first, and because it directly refers to two of the other readings, I find that I keep returning to "Inventing the Medium" to tie together my thoughts on the entire assignment. Initially, I found Murray's style to be a little too dense, but upon re-reading her essay after I had finished the others, it was far more comprehensible and I could appreciate her arguments more fully. I like the contrast that she set up between the two viewpoints (one showing an unwavering belief in the meaning of progress as relating to technology, the other questioning the positive nature of moving forward in this sense) although I personally found Borges' writing to be more interesting on another level.
The main question addressed by both Murray and Manovich, however, pertains more to the actual definition of "new media." It seems pretty contradictory to define any medium or concept as "new" when, as we discussed in class, "new" is a relative term. Eventually (and judging by the speed of progress this is not a distant eventuality) anything that we could possibly perceive as novel, will soon be superceded by something entirely different, or at least not entirely related. Even though it may seem that new media can branch off infinitely into various forms of expression, those forms will probably soon be specialized enough to be their own medium, just as film, originally considered an offspring or branch of photography, is now seen as a distinct medium. Just as the modernist or historical avant-garde movement must now generally be distinguished as such, to differentiate it from the actual current artistic forefront, so new media will soon require more exact contextual definition.
This thought leads me to Manovich's seventh proposition, that new media is "the encoding of the 1920s avant-garde techniques" (Manovich, p.22). It is a really interesting way of putting new media in a historical context, and I was especially interested in how Manovich develops his idea to include the post-modern aesthetic. Here, however he often refers to new media as a set of tools, and that may undermine his argument of it relating to any one movement or aesthetic. Seen in a much broader historical context, new media really does appear to be only a new set of tools, and differs from innovations such as canvas, or water colors, in that it is currently on the crest of an exponentially rising wave of progress, and hence is much more manifold than anything we have previously experienced. However, the invention of new tools for self-expression or communication has always stimulated some degree of artistic progress and innovation by virtue of facilitating and/or re-contextualizing the creative process. The difference is that we are in the middle of this period of change and can see only the rapid improvements of every passing year, to what will probably, in time, become a much more defined set of tools.