The Limits of Cyberspace

The Limits of Cyberspace

Lev Manovich’s wider history of vision and Simon Cook’s amendments to it reveal much about the recent developments in visual communication. This essay will use these two papers to show that today’s digital culture stems from late-Victorian methods of organization and Modernist visual forms. Also, it will discuss the current rate of progress, and the ultimate limit of technology in our world.

Technology changes rapidly. Just a few years ago, the world was unable to stop discussing the rate of technological advancement. People laughed at Bill Gates’ famous quote, “with 1 MB RAM, we have a memory capacity, which will never be fully utilized,” and marvelled that “processor speed doubles every 18 months.”

Some thinkers, coming to grips with this amazing rate of development, have stopped looking solely at the slope of technological progress and have begun looking also at the history of human interaction with technology, as well as making predictions about its future. A new work at the forefront of the discussion of the history of the digital revolution is UCSD professor Lev Manovich’s “The Language of New Media.” The ideas contained in this book are essentially elaborations of the ideas in his doctoral dissertation, “The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers,” and a few articles published on his website.

In “The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers,” Manovich discusses at length the recent developments in modern vision as well as analyzing its present state.

Over the last hundred and thirty years, says Manovich, there has been a dramatic decrease in the physical difficulty of labor and a correspondingly large increase in the need for the use of the eye and mind to perform productively. Manovich divides this time period into three separate stages. Firstly, from 1870 to 1920, he states that Venn, Freud, and others created new systems for visual reasoning. “For the first time, we can find in their work the explicit justifications for the very notion of reasoning through vision.” According to Manovich, these “diferent models of how vision can be used in reasoning represent the first stage in the reversal of attitude towards the inadequacy of vision.”

The second stage begins in 1870 and continues until 1920. It encompasses the transition from physical labor to “visual labor”, when the muscular effort of physical labor is slowly replaced by the labor of the eye looking for changing details in a managerial workplace.