Assignment 1

According to Lev Manovich, digital media and language share a few similarities; namely, both are composed of discrete units. Language is broken up into words — each unit combined together forms meaning; digital media combines single, decomposable elements to actualize meaning. For example, in the Long Rong Song, the sounds that we hear are discrete pieces of language; each sound has a word that corresponds to it but does not have any meaning. Through the visuals that we see, a form of digital media, we assign meaning to it. We piece together each image and word we see and create some meaning from the discrete elements.
Another particularly interesting medium is the relation between artificial intelligence as a digital media and language. In the Listener, a user can communicate with an AI and engage in conversation. The AI is trained using language itself; each piece that makes up the language is broken down into discrete elements and used to train the algorithm for the AI. Hence, there is no difference in makeup between the way interprets language and the instructions it was fed.
Words don’t have significant or specific meaning until we combine them into some type of structure or give them specific meaning. Software does something similar; you combine seemingly meaningless pieces of language into structure and you get some meaningful output. This is portrayed through the spoken word poetry in Prothesis.
Interesting/Relevant article: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

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