Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Introduction 9
industrial, technological, and economic forces working to deliver content
via different devices and modes of viewing, has resulted in a definitive and
permanent blurring between genres like film, television, virtual imaging,
and writing, and that visual culture is the most appropriate modality of critique
equipped to account for this melding of media that had all previously
been separate. She asks: “How does the digital, an aspect of late 20th century
visual culture which emerged roughly simultaneously with visual studies,
figure into the field?” 12
The first major book-length work that identifies itself with this orientation
in an overt way is Andrew Darley’s Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and
Spectacle in New Media Genres. His critique, which is informed primarily by
film history and theory, seeks to understand new media objects through their
relationships to earlier types of media simulations, such as rides, amusement
parks, and early film forms such as the cinema of attractions. David Bolter
and Richard Grusin take a similar tack in Remediation, as does Per Persson. 13
The most impressive of these is Lev Manovich, whose brilliant Language of
New Media is justly credited with creating the first fully articulated theoretical
work on the logic of digital media by linking the rigorous affinities between
film form and history to the structure and function of computer software and
its operations.
However, while Darley, Manovich, and Persson pay close attention to
the connections between old and new media forms, reception, and exhibition,
none of them writes specifically about the Internet as a platform for
digital visual culture. In other words, their critiques neglect the added and
determinative element of networking—the facilitation of image production
and sharing via linked computers. They write about computer-generated
images and simulations as if they were texts and technologies that address
the viewer in particular ways, but assume only one viewer; and when interactivity
is discussed, it is in reference to the interface itself, rather than
with other users. In other words, these critics write about digital visuality as if
it were a medium like radio, television, or film, rather than as a mode of communication,
like the telephone or the telegraph. This tendency of visual
culture to omit considerations of the realm of communication, focusing instead
on representations and signification that occur between a visual medium
and a viewer, can be traced to its roots in the critical humanities. To use an
acronym borrowed from the language of communication scholars, visualculture-oriented
analyses of digital culture concern themselves with HCI
(human-computer interaction) rather than CMC (computer-mediated communication).
This accounts for the lack of scholarship on digital visual culture