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Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003. 823 pp. + CD-ROM. ISBN 0-262-23227-8. 29.95 GBP; 48 USD.
This impressive collection of 54 texts on new media, with introductions by Janet H. Murray and Lev Manovich, is an important statement. The editors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, present new media as a domain that is certainly not constrained to computer experts and that contributes to bridging the gap between science and the humanities. For instance, the first text in this collection is Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths". As the editors explain in a short introduction, "many of new media's important ideas and influence first appeared in unexpected contexts" (29). The collection is divided into four subdivisions. Apart from Borges, the first part (I. The Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate) contains landmark articles by Vannevar Bush, AlanTuring, Theodor Nelson, but also William Burroughs' explanation of "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" and a selection of articles by the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). The second part (II. Collective Media, Personal Media) opens with two texts by Marshall McLuhan (from Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy), and gathers articles from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" (1970), Jean Baudrillard...