The Developing Database Culture. An overview of Lev Manovich's excerpt article The Database (2001) and Eugene Thacker's essay Biocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing of the Population. (2005) Disclaimer: All images used for illustrative purposes belong to their respective trademark owners. No copyright infringement is intended.

1. The Way We Were
• 40’s Bush and Weiner: From
analogue to digital, cybernetics
• 60’s McLuhan: The medium is the
message (mediated content)
• 90’s: Bolter & Grusin:
remediation and digitextuality
• 2000s Everett - symptoms of:
click theory

2. The Developing
Database Culture
Lev Manovich
Eugene Thacker

3. Overview
• Lev Manovich
The Database (2001)
• Eugene Thacker
Biocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing
of the Population (2005)

4. Lev Manovich
• Interested in new media art, history and
theory of digital culture
• Professor of Visual Arts, UCSD
• Background in fine art,
architecture, semiotics, computer
programming
• M.A. Experimental Psychology
Ph.D.Visual/Cultural Studies
• The Language of Media (MIT Press, 2001)
• excerpt from Database as a
Symbolic Form

5. Article in a nutshell
• The rise of computer culture has redistributed the weight between databases and
narratives as the lens for user experience and understanding of the world
• “Both have existed long before modern media...[and represent] two essential
responses to the world” (Nayar 60)
• Narrative becomes syntagm|virtual|dematerialized while database becomes
paradigm|privileged|material in new media

6. Key terms
• Database form can be defined as a
structured collection of data.
• Data has equal significance
• No end, no beginning (editable)
• Open and editable

7. Key Concepts
• Database form and data structure as a cultural mirror.
• Computer age succeeds modern age
• Rise of idea of world as unstructured and endless
collection of data
• Represents a new way to translate our experience of
ourselves and the world

8. Key terms
• Narrative form “… contents should be a
series of connected events caused or
experienced by actors”.
- Mieke Bal. literary scholar (Nayar 56)
• Linear, single trajectory
• Novels, cinema, comics, music

9. Why are database>narrative structure for
new media objects?
• New media objects do not tell
stories
• Traditional genres which already
have a database logic are
receptive to reinvention with
new media storage
• OED, Chapters, Flickr,
Wikipedia, Hotmail, CBC Radio
3

10. But what about new media objects experienced as
narratives...
Such as games?

11. Key terms
• Algorithm: “a final sequence of simplified operations that a
computer can execute to accomplish a given task.” (Nayar
53)
• “Hidden logic” a sequence of simple operation required to
complete a task

12. Manovich’s Issues
• “The computerization of culture” “[C]omputer programming encapsulates the world according to its
own logic. The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects which are
complementary to each other: data structures and algorithms.” (Nayar 53)
• “the digitizing craze” “storage mania”
• Data does not just exist - it has to be generated, collected and organized
• New cultural algorithm (database logic as logic of culture):
reality ->media->data->database

13. Re: Everett’s Issue
• “By distancing technology from the body,
we become less accountable to ourselves.”
• Issue of disconnecting information from the
body.

14. Thacker’s Issue
• When we displace data from the body, does
it gain additional significance? Is context
lost in the datafication? (Re: McLuhan)

15. Eugene Thacker
• Interested in new media theory, digital
arts, science fiction, bioscience and
ethics, body and technology
• Associate Professor of Media Studies &
film, The New School
• BA in English Literature
M.A. and Ph.D.: Comparative
Literature
• excerpt from The Global Genome
(MIT Press, 2005)

17. Article in a nutshell
• The databasing of the population is problematic. The human population is reduced to three entities:
biological material in a test tube, as a sequence in a computer database, and as economically valuable
information in a patent.
• “… what techniques is bioinformatics reinterpreting and incorporating cultural
difference?” (Nayar 241)
• Datification is a process fraught with semiotic meaning in both input and output (de Saussure).

18. Key Terms
• Population Genomics: Genetic study of the
genomes of specific populations, through both
statistics and medicine, genetics and
technology(Nayar 223)
• Studies genetic elements that make human
populations distinct from all humans (ie. ethnic
groups.)
• Produces what population means in the
context of genetics-based medicine and health
care-paradigm.
• Omits nonbiological factors (environmental,
geography, political, social)
• Related: Biopower, Bioinformatics as
Biocapitalism

19. Key Terms
• Biopolitics: incorporating the life of a population into a set of
economic and political concerns.
• defines population as mathematical, informatic-based
statistics approach
• works by subdividing and creating internal differences in
population to regulate political and economic health.
• produces and collects knowledge of the population in
the form of manageable data, inserting that info back
through the social-biological body of the population
Michel Foucault, French philosopher

20. Key Terms
• Biocolonialism: the appropriation (through force or
coercion) of Third World biological bodies and
populations by First World science, practice and research
to feed into health care economies.
• Concept of race manifested within biosciences is
encoded by Western science.
• Population databases are “... like value-added export
products designed to circulate in a global rhetorical
economy” (Nayar, 225)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8HDjU6URqw

22. Key Issues
• Bioethical Concerns & the Database:
• privacy, ownership and access to data
• commodification of data by free market capitalism
• emphasis on marketable genes data over others
• genetic discrimination
• selected conservation of genetic difference.
• reinscribed data; variability of biological data
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apjebtal8bQ&feature=player_profilepage

23. Thank you

24. Disclaimer: All images used for illustrative purposes belong to their respective trademark owners. The images
used therein are for non-commercial use and do not imply artist or corporate endorsement. No copyright
infringement is intended. For image takedown notice, please contact strieudal@yahoo.ca