杏吧原创

The New Media Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, MIT, 拢29.95/$45, ISBN 0262232278 Reviewed by Mike Holderness

MOSTLY, I read the books I review on trains. I half-broke my back schlepping The New Media Reader to Edinburgh: 820 pages of small type are less than 5 Mb of plain text, but it鈥檚 about half as heavy as my cheap chunky laptop. Surely they could have fit the book itself into an odd corner of the enclosed CD-ROM鈥檚 650 Mb capacity?

So is The New Media Reader worth the back ache? There are many excellent founding texts, ranging from 鈥� of course 鈥� Presidential Science Adviser Vannevar Bush鈥檚 1945 essay 鈥淎s We May Think鈥�, in which he invented hypertext, via Raymond Queneau鈥檚 combinatorial 鈥�10¹⁴ Poems鈥� to Scott McCloud鈥檚 鈥淭ime Frames鈥�, a discussion of time in comics that is itself a comic. And, on the CD, more (hyper)text, videos of long-lost programs and the very first computer games.

Editors Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort give introductions, which are generally useful, though they could have done more to explain the significance of (say) the philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the pure coder types and the coder Ivan Sutherland鈥檚 first description of a graphics program to philosophers.

What have they left out? Loads, from the 鈥淩equest for Comment鈥� documents that founded the Web, to the annals of the experimental virtual world Lambda-MOO, to much European art. So, no, this book won鈥檛 do for a media studies degree between two covers.