Jon's Course Reflection: Without new media narratives all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

There is never enough time.

That’s my reflection on this course—and most courses, really. The content here is so rich, so thought-provoking, that it feels like I’m only scratching the surface. I want to take a deep dive into the work of Lev Manovich, fully wrap my head around the ideas of performance and identity, and bask in the utopian undertones of Jenny Odell and Sue Thomas’s techno-biophilia. How can we reach the cybernetic meadow of Richard Brautigan’s “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”?

It reminds me of something American naturalist John Muir once said:
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." (Muir, 1911).

And perhaps that’s the essence of new media narratives—they are interconnected, multimedia, multimodal, constantly growing and changing. The “new” in new media is inherently metamedia. It’s about transliteracy: the ability to navigate across different forms of media and meaning-making. This evokes a sense of freedom and fluidity akin to other “trans” existences—the idea of avoiding fixed or binary representations and instead recontextualizing across media and creating new forms of expression.

And although it’s overwhelming at the moment, it’s not all about AI. AI may be the shiniest new tool in the shed, and it will undoubtedly remain relevant, but it doesn’t override the fundamental aspects of human experience. These human experiences feed the machine and are necessary for creating good stories—narratives that resonate deeply. If AI is just a large language model that predicts which words often follow others, can it dream? Does it have imagination?

This leads me to Philip K. Dick’s central question from his novel: Do androids dream of electric sheep?—and beyond that, to an even more profound question: What does it truly mean to be human?

When I first looked at the MACT catalogue of courses, this one stood out to me. As someone who was around in the early days of the web, I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of “new media.” Back then, these tools felt like portals into a new universe—one we were building from scratch. I had faith in its utopian potential.

But over time, that optimism—the “utopian undertones” of what Stevenson (2018) calls “The Californian Ideology”—has faded into something more dystopian. Techno-capitalism has taken center stage, prioritizing profit over privacy as our data becomes currency. Worse still, we don’t even have agency over our own data anymore.

And yet… maybe that’s okay because there is never enough time anyway. Algorithms might help us process more information faster, but they can’t capture nuance or subtlety—the tone in someone’s voice, the look in their eye, or the context surrounding an interaction. These are things that make us human and give stories their depth.

New media narratives are ultimately an attempt to capture time—to preserve memory for future generations. But time is elusive; it slips through our fingers no matter how hard we try to hold onto it. Strangely enough, this brings me back to AI and again to Blade Runner’s central question: What does it mean to be human?

In Blade Runner, empathy is presented as the defining trait that separates humans from androids. Yet even this distinction becomes blurred as some androids exhibit human-like emotions. And then there’s the haunting soliloquy by replicant (android) Roy Batty:

"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

Without new media narratives—without our attempts to capture and preserve these moments—all will indeed be lost in time like tears in rain.

References: Muir, J. (1911). My First Summer in the Sierra. Houghton Mifflin.` Stevenson, N. (2018). Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitan questions. Routledge.