#practical module

Ruff, T. (2006), jpeg n 2

jpegs demonstrate the new cultural and economic logic of post-industrial societies in which, as Manovich points out, new media cultural objects are not fixed but can exist in different versions, and this quality enables ‘production on demand’, because the consumer can determine the exact features of the commodity: ‘In industrial mass society everyone was supposed to enjoy the same goods  …  . In a post-industrial society, every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and “select” her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices  …  . The logic of new media technology reflects this new social logic’. In practice, that means that media users are given options to modify programmes, interface features, and file size, file type, type of compression used, file format, and so on. Yet, what enables ‘variability’ and ‘mutability’, programmability and quantification, is also what delimits it, because ‘choices’ are always pre-programmed in advance by designers, programmers, media corporations, advertisers, etc. And this is precisely what is demonstrated in jpegs because individual changes are possible but only within the realm of possibilities and choices predetermined in advance by a standards committee.