In order to understand a new media database, you must first understand and integrate the definition of a database onto the new media platform. If databases are collections of individual items that hold equal significance to them, then a perfect database in new media, would apply to digital storage devices (CD-ROMs, Floppy Disks, USBs) to the Web and computerized games.
This video from Idea Channel, expresses the idea of the Internet growing into a better form of an archive. An archive is a database within itself of previous current topics that are filed under that category. Once material is shared through the web, often times it’s there forever.
Yet if technology is always advancing, and every aspect of social media such as a comment, a status update, or a retweet, has been archived, then isn’t that in itself a database with no need for structure of many different interfaces? It makes you think with the changing times. There are different types of databases that correspond to the data is upholds within itself such as: Hierarchal, Object-orientated, Network, and Relational.
Other key components of a database include the algorithm of a piece, the interfaces that compose a database, and the narratives behind each piece. While it’s not always evident of an algorithm within a work, it’s often most prominent in video and computer games. Algorithm is a sequence of command patterns that achieve a goal. So if a video game requires the user to go through step by step tasks in order to reach the end of the program, it is through trial and error, that the user discovers an algorithm.
Yet Algorithms don’t just apply to digital gaming. Sleeping Giant Media further explains in this YouTube video, just what an algorithm means when it’s applied to the Web, specifically the Google search engine. Search engines are used to access a database of websites. There are certain factors such as SEO, and ways a consumer searches an item that will lead to an algorithm.
A narrative is a new media object within a database that tells a story. A narrative and algorithm go hand in hand, because the user’s goal is to find the logic behind them. The user can try to understand the underlying narrative of a material, such as apparent messages or hidden ones being conveyed in the multimedia object. A great use of narrative, is a film or video. Whether the narrative is evident or underlying, it does its job of conveying that through the motions and sequences of a film.
Here’s a prime example of a short film with many different underlying narratives. This short film was created by Greg Glienna, who created the popular film “Meet the Parents”. How we perceive it, is from our own experience with it. If you observe the different perspectives on the elevators of what’s going on, what bothers them, and what’s apparent to them personally, you see that they all experience reality in a very different way. This in itself is the underlying narrative, at least to me.
To me, a Multimedia Object is diverse in itself. Whether it’s a web page, an animation, a film, or a canvas painting, we can safely apply the elements of interface, narratives, algorithms, and database as key components in the makeup of a new media object.
The Multimedia Spectrum 