Lev Manovich starts his essay by stating “new media objects” “are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance of any other” ( Kocur, Leung, 408). He then goes on to discuss CD-ROMs and the lack of a true narrative within a biographical CD-ROM. So instead of sitting down, reading a biography, and truly educating ourselves, we are using this new form of media that is lazily simple and contains no formal quality of a narrative. Throughout the first three chapters Manovich presents the question of whether or not a narrative is equivalent to a database in the computer culture.

Manovich believes narratives and databases are ultimately “natural enemies” (Kocur, Leung, 413). If he believes this based on the opinion that a user navigating their way through a game or virtual museum is in no way a narrative, I wonder what he would think about the Kindle. This came to mind because the Kindle is a database type system, but of books. Because of the Kindle would Manovich change his opinion about narratives and databases relating in the computer world? Although a user is navigating their way through the database of the Kindle, they are doing so to find the desired book. This book may be a narrative. Although the actual act of navigation would not be considered a narrative, I think it would be hard for Manovich to claim a lack of relationship between the two. But then again his opinion may hold because he states in the “Database and Narrative” chapter, “a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation” (Kocur, Leung, 415). So in this sense maybe he would still simply claim that the two are “enemies”, but narrative allows the support of a database, which is essentially what the Kindle is.

Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Print.