I'm reading it.

I’ve been searching and thinking about this guy since the day watching his SOFT CINEMA. Lev Manovich, the leader of the Soft Cinema project and the videographer, editor, and author of Mission to Earth, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of new media culture. He is the author of The Language of New Media which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." In 1994 he created Little Movies (1994), the first film project created specifically for the World Wide Web. His computer-driven installations and films have been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, media and film festivals in the US, Europe and Asia.
Lev Manovich's work on the "language of new media" provides valuable ways for looking at new media from the point of view of structure rather than cultural content. While reading the book I feel the truth of “the normative cinema of my time feels nostalgic”.
One of Manovich's key ideas is that the emphasis on the database within digital media is what distinguishes it from older media (film literature), which emphasize narrative sequence: “After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate—the database. Many new media objects...are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as every other” (Language of New Media, 218).
He questioned the concept of Interactivity and the claim that a user of an interactive program or website becomes its co-author: that by choosing a unique path through the elements of a work, she/he supposedly creates a new work.
Manovich also points out - it is also possible to see the same process in a different way. If, as it is in most cases, a complete work is a sum of all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a particular path (which the user herself choose) only accesses a part of this whole. In other words, the user is only activating a part of the total work that already exists.

( more entries are coming as I carry on reading this book=))