Sitting here on a very pleasant Sunday morning, sun coming in and window open, playing a mindless video game on my computer and daydreaming about paradox, like warm weather in February (rare in my part of the world) and wasting time with perhaps the most efficient tool ever invented.

Lev Manowich, a professor in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, wrote an oft-cited book a few years ago called the Language of the New Media. In this book, he discusses the dynamics between the two dominant cultural forms represented in the new media, database and narrative: