As the world still appears to us as an “endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records”, it is only natural that we should seek to collate them in a ordered manner and that results in a database.

The idea behind a database to help us make sense of the world, but being a jumble of separate things, it perhaps has less appeal that the cause and effect nature of narrative to which we are so accustomed.

The database represents the world as a “list of items” but refuses to order that list for us in anyway which can become confusing and frustrating when we have a tendency to depend on things evolving in a linear fashion. The idea of a database of information works against our notion of time.

Manovich argues it’s simply a matter of finding the right ‘algorithm’, the right way of reading a database for it to become as normal to us as narrative.