Reflections on New Media (2)
Thursday, June 9, 2005 at 2:09AM Jonathan Tyrrell comments on the discussion
I am following this discussion with tremendous interest, though I think that we ought to be careful about assumptions and value judgements regarding the legitimacy of certain forms of communication and knowledge - a retrofit of the high/low culture debate. For example, if we were to study "everyday" face-to-face conversations, would we discover less or more idle chatter?
One of the things I find interesting about these technologies is they way they seem to evolve and respond to the cultures they inhabit, as they simultaneously shape and influence the ways we communicate.
Thumbs take over for text generation (25 March, 2002)
Ron Burnett responds
Your points are important. I think that the evolution of new technologies works in a number of different ways. An apparatus or tool is invented and then marketed. In general, most new inventions fail. Those that do succeed evolve with the marketplace. The iPod is a good example. The core cencepts that produced the iPod have not changed, but its evolution into a mini iPod and then the Shuffle, suggests that users are more interested in portability than storage. Portability and style, look and feel have all made the iPod a success. Ultimately, whether the iPod represents a shift from one mode of music listening to another will depend on whether users will be able to customize it to fit their own and sometimes quite individual needs.
Contrast this with the evolving nature of video games. As video games morph into mass entertainment, they become less and less customizable. Their plots and storylines, their look and feel have already become relatively stale. The key to unlocking the evolution of this process will be games that can be rewritten or developed from the ground up by amateurs. Cultural innovation in any medium is only possible when people can take control of the core elements and recreate that core to fit their needs and outlook.
Seth responds
Being the recent recipient of an iPod shuffle (an early Father's Day present), I'd like to add one thought:
I've divided the 1GB, half for songs, half to carry the files I'm working on. In other words, I have a memory stick that sings to me. I can see this as an incentive to not just save music and other multi-media but to integrate it more closely into the work I save and transport on my memory stick. To make this work better will require more bridges across the iTunes/other data divide (definitely a social challenge). It will inevitably require more memory as well,
Second observation: iTunes is now expanding into a podcasting resource (free and not so free). I've actually talked to some Apple people about using it as an educational resource, i.e. assembling multi-media course kits that could be bought the same way my hard copy course kits are bought at the bookstore.
The advantage from my end is copyright clearance - which, or so my friends at the course kit dept. of the bookstore warn me, is about to jack up the prices of course kits and make much material unavailable. Perhaps we need corporate clout to fight corporate clout. But from Apple's end, the prospect might be attractive not simply from the point of view of course kit sales (with free assembly labour provided by the world's academics) but also in encouraging the sales of reading devices, i.e. the iPods and iMacs of the future. They've gone off (one of them to Cupertino) to mull it over.
Reader Comments (3)
I've divided the 1GB, half for songs, half to carry the files I'm working on. In other words, I have a memory stick that sings to me. I can see this as an incentive to not just save music and other multi-media but to integrate it more closely into the work I save and transport on my memory stick. To make this work better will require more bridges across the iTunes/other data divide (definitely a social challenge). It will inevitably require more memory as well,
Second observation: iTunes is now expanding into a podcasting resource (free and not so free). I've actually talked to some Apple people about using it as an educational resource, i.e. assembling multi-media course kits that could be bought the same way my hard copy course kits are bought at the bookstore.The advantage from my end is copyright clearance - which, or so my friends at the course kit dept. of the bookstore warn me, is about to jack up the prices of course kits and make much material unavailable. Perhaps we need corporate clout to fight corporate clout. But from Apple's end, the prospect might be attractive no simply from the point of view of course kit sales (with free assembly labour provided by the world's academics) but also in encouraging the sales of reading devices, i.e. the iPods and iMacs of the future. They've gone off (one of them to Cupertino) to mull it over.
Seth
I agree that the iPod was was and is both those things, but I cannot help wondering where it came from in the first place? I think in all the examples we have touched on in this discussion, each has its precursors and its origins can be traced to some other form or forms. these are the things that make the "New" not so new after all. I would suggest that the iPod is part of a wider cultural landscape that includes, the Walkman, the mix tape, the RIAA, disco, the Beatles, and Napster (v1).
I also think it depends on what you want from video games as to whether you find them stale or not. While you and I might find the current crop of movie tie-ins and franchise sequels less than inspiring, Film and Television Studies has long proposed an alternative mode of spectatorship which does not seek pleasures in newness, novelty or narrative resolution (Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, 1994; Gunning, "Early Film, its spectator and the avant-garde", Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, 1990).
There are two comments from Brian Eno which also come to mind.
"I [am] more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this 'scenius' - it means 'the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene'. It is the communial form of the concept of genius." (Eno, A Year: With Swollen Appendicies, 1996, p354)
"[In] general we know longer feel such a sharp distinction between the culture-maker and the culture consumer. We feel that culture is there for us to use and incorporate into our lives as we wish. We don't feel guilty about using the Fauré Requiem as background while we clean the house, and we don't feel bad wearing jeans with a Versace jacket. We mix and match. We make our own cultural statements.
This has of course effected how culture is being produced: people are starting to make things that implicitly invite 'mixing and matching' instead of presenting us with neatly finished pieces. You can see this breakdown of the singularity of the art-object most spectacularly in the remix movement in popular music. It used to be the case that a record was expected to contain the definitive and perhaps only version of a song, and that the job of the band and the producer was to creat this 'ideal' object. Now this has loosened up a lot. It is very unusual for a song to be realeased in up to 20 different forms - short mixes, long mixes, radio mixes, dance mixes, ambient mixes - and of course it can't be very long before we are routinely faced with the awesomely tedious prospect of having to mix everything ourselves at home, the artist just selling us a CD-Rom [sic] 'kit of parts' which you then assemble." (Eno, A Year: With Swollen Appendicies, 1996, p402)
Ron's point about the customizability of technologies is well taken in that regard. How much freedom do we really have in using today’s technological tools? Yes, they evolve, thanks to market research, with the assumed needs and expressed desires of the user. At the same time, people’s needs and desires evolve with changes in the technological landscape that may well be determined by other motives, such as profit making. Compared with the technology of the past, customizability has changed quite dramatically. For the majority of today’s users, technological tools have become black boxes that at best offer them a limited menu of choices for alternative configurations. With the exception of the hacker community and open source software (typically not marketed on commercial products) most people will not be able to take their iPod or cell phone apart (either physically or in terms of its software) and rebuild it THEIR way. This limit to customizability – not so different from the culinary culture of fast-food restaurants and other instances of comoditization in our society – may well be a factor of influence on how we evolve increasingly to being satisfied with choosing from limited menus rather than feeling inspired to cook our own meals. Instead, if we want it different, we have to send someone back to the kitchen in Cupertino to do it for us.