Some Thoughts on Changing Media

On the weekend I met two former Australian lecturers of mine – Jason Nelson and Ben (whose last name neither Parker nor I can remember) – when the conversation turned to the demise of newspapers. Ben's argument was that they probably would stay around, after all we're still listening to the radio. Something about that argument felt wrong, even though at that moment I couldn't articulate it. Thinking about it more, I realised that this view is very ahistoric. When radio started, people would schedule their lives around it. They would wait for a certain programme to be broadcasted to gather the whole family around it and consciously absorb what the wireless had to say.

Then television arrived and took over exactly that role. Now people were staying at home to watch evening shows and sometimes were even attired to underline the specialness of the moment. It was like going to the theatre, only in one's own home.

Radio couldn't compete with that. Instead it started to serve a different purpose: It served as background noise, something that tootles along while you're in the office or driving to work. No one scheduled his life around the broadcast schedule anymore, instead the interchangeable format radio became the norm. "Five songs in a row with no ads or talking!" That function is certainly different to the one of the printed press whose products you'd have to consciously read in order to make meaning of them.

As Parker pointed out this doesn't mean that media is dying, it's just changing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, even though traditional media certainly serves its purposes; e.g. it helps to bring important developments to the conscience of the public by helping to spread them. It's a catalyst. Without you never might have noticed that Facebook changed it terms of use – not everyone is reading tech blogs after all.

Then again this isn't a process that couldn't be democratised with the help of internet, the best examples being sites like digg or reddit. Here the users decide which information enters the front page which in turn acts like a catalyst again (just like sites iliketotallyloveit.com serve as means of democratisation of something as elitist as 'style')

These 'democratic catalysts' certainly aren't without problems. Power users might dominate which content gets voted for, fads become more important than news and a net-savvy, educated elite could dominate the political discourse and use these sites like an echo-chamber.

But the same could be said of newspapers: They certainly aren't free of interest but rely heavily on advertising; human interest matters more than serious reporting; again an educated elite perpetuates world views (otherwise there wouldn't be conservative and liberal papers) Which begs the question: Why not have 'democratic catalysts' of different political nature? The certainly is room for a conservative counterpart to reddit.

-Jens

The Future of Digital Memories

Now that I moved to Berlin I pretty much come across art at every corner. Although digital art isn't really that publicly present. And it is difficult to sustain this art due to rapidly changing technologies. Of course this is a problem of all digital media. Photos for example, the collective memory of generations, tend to be more and more digitalized with no-one knowing whether the formats will still exist in 100 or even 50 years (on the other hand the redundancy of pictures is also increasing, e.g. whenever I shot photos of a party I send them to my friends or upload them on Facebook). This issue gets even more problematic with digital games. Here the main problem is the ever changing hardware. Since the first games we saw dozens of different platforms games could be played on (and do you know where your first console went?).

But then there are still emulators, programmed by enthusiastic individuals (and not by game libraries), but also here several problems evolve. First of all in most cases it's illegal to play games with the help of these programs (unless you own them of course) and we don't experience these games as we have experienced them in the past since we don‘t play them on the original hardware and without the old input devices.

Since it‘s the destiny of every hardware to cash in the chips one day (no pun intended) and we don‘t have any retro specialists who are able to copy whole chips we are very likely to lose something very interesting. But as problematic as emulators are – at least they keep something of the game alive; artifacts of a culture which carry ideas and world views, which get lost just like old movies. Movies which couldn‘t be archived and will never be seen again.

Which made me wonder: Wouldn't one way to preserve digital art be to allow it to run on console hardware? Maybe the console makers could open up some art corner, a (peerreviewed?) museum in the Playstation "Home", a (peer-reviewed?) arts channel on Xbox Live (maybe XNA offers really interesting opportunities in that it turns out to be a viable toolkit for digital artists). And then in 15 years you not only download Bioshock to play on your Xbox 360 emulator, but also the incomparable weird and thought challenging art of my friend Jason Nelson – at a point when the PC based software of that time is long outdated and nowhere to be found, respectively incapable of working on any modern computer. Not an ideal solution though, considering that digital art often also involves unusual forms of input and that converting a PC based program to a console format is involving (especially without development kits). So the console makers would have to play along, but the question is in how far they want to contribute to future emulation now that the commercial interests for retro software grows strongly.

All in all: A step in the right direction– on a path littered with the stones of commercial imperatives.

-Jens