extensions

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday night, I came home and put on the DVR, expecting to watch LOST. To my dismay, the recorder, for whatever reason (damn computers…), decided not to record it that night. So I thought I would try watching the free, streaming version off ABC’s web site the following night.

Not fun.

Before my complaining, though, it’s worth discussing a bit about how we use media. Television is one-way — we sit back on the couch, and we soak it in. The Internet is interactive — we proactively click on things to make other things happen. Dan Harries, in an essay titled “Watching the Internet” from his 2002 The New Media Book, summarizes these two somewhat opposing media practices, and calls for something new:

…one of the central modes encouraged by the internet is that of ‘viewing’, literally the online viewing of movies in a manner that loosely emulates the viewing of films in the cinema…A second mode is that of ‘using’ new media with users following more ‘computer oriented’ activities, such as exploring hyperlinked Web pages or playing online games…Yet what happens when both of these modes are integrated in a manner where the using affects the viewing, and vice versa?…I call this third emerging mode of spectatorship ‘viewsing’ — the experiencing of media in a manner that effectively integrates the activities of both viewing and using…

Viewsing is something like what MIT’s Henry Jenkins calls “convergence.” It’s the new form of participatory media we see emerging all over.

Now, getting back to LOST. The series certainly has strong viewsing elements to it — the fans are completely engaged, and the producers are not only aware of this, but use their fans’ feedback, incorporating it into the narrative. (Season Three’s “Expose” episode, for example, where Nikki and Paolo were killed off, was largely a gift to the fans, who never warmed up to those characters.)

But the experience of watching LOST online was terrible, because it incorporated the worst elements of “using” and “viewing” the web. The HD-quality stream looks great, and, connected to the home theater system, provides a terrific “viewing” experience. We dimmed the lights, sat back on the couch, and soaked it in. Until…

The commercials. Which are fine; we’re all used to that (although watching LOST on a DVR allows you to roll past them). But you’re not just required to watch the commercials — you physically have to click on the “continue” link on the web page to see the rest of the show. And this happens several (five or six?) times throughout the episode.

So much for sitting back on the couch and watching in HD.

Obviously, the producers assume most people watching are doing so at a desk, or on a laptop. But with Apple TV, and other web/video delivery mechanisms that continue to push media onto our 36″+ HD screens, watching the Internet becomes an increasingly passive experience — more “viewing” than “using.”

Until media producers figure that out, I’m hoping my DVR doesn’t forget to record LOST anymore…

On Friday, I presented my paper, entitled “Virtual Memory: The Blog as Technological Prosthetic,” at the NSSR Interdisciplinary Memory Studies conference. It went very well overall, but the most difficult part of presenting a paper is the Q&A that follows. I think I did OK, but, now that 48 or so hours have passed, I think I have much better answers to the questions I received.

First, I was asked about the materiality/immateriality of the blog; that is, it’s in cyberspace, and “not-there,” yet there is a physical component to it all (servers, network connectivity), and it is really “memory” when we’re so often disconnected to the net?

It’s a great point. I think that bloggers, given they are constantly blogging, are perhaps more connected than others throughout the day. But there is also an asynchronicity to blog conversations — bloggers can carry on, indifferent to time in this sense. One person speaks, and the replies may come back in a few minutes, or in a few days. Within the subjectivity of the blogger, within these asynchronous conversations, memory is available when needed.

There are also other forms of social media — Twitter comes to mind — that perhaps approach real-time and connectedness more than the blog. Because Twitter, for example, works across platforms, including cell phones, the “tweets” that take place are much more accessible, and take place more in “real life.” Unlike the blog, though, Twitter provides little to no memory, as the tweets aren’t stored in a database, and, in this respect, look more like the ephemerality of primary oral cultures.

The next question was whether I wasn’t really talking about an “archive,” rather than “memory.” I think here, we need to question further the nature of an “archive.” First, to me, an archive is something distant — the stacks in the local library. As the time and distance decreases between “I need to remember something” and “here’s the answer” — that is, as we’re able to google our answers as we need them, I think the notion of “archive” begins to wane. Google Books, for example, is an effort to essentially digitize every book — this, I think, changes the meaning of archive. Increasingly, as we search google for, say, Deleuze, we turn up the actual words of Deleuze (his books), rather than the words of other people talking about Deleuze.

At some point, as things can be instantaneously recalled, as we become continually closer to our technology, doesn’t the divide between memory and archive simply cease to exist?

I also think an archive is something fixed. Again, the stacks of books. And yet, the kinds of memory we’re building in a digital age — wikipedia, for example, is hardly fixed. Digital archives/encyclopedias/memories can be updated, and changed. Fixity is lost.

Finally, with respect to the blogger, the memories stored in the database are actually often retrieved and actively “used.” This is because the hypertextual nature of blogging requires an active use of memory — bloggers are extremely self-referential. So, for example, if I want to comment on something I said last week on the blog, my comment will include a link back to that previous post. The form and style of blog culture is heavily reliant on memory, heavily reliant on the ability to find prior blog posts and prior blog comments. In the subjectivity of the blogger, the constant use of the database is something more “active,” something much “closer at hand,” than the term “archive” implies.

But, um, yeah…should have thought of all this when the questions were asked. Not 48 hours later…