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…

I’m watching with interest, as well as participating in, Bryant Park Project’s fun little experiment with Twitter. Or, as they call it: the twitter-lution.

Others have written about the potential here, as old media (no offense, NPR radio people…) mixes with new. What’s most interesting to me is to see how it’s actually playing out, how both the folks at BPP and the fans are all trying to get a sense of this interesting community of real-time, 140-characters-or-less virtual beings in cyberspace. The somewhat inevitable cocktail party metaphor has been used, and as well the somewhat more intriguing “coffee at the local diner.” The latter, in fact, was the inspiration for BPPDiner, a Twitter account that scoops up any and all tweets containing the expression “bpp” — a neat way, once you’re following the account, to find other BPP fans who are talking about the show.

For those folks who still don’t get it, if the cocktail party and diner metaphors just aren’t enough, the most insightful description of Twitter I’ve come across is in Wired, in this post by Clive Thompson, who finds all this tweeting something much more experiential and sensory-driven than anything else:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

He calls this a “social sixth sense,” and I think that’s exactly right. Once you begin to use Twitter, and find a few interesting people to follow, you really do get a sense of “knowing,” at least to the extent you can know someone else you only know virtually.

This, therefore, leads us away from the web as something textual, to something more like what Erik Davis described in the late 1990s as “acoustic cyberspace.” A kind of “space” that’s much more immersive, much more experiential, at least as much “body” as it is “mind.”

And it’s this acoustic space that’s created with Twitter, as conversations happen in real-time (perhaps the cocktail party metaphor is entirely appropriate?), that makes this particular space “oral,” just as much as it is written. And this orality, in turn, brings people together, and creates exactly the kind of community that BPP’s twitter-lutionary experiment is creating within their audience.

What I like about Lev Manovich is how he forces us to realize that however new we might think our Brave New Digital World is, much of it is rooted in older media paradigms and sensibilities.

His essay, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography“, seems so familiar. That’s because it's all in “The Language of New Media,” although it's split into two different sections in the book.

In the essay, he makes a big mistake regarding lossy compression — that “each time a compressed file is save, more information is lost” is completely incorrect. He must have noticed , because that statement did not make it in the book. More importantly, it doesn't even matter, because, the way people use digital files, it's compressed once, and then (perfect) copies of that file are passed around. No one re-compresses a file before sharing it.

But the more important points of the essay hold true. Photography has never been only about realism, and his example of advertising is on point. Much of advertising is about fantasy, and no one mistakes that for real life. More importantly, what Manovich is saying is that there is no “photography” — there is no single conception of it. It's not only “realism,” and it's not only a lie. There was never “normal photography”:

Straight photography has always represented just one tradition of photography; it always coexisted with equally popular traditions where a photographic image was openly manipulated and was read as such. Equally, there never existed a single dominant way of reading photography; depending on the context the viewer could (and continue to) read photographs as representations of concrete events, or as illustrations which do not claim to correspond to events which have occurred.

He also discusses the issue of representation and the real, but with a twist:

For what is faked is, of course, not reality but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics has (almost) achieved is not realism, but only photorealism — the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image.[16] …And the reason we think that computer graphics has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, has come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.

Maybe the “truth” photography represents isn't “truth,” but only the lens's version of truth. We've been changed, bodily, by seeing through the camera. Here's Susan Sontag, from “On Photography”:

Cameras did not simply make is possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotograpy and teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing's sake. (93)

McLuhan, of course, also has much to say on this matter, as cameras are, for him, an extension of the visual sense, an extension of the eye.

Which returns me to Manovich, where I think he's at his most provocative. The perfectness of the computer image becomes the perfectness of vision:

The synthetic image is free of the limitations of both human and camera vision. It can have unlimited resolution and an unlimited level of detail. It is free of the depth-of-field effect, this inevitable consequence of the lens, so everything is in focus. It is also free of grain — the layer of noise created by film stock and by human perception. Its colors are more saturated and its sharp lines follow the economy of geometry. From the point of view of human vision it is hyperreal. And yet, it is completely realistic. It is simply a result of a different, more perfect than human, vision.

Whose vision is it? It is the vision of a cyborg or a computer; a vision of Robocop and of an automatic missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid.

If photography really has the ability to change our vision, if technology is an extension of our senses, then I think Manovich is undoubtedly correct. Computer vision is human vision of the future.

Our dependence on machines, now an interdependence, really, points us in that direction.

Today, Amazon opened its music service. The motto seems to be: “MP3s, but less expensive than Apple!” Not every music label has signed on, but taking a look at their top 25 or so albums, the list seems pretty good. Radiohead, Ryan Adams, Kanye West, and Feist — all nice stuff.

The real question is, will they move anyone off the convenience of iTunes, with a link to the music store in the same place as all their music? DRM-free music is important, but is it enough to sway the masses?

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, remarks that “old media never die.” Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, has this to say on the matter:

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Manuscript culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called “scholasticism” at its higher levels; but by putting the same text in front of any given number of students or readers print ended the scholastic regime of oral disputation very quickly. Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate.

Of course, McLuhan was speaking to medium theory’s zoomed out, larger perspective, the “break boundaries” in society that move us from media paradigm to media paradigm. Jenkins’s point is zoomed in: the move from 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs is much smaller in scale.

But perhaps the question today should be posed differently? In the age of participatory culture, it’s not that media is being replaced as it is media being confused: mashed up and remixed, to the point that we don’t know what to make of it. A recent example is “Quarterlife,” a new series debuting on MySpace:

Hollywood has been dipping its toe in original online content. Two seasoned producers are about to take a full plunge.

‘); } //–> Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick — who have made films like “Blood Diamond” and “The Last Samurai” and whose ABC series “Thirtysomething” helped to define television drama in the 1980s — have made a deal with MySpace, the online social network owned by the News Corporation, to produce an original Web series called “Quarterlife.”

Mr. Herskovitz described “Quarterlife” as a regular television series, made by network-caliber writers, directors and production crews…A day after their original MySpace posting, the episodes will be available on quarterlife.com. A week later, they will be generally available on the Web. And, if all goes as planned, they will eventually find their way onto conventional television screens.

What’s becoming apparent is that our need (is “desire” a better word?) to categorize media — this is television, this is Internet — is quickly becoming irrelevant. These boxed-in descriptions of media no longer work, no longer apply. Is Quarterlife television? Online? Both? Neither?

From our vantage point, the impact is not that clear. There’s certainly something happening, some sort of societal change is taking place; whether it’s of the same magnitude as print displacing our memory, as McLuhan notes, I’m not sure…

Spaces such as YouTube and MySpace are essential parts of our participatory culture, and yet Quarterlife is an overt attempt to co-opt some of new media’s democratizing potential. That’s why I’m not so sure — it seems like a power struggle at this point, and it’s not clear who will win.

Quarterlife is simply, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

It reads like a pre-i-bubble-burst marketing sheet:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans.

…Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device’s central innovation lies — in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer…The device also has a keyboard, so its users can take notes when reading or navigate the Web to look something up. A scroll wheel and a progress indicator next to the main screen, will help users navigate Web pages and texts on the device.

As the Times article points out, the new e-book offering from Amazon may end up like the host of dot-com failures that came before them. For while the pitch is persuasive — “Digital readers are not a replacement for a print book; they are a replacement for a stack of print books” — yeah, yeah…we’ve heard it all before.

People like books. People like the tactile quality, dog-earing the pages, marking up the sides. People like a book’s transportability, so you can read them on a beach, or on the roof deck. Or, yes, crass as it is, on the toilet. Books on a bookshelf, are, in a way, art; they look cool. They’re certainly also an expression of who we are, and what’s in our brains.

And if you lose it, oh well, it’s a book. $14.95, not the $400 to $500 Amazon plans on charging for their new Kindle.

Now, if the thing allows me to vote on American Idol…they may have something!