Buy Ye Not Betamax

7/27/2019 Buy Ye Not Betamax

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IntangibleMedia:Atemporality and Digitization

Buy ye not Betamax-- Good Omens

Theres more than enjoyment attached to entertainment media today. We dont watch

movies or browse the Internet to find happiness, only to kill time. We carry the mediaaround with us in our minds. We use screens and computers to access original content,but where it really exists is in our memory. Screens are becoming more diverse: bothbigger and smaller. Screens are also disappearing: into consciousness, perception, andculture. The media are an intangible part of the world, and the world becomesirreconcilably mediated as an effect.

When my computer breaks down I become restless, helpless. The last time it happenedI paced, tried to read but couldnt concentrate. What I wanted to do was Google, watchsome videos on Youtube, check my email: all that locked inside the dead laptop. I was

bereft.

I had some old 8mm reels in my trunk, so I pulled them out and started scanning. Atactile entertainment, an active engagement with the physical media: such contact ismissing in digital media. Its true that I had a digital transfer of that same 8mm reel.Looking at each of them side by side, its immediately apparent that the divide betweencelluloid and digital media is one based in tangibility.

The film reel is tangible, visible,immediately interactive in the sense thatyou can cut the film to edit, and invarious senses transparent.

The miniDV tape is fixed in its form,requires a separate media in order toaccess, and the content that it containsis compressed, digitized, in atechnological manner so as to separatethe human from her creation.

Digitization of analog material turns a solid material into a series of digits made of code,changing the meaning and composition of the material but not the appearance. The

content stays the same, but the core of our cultural artifacts have changed. For

example, Googles book project has made a storehouse of knowledge available at thepress of a button; ebooks and PDFs, accessed via a computer, changes the way weinteract with print material (see Nicholas Carr).

Many of Jean Baudrillards writings have extended the claim that people desire to live inthe space mediated by the image. But is this statement lasting?

Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and that of


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projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, areimages without a negative and hence without negativity and without reference.They are virtualand the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to allreference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of images,engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself

becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering producesinformation as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image?1

Baudrillard goes on to explain how digital media dry out the relationship of the image tothe thing, the symbol to the act. He calls the screen an "empty space of representation,""the non-site of the event," "the virtual space of the event" and the location of the eventthat was represented: "the street itself becomes a virtual space." User generated cultureevaporates the imaginary divide between amateur producers (who were once the inertsubjects of the media) and the digital image. Digital culture is the world we live in, thespace as well as the mindset.

What we are seeing more and more of these days is a disappearance of screens.Monitors turn into projection displays. Peripheral devices disappear in the wake of thegestural interface. The computer becomes easier to interact with, and more connected

to our physical reality without a solid, specific interface. If the screen marks theseparation of the image from reality, what happens when the representation and theobject hold similar, if not equal, weight in the corporal world?

We carry around all this prosthetic memory: images from the past, recollections ofevents that may or may not be from a movie, someone elses anecdote that youremember as your own. The dream is as real as you remember it. So is the movie. The

digital media are as real as our culture makes it out to be; and the more you watch, themore of it you remember, the more it becomes you.

Information as catastrophe, wrote Baudrillard. The web explodes with so muchinformation, to the point where cognition breaks apart: a scattered, ADD, schizophrenicattitude. You need to suck it all in at once, hold your breath, and allow for it to compress,into one single whole, in order to make any sense of it. This simple process leads tomisinformation on one end and learning disabilities on the other. When the informationfolds in on itself, it loses meaning and requires a revisionist attitude that the informationexplosion breeds.

If you cant find it on Google, it doesnt exist. The ironic effect of the Internet/the Web isthat while the intent is to expand our reach, it inevitably makes its users moreincapsulated in their own virtual reality. The Internet hides its infrastructure from usersso that the everyday browser doesnt have an understanding of the relationship betweentheir operations on their PC with the vast infrastructure that supports the Internet: fiberoptic cables, data farms, electricity, and servers

1Jean Baudrillad, The Illusion of the End, 55.


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Mobile and wireless technologies further mystify the process. WiFi, for example, is aninvisible technology. We know that it works, but not necessarily how. Users may have arecognition of the router and the card in their computer that connect over the air, butcertainly that recognition is not made apparent in everyday use due to its very

invisibility. UbiComp, the next generation of computing, carries with it this sameinvisibility. Ubiquitous computing, in the 4G network, enables users to connect to thenetwork anywhere and any time. If you can have anything at any time, the weight of

information lessens; continuous connectivity to the Internet filters in to a weakening ofthe perception of the Internet so that it comes to equal Reality. This is entirely a productof a consumer society that is conditioned to the supply and demand way of existence.When its readily available, the value of the product decreaces. Virtual reality and socialreality (the physical kind) become equal. Finally, with the advent of microblogging,media and culture became too fast for one to be able to recognize the temporality.

Augmented reality map application nearest tube http://www.cnx-software.com/wp-

content/uploads/2010/12/augmented_reality_map_application_nearest_tube.jpg

When you look at a thing, whether natural or not, you perceive it in the paradigm ofdesign. A natural thing is no longer itself but a culturally constructed object that hasbeen modified by technology: language, media, electricity, and code. it is remarkably

difficult if not impossible to set oneself apart from contemporary technology, even in anunmediated environment (Zengotita, Debord).A pixilated frame.


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and making it new again. User-generated content is full of references built uponreferences, and the link to the original is lost. On Wikipedia, reference links are brokenand citations are second-hand sources. Web 2.0, net culture, is a sphere of repetitionand re-fabrication, everything interlocked and self-referential. Only thing is, whos to tellwhat came first?

Baudrillards inventive and inspired use of Borges forking paths became a clich longago. For one thing, Im in love with clichs. Secondly, the map preceded the territory is

a transcendental statement. Its true. Its a shame that anyone shies away from clichs,especially one as good as this, so I am breaking from tradition here. The map is nolonger ink on paper. We hold maps in our hands all the time, but we dont think of themas maps; we call them 4Gs or droids or iPhones. Its incredible the power we have atour fingertips (Im speaking generally here because I want to be one of you, but sadlydont yet own a smartphone). You can interact to a higher degree with your environmentby seeing the world through your phone. Im thinking specifically of augmented city

guides and maps.

Before the printing press there was the palimpsest. the approach to history, and in away the approach to objective truth, on a global, cultural and social level, were different

in ages dominated by these two writing technologies. The palimpsest connotes anawareness of time like sand dunes. The truth of history gets blown away with every turnof the page and every erasure and scribble. History exists in the minds of the re-presenters, the writers, those who are congealing events and making truth intoknowledge. With the printing press, history received the gift of concretion. Truth in a waybecame fixed, that is if you could read Latin.

In sixth grade, I bought a package of pencils at a book fair. As they wore down, thesharpener making mincemeat out of the compressed wood and graphite, layers of paintunderneath started to wear through as well. Beneath the sparkling silver metallic outerlayer was mickey mouse. These were secondhand pencils. I guessed last year theDisney theme hadnt sold, so they had taken a different tactic. The idea of a hiddenlayer beneath has haunted me ever since. I grew up in the heyday of analog video andVHS, and I remember when I was younger I had nightmares that the video was erasingand that there were layers, worlds, unexplored images beneath the broadcast. I playedwith the VCR compulsively, broke a few in fact, by thumbing the cassette upward whilein the carriage so that the TV would show up snow and interference. Sometimes it was

to see if there was anything underneath, sometimes just to annoy the parents.

Just as cause and effect is a logical fallacy, your eyes deceive you when you see thelight bulb turn on from the light switch: the fictionalizationmythologizationofexperience through technology. Do we really understand what technology is, and how iteffects our basic everyday operations? We canfunction on two levels, but theintellectual cogitation of *knowing* that there's an electric infrastructure in place and*acting* by making coffee when the power is out tells us that there's a gap there.


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because electricity is intangible. Just like the difference between a celluloid and HD: it'stough to tell the difference.

The same way that we generally neglect electric infrastructure (like when you try tomake coffee when the power's out, it's become instinct to believe that the electric in your

house is a part of the house, inert, rather than connected to a national grid and that gridis fallible), we neglect the difference between a real book and an eText.

Tom Standage, in his Victorian Internet, relays the story of a woman trying to send soupto the men on the war front. She was told that you can send the messages over thewires. Early telegraph messengers found it occasionally difficult to describe exactlywhat they were doing in their office. Dont laugh. We experience similar disjunctionsnowadays. The other day, the power went out. Someone went to make coffee and hadto take a moment to recognize why the pot wasnt simmering. No power: no coffee.Invisible infrastructures confuse. We have expectations, too. Sometimes the two dont

jell. The use of old terms to describe the way that the telegraph, a new technology,

worked created a lot of confusion. People make up stories about intangible technologyin order to make sense of the world. We believe the hoax because it's easier to bearthan the reality.

The fake and the 'real': what's the difference? When you think about art forgery, whatcomes to mind is the forgers' flying in the face of an artistic and historical institution, notto mention the destruction of a cultural belief - that the artist who had been claimed asthe author is not who he was presented to be. We have faith in a universe that presentsreal objects as culturally and historically sound. When a forgery is discovered as a fakewe feel that something has been stolen from us, our history, from our very faculty of

sight. But what if these forgeries were never uncovered? What would you say if i toldyou that every painting hanging on the walls of some venerable museum was a forgery?Something has been stolen. Someone like Emile de Hory could have stolen our historyout from under our very noses.

But today, when we talk about originality and truth, there is not so much a differencebetween the real painting and the forgery. We have too much history behind us and toomany experts. Today when something is true it is only either the expert opinion or thecultural consensus (popular?) that says so. History lies.

Star Trekis an historical document of equal value to the Declaration of Independence.

The argument put forth in the popular film Galaxy Questshould not be taken lightly;Given a level playing field, and accepting the suspension of disbelief, creativity in theproduction of cultural artifacts disintegrates the truth value of both. Truth and fiction bearequal weight in a postmodern digital universe.

We write the history of our own past from the perspective of today while taking artisticlicense. Turnbulls Signing of the Declaration of Independence presents its own truth of


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the event, and hanging in the venerable position in the halls of Senate, do we believethe representation? Even historical pictures tell lies. There can never be an Americanhistory, (John Adams, HBO). The same injustice is performed when burning historicalrecords to rewrite your present as the past (Orwell, 1984). Such crimes happeneveryday.

Screenshots from Apples 1984 commercial.

The media make time travel possible in a very real way, and today we experiencetemporality in a very surreal manner. Just as we can witness the second presidents firstglimpse of that portrait that would become famous one day, or how we can see thefuture in films like Blade Runner and Total Recall, we also make the future and the pastreal through the media. For example, Apple relied heavily upon Orwells vision of 1984in its inaugural campaign ironically in that same year. We can look back on the artifact

today and see how well it rings true in an oddly self-reflexive way (iPads lock their

material inside so we cant change it. We have no control. The isight watches us). The

difference between the fiction and the historical (or future) reality has less and lessrelevance.

Taking from Lev Manovich (there is only software) as well as from his contemporaryFriedrich Kittler (there is only hardware), there is no digital media without hardware andsoftware. The content of our cultural material is locked inside both technological entities.

In the manner of Orwell, I like to imagine what the world will look like in 50 or so years.

Given that many technologies we use today will die out, some as quickly as Betamax or8 tracks, how much of our cultural material is lost because of its digital intangibility? Andhow much of it will be retained because of its popular status, either in the popular mindor stored inside transmedia devices? What will our descendents think of us? I have thesinking suspicion that our way of life is finite, that we will be misunderstood, like thearmy wife with her pot of soup in the telegraphers office. And a century from now thisworld will be irrevocably changed by digital technology in a way that makes natural lifeindistinguishable from artificiality. Such progress is slow, and for that very reason just asintangible as the media we rely upon to hold our cultural consciousness.


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Bibliography:

Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. "A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations.New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Print.

Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York:W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.

De Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way YouLive in It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. Print.

Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens. New York: Ace, 1996. Print.

Galaxy Quest. Dir. Dean Parisot. Perf. Tim Allen, Allen Rickman, and Sigourney

Weaver. Dreamworks, 1999. DVD.

Hooper, Tom, dir. "Unnecessary War." John Adams. HBO. 13 Apr. 2008. Television.

Kittler, Friedrich. "There Is No Software" CTheory.net. Oct. 1995. Web. 09 May 2011..

Landsberg, A. "Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner." Body & Society1.3-4 (1995): 175-89. Print.

Manovich, Lev. "There Is Only Software" Software Studies. Apr. 2011. Web. 09 May2011. .

Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet. New York: Walker, 2007. Print.

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Buy Ye Not Betamax