Media-fiction [?]
Science-fiction has always provided society with a healthy dose of fresh ideas that at times proved to be more than just inspiration for “real life” science. Perhaps one of the most notorious sci-fi writers in recent times has been Philip K. Dick, who passed away over 20 years ago and yet his ideas are now more relevant than ever. Cinematic fame can be one way to prove Dick’s relevance, a handful of his books have been recently adapted to big Hollywood titles such as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “Paycheck,” and, most recently, “Scanner Darkly.”
A 2004 article at The Economist attempts to explain Hollywood’s fascination with Dick’s ideas: “...why is a strange, drugged-out and paranoid bygone of such interest to modern-day filmmakers? Partly because today's revolution in the biosciences, in particular in neuroscience, makes the questions he was asking particularly relevant. What is real if we can take drugs that alter our moods, or if we can tinker with our own memories? These issues were the flesh and bones of Dick's books, all those years ago.”
Take a closer look at the context of his stories and you will also find a media environment that more or less depicts the multi-screen, information-saturated, ubiquitous present day media world. This is an environment that is somehow familiar in most science-fiction; it seems that there has always been consensus with the fact that we are media and that media will outpace our own evolution exponentially.
A harder endeavor is to add details, imagine a system, the media architecture of the future, more than just the media environment that provides context to the storyline. This has been recently tackled by a new generation of artists that are part of the modern media-savvy society (in which the producer-consumer barrier is long gone) with the ability to predict with more precision the possibilities of futuristic media engineering.
The perfect example is the web-based comic Shooting War, which we reviewed in a previous post almost one month ago. The story is set in 2011, which is not far way in absolute time but certainly distant in “technology years.” This dichotomy makes the vision of this story very interesting, we can almost grasp the future; it is credible and incredible at the same time.
It is surprising how little attention has been devoted to the media environment of Shooting War. Well, it is true that media is essential to the plot and that the story itself takes a hard look at the current media establishment. However, the media architecture itself has been almost overlooked and we find this area particularly interesting because it shows an evolution of digital media in which the web, TV, wireless technology, and evolved video cameras merge to become a seamless experience.
Here is how it works: in 2011 video-blogging (vlogging) is as popular as ever, probably even more so than traditional blogs, WiMAX (wireless internet everywhere) is standard in all major cities, a new generation of digital cameras can stream video directly to any url (vlog) through an easy-to-use interface, a couple of big news networks still command the larger portion of a fractured audience, these networks use a human/software process to constantly monitor the vlogosphere, uploading any signal straight to the network as needed. This provides corporate TV with an almost unlimited source of content in about every subject possible, which can be distributed in any screen imaginable. The system benefits from our collective intelligence in the most literal sense.
Media convergence as opposed to substitution. This doesn't necessarily translate into any improvement for network TV as it is clearly reflected in the story itself. Shooting War contributes with our understanding of modern communication systems by imagining and delineating a complex media environment with outstanding simplicity.
Click on the images below to see our own explanation of the key players in this possible future.
The New Samsung Camera
Vlogging Camera Display
The Network