London-based musician, writer and curator David Toop compiled a series of ten “field recording” tracks titled Soundscape available with the July/September issue of UOVO Magazine. Thanks to matching articles in the magazine those of us with no previous contact with the field are able to truly dive into what Toop describes as “the significance of sound and silence in human society.”
After digesting the essay that serves as introduction to the reading, it is quite easy to appreciate the importance of this emerging medium in the context of the environmentalist struggle. In the words of its author, the (unofficial) sample offered above aims to examine “the close relationship between an environment and its soundscape,” as “part of a larger project entitled Sounds from Dangerous Places,” defining dangerous in terms of ecological devastation.
Peter Cusack drills on the scope of Sounds from Dangerous Places by asking, among other questions, “what insights can sound offer into the environmental, social and political contexts of a ‘dangerous place’?” As someone who grew up in an oil rich nation I can’t avoid to go back in time when listening to Cusack’s piece, reflecting on the muted sounds of possibility that were overpowered by the 24/7 cacophony of mind-numbing progress.
Monocle suggests that the new W. Terrence Gordon’s book about McLuhan should probably be a podcast. The idea comes in a straightforward McLuhanesque manner, ready to provoke reactions and even infuriate some probably resulting in more attention to the book itself, which is a good thing.
The beginning of the book drills on McLuhan’s idea of technology as catalyst for the development of new environments that both transform and contain their predecessors. The spatial metaphor to “express the idea of the medium as a message,” comes handy at a time when our understanding of the evolution of media has been obsessively focused on our own narrow definition of “mass media communications:” For example, we dwell on the question of whether or not newspapers will survive the internet while ignoring bigger questions related to the environment created by networked digital devices, which include citizens and their thought process as well as institutions, etc.
Daniel Henninger provides an excellent example in his WSJ column: “If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorsteps of a Marshall-meets-Milton world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren’t the only empires at risk. Public school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents… ‘accessing’ K-8 education in unforeseen ways.”
Probably one of the most important contributions from McLuhan to our modern world can be found in “the broad sense of medium” that he envisioned a few decades ago, and which allows us to see media as extension of ourselves and therefore everywhere as environmental happenings that are produced by people but hardly controlled by anyone but the environment that they create. Understanding the environment as opposed to the more traditional concept of the medium is essential to truly see what's going on today in our very real "information
megalopolis."
Like most books in today's environment, Everyman's McLuhan is not confined to its physical form...
It is not surprising that dinner theater as a media form is being brought to life again in the midst of a digital explosion and after a few decades of notable absence in the cultural scene. A Wikipedia post gives credit to Chauncey O'Neil, “who began staging his own shows in his loft apartment on the north side of Williamsburg in 1999,” for sparking a revival of this art form so compatible with today’s media consumption behavior.
The modern audience, accustomed to constant and oftentimes intense interaction with digital media is naturally trained to deal with what Lev Manovich defines as a constant alternation between “concentration and detachment” as a product of the “continuous presence of the communication channel in the message.” Linear analogue media, such as TV or cinema involve the audience in the experience with little or no awareness of the medium itself, which can be contrasted with the digital experience of constant swinging between the technology [e.g. a website loading] and the message [e.g. the actual site], which is precisely what happens when experiencing dinner theater with its inherent interactivity [e.g. with waitstaff] and intense sensory stimulation [e.g. food and alcohol].
Manovich writes about “illusion, narrative, and interactivity” in the context of digital media in a way that can very well apply to the dinner theater experience: “The subject is forced to oscillate between the roles of viewer and user, shifting between perceiving and acting, between following the story and actively participating in it.” We do this every time we use digital media, the level of intensity varies with the purpose and context but the principle remains, which is why dinner theater might be set to make a come back, re-energized by artists and audiences that are naturally prepared to make the most of it.
Last week we had the pleasure of experiencing a “radical reworking” of this genre thanks Williamsburg’s performance/dining space Monkey Town, which joined forces with Accidental Movement and Mogollon to execute their vision of dinner theater designed to exalt and at points even overwhelm the senses via a combination of performance, music, video, blind menu tasting, and a choreographed selection of cocktails and wine.
Such a complex endeavor faces a critical challenge in the many decisions that must be made to prioritize the elements that are part of the piece. Prioritization becomes an art on its own, allowing performers to swing between being the center of attention, directors [of the audience], and part of a bigger whole. Unlike most forms of multimedia theater in which video competes with humans (to always lose amid noise and confusion), OutMigration achieved a balance that resulted in a progressive sensation of drunkenness, tickling, and happiness.
Let’s hope that these folks reunite in the future to keep evolving dinner theater as perfect entertainment for today’s hypermediated crowd.
Starting this week you might have noticed a new category: Mediology. The idea is to reclassify old posts that are somehow related to this method of analysis as well as to stimulate new writing in this area.
Mediology was conceived in the late 90’s by Régis Debray, as “an original mode of coming to knowledge” [as opposed to a doctrine or a science], with the objective of closing the gap between technology [usually lowbrow media forms like TV and cinema] and culture [mostly highbrow forms like art and literature], disintegrating the conception that they operate against each other. In Debray’s own words, “it is time to think them systematically one by the other, one with the other.”
As a method of analysis, Mediology proposes a thought process that systematically correlates a “symbolic corpus [a religion, a doctrine, an artistic genre, a discipline, etc…], a form of collective organization [a church, a party, a school, an academy] and a technical system of communication [recording, storage and trace circulation].” The result is an attempt to make sense of the transformation of media by culture and the transformation of culture by media, understanding media as a system that is composed of technology and the popular culture that evolves around it.
By looking at the modern media landscape through the eyes of the mediologist, we could bump into insights that can potentially help us evolve our skills as media producers and analysts of new manifestations of the digital age such as social media or user generated content, which certainly take the concepts of culture and technology to a whole new level, perhaps forcing us to become mediologists in our own right.
Just to provide a simple, practical example, consider this one grabbed from Régis Debray’s official Mediology site:
“A study of the desire for immortality would be welcome in itself, but it would become mediological only if one endeavors to show how this intimate aspiration changed under the effect of painting, the photograph, cinema, television, in short, with the apparatuses of the collective imaginary.”
Another fascinating trait of this area is rooted in its theoretical background and its aim to understand and modernize the body of knowledge that we have inherited from “the intuitions of great pioneers” like “Walter Benjamin, Valéry, McLuhan, Walter Ong, etc…” in an effort to build a coherent “ecology of culture.”
Debray’s 1999 Le Monde Diplomatique article explaining Mediology is available here courtesy of Georgetown University.
Fast forward to February 2009 and you will experience an all-digital TV environment in the US after more than six decades of analogue broadcasting. When the analogue signal is finally turned off, TV will automatically become a “hot” medium. According to Marshall McLuhan, media can be structured in the “hot” and “cool” buckets depending on their ability to “involve” people. The involvement of people depends mainly on how the technology [not necessarily advanced or otherwise] that enables the medium displays or affect its content. Cinema will always be a hot medium because its technology [film] renders its content in high resolution, allowing for almost no involvement. Analogue TV, on the other hand, is a cool medium because the viewer has to constantly join the dots to digest the content, the low-res nature of TV demands constant closure and that, in McLuhan’s theory, accounts for a high level on involvement.
McLuhan’s Hot and Cool Interview [with Gerald Emanuel Stearn, available here], offers some interesting reflections on this matter in a context not so distant from today’s key issues. After a reflection on the effects [at home] of TV coverage of the Vietnam War, Stearn asks whether shutting down TV would actually end the war, to which McLuhan replies with a statement that deserves further discussion in the light of the upcoming digital TV revamp:
“Oh yes. But there is an alternative: Put hundreds of extra lines on the TV image, set up its visual intensity to a new hot level. This might serve to reverse the whole effect of TV. It might make the TV image photographic, slick, like movies: hot and detached.”
We could translate his point with the assumption that involvement, via a conscious or unconscious effort to [literally] complete the picture, alienates the audience via driving us inward into our own passive universe. This can be contrasted with the effect of hot media, which let us digest the full picture and be critical about it.
In the new era of digital and HDTV there is no need for additional lines, in fact, there are no lines at all, however, the effect [or at least the goal] is still photographic quality, the best resolution possible, a visual representation with an intensity that we haven’t experienced on TV. Whether or not this will have a tangible effect on the impact of the medium in society remains to be seen, almost no “respectable” intellectual believed McLuhan in his time and most people still remain skeptic today. In spite of this, in the past few years we have seen his thinking permeating and being validated by popular culture in unexpected ways, so it doesn’t sound too crazy to take a hard look at our future relationship with TV and its new hot identity.
Officially launched last Friday, the new video blog venture by HBO and AOL, “This Just In” could be considered as yet another milestone in the evolution of the blog as a communications channel in its own right. The fact that blogs use the Internet and mainly computer screens to be consumed is circumstantial, at this point it is clear that the simple and unique structure of this relatively new medium is solidifying on its own and that we can expect it to break free from its technical constrains [the computer screen and even the Web] in the near future.
Blogs could then live in your mobile phone or PDA as a service from your carrier in a closed network, they could also be adopted in the wide array of Video on Demand [VOD] platforms that are rapidly evolving, or live as part of online gaming platforms such as Xbox Live. What is certain is that there is something at the intersection of its main characteristics [informal, to-the-point, multimedia, open for dialogue, among others] that makes this medium highly appealing to the modern producer and consumer of media.
This Just In seems to be one of the first in the corporate blogging scene that understands the mechanics of the medium and that could be poised for instant success. Its main ingredients include excellent content by HBO, aggregation from other video sites [i.e. You Tube], anti-interruption advertising policy, and the usual sharing and dialogue features available at any blog. One post last week received over 180 comments, which can already be considered as a good sign of participation, however, beyond being a potential success metric, the conversation that happened among all those “viewers” feels as real as any dialogue happening in a personal blog, an early indicator that the site is doing something right to engage people and stimulate participation, two essentials in contemporary communications.
For more details about this initiative, check out the Advertising Agearticle announcing its birth.
If Marshall McLuhan was right with his “the medium is the message” theory, then media should be always examined through the lens of semiotics. The science and art of communication, now more than ever, tries to conciliate several layers of meaning, which sometimes come together as a cohesive experience without loosing its discrete parts. The medium can contribute with meaning as much as the message itself, and in the age of media fragmentation, most pieces of communication involve voluntarily or involuntarily more than one channel, which means that the message can be either amplified or distorted depending on how well coordinated are all the parts involved.
“Media” and “Creative” as communication disciplines are merging into a hybrid that can’t differentiate the what from the how, and this is evident when considering recent work in the digital marketing arena crafted by fashion design brand Diesel, which just provided an excellent example that might help us get better at understanding the new dynamics of communication.
Regardless of whether or nor it was a good marketing program, the Heidies could be seen as an experiment which relied on almost every Web 2.0 vehicle on the catalogue, offering an interesting multi-media case study of modern communication. The program consisted on the hijacking of Diesel.com by a group of hipsters that pretended to also hold hostage one of their salesman together with the complete [new] underwear collection, here is their first message:
From the beginning it was apparent that the whole effort was yet another guerrilla initiative by a brand seeking to connect with a specific group of people, in other words that it was advertising. The tone of the communication made clear that they were letting consumers participate in the joke; this probably gave the program a more relaxed character as the intent was to have fun, to let people interact with advertising as opposed to be interrupted by it.
In the process of letting people in, the brand employed a number of media channels that not only disseminated the campaign with the speed of light but that carried their own messages that could ease the connection with a young, tech savvy, and highly connected crowd.
Most of the video content on the Heidies’ site was streamed from uploaded versions residing in You Tube; this was an interesting move [as opposed to create their own media player with pristine quality video] because it sent a message of approachability, opening various forums at the same time as people could comment on their site and on You Tube. It also provided the tools to any website in the world [i.e. blogs like this one] to spread the word through embedded video. It is worth to consider the implications on the message of streaming a You Tube video on their site, that is, a video with the You Tube logo on the lower right corner.
Needless to say, the site also featured a blog in which the hijackers webcasted live feeds from their base and posted random messages, received comments from fans and detractors, and replied to them. The blog, as a communications channel, follows a structure that also carries its own messages. It might be hard to pinpoint exactly what those messages are but it is easy to at least infer certain openness and even transparency when you are able to post comments at will regardless of whether they are positive, negative, insulting, or encouraging. Here is an example:
A very visual campaign for a very visual product: underwear. The site documented every step of the hijacking with plenty of still images, click on any of them and you will be directed to a Flickr page titled “Heidie1And2's photos,” where users can also leave comments and browse through all the images available on the official site and beyond. From the marketing point of view there is a clear benefit on this move: as in the You Tube case, every picture is properly tagged and can therefore be found by anyone searching on the site, which can then lead that individual to Diesel’s site.
Polls were also another resource used within the site to keep people engaged and participating, there are various new web2.0ish polling tools that allow anyone to embed a professionally-looking survey/results application, this can help any blogger [or any site for that matter] to create a sense of community even if a superficial one, in which people can validate their own opinions and get deeper into the story.
Since news these days constantly cross the line between seriousness and dead seriousness, why not adding this event to the Digg community. With one click any user could digg the story titled “Diesel.com has been hacked!” which generated 27 diggs and a few, mainly favorable comments. Lastly, the hijackers opened their own del.icio.us page in which they posted the links of anyone that referenced their site during the period of the campaign, so far 81 links are available, exposing media accounts from widely diverse sources.
Over 288 friends on their MySpace page might be one of the many indicators of their popularity [or lack of, depending on your benchmarks], it can also be considered as another version of the official site that lives beyond the campaign and that also gives the brand the credibility and platform to confabulate its next comeback together with the community that loved and/or hated them throughout the ad that lasted five days.
Yesterday’s column The Public Editor in The New York Times pondered on whether or not the newspaper is going to be able to sustain its quality when delivering breaking news through its web version. “That means more editors are constantly balancing speed against completeness to decide when an article is good enough to carry The Time’s respected brand.”
Speed versus completeness seems to be at the core of the dilemma. The world of “instant information” requires a different paradigm in the context of delivering breaking news. The Times is then struggling with the speed of the net. No easy task given that this brand is well know for its proven ability “to add significant value” to the stories that it publishes.
The process of adding value, in the traditional sense (i.e. high level of reporting and analysis), requires time. There is some digesting to be made before the raw piece of information is turned into “a traditional Times story.” So far it seems that we are trying to deal with a mediatic problem via the editorial board and that route might not offer a solution to the newspaper.
This dilemma is offering an interesting look at a real-life case study of "radical versus respectful" Remediation as conceived by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin almost a decade ago (more about this subject here). By looking at this problem from the mediatic point of view we could see how the current policy of the digital operation of not giving priority to “speed over content” is already providing an answer and leading the Times in the right direction.
The problem shouldn’t be how to (respectfully) adapt to the new medium, in this case, how to replicate a daily newspaper in the Web with the maximum speed possible, understanding that in its printed version, The Times is already close to the speed limit (once per day) and that in the Web there is no speed limit (once per second, faster if necessary). The question is not how to balance speed versus completeness but how to use the newer digital channel in a way that is consistent and adds value to readers.
When answering that question the brand is forced to take a hard look at its own persona as well as to its vision. Those answers will provide key direction. The speed of the Web does not necessarily mean the end of an audience that appreciates excellent content, nor it means that all breaking news must now be swallowed raw.
Rewind to 1999. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin both academics and media critics publish a theory of mediation challenging the assumption that new (digital) media must “divorce themselves from earlier media” in order to produce a new set of “aesthetic and cultural principles.” Remediation argued that all new media forms refashion, repurpose, rival, and are therefore intrinsically linked to previous media in their permanent quest for their own identities.
According to Bolter and Grusin there are a number of possible “strategies for remediation,” from “respectful to radical.” The definitions are almost self-explanatory. In the specific case of multimedia on the Web, the authors saw a case of the radical form when compared to the more traditional remediation of print: “Web and Internet applications refashion the newer perceptual media of radio, television, and telephone more aggressively than they refashion print.”
Fast forward to 2006. The advertising industry struggles to crack the code of net video. As an emerging medium its potential generates a high level of anxiety among professionals in the industry. On the other hand, sellers are aiming high when pricing it “because they offer an engaged, actual audience rather than a passive, estimated one.” So far the formula is very “respectful” of the TV model, so respectful that both formats are competing head to head.
Were Bolter and Grusin wrong in their video-web remediation assessment? Let’s assume their interpretation was right. In which case, it means the industry might not be going in the right direction.
The current frenzy to leverage net video might be preventing us from taking a look at the whole picture. The ability to stream video on the web does not automatically transform the computer in another TV set. The non-linear nature of media consumption on the web has tremendous implications on how we use this medium to communicate. The application of the linear TV model (serving ads before content) is flawed in the sense that it’s insensitive to people’s relationship with the medium in which control is essential to the true experience. Take that control away by imposing any type of content and people will feel annoyed.
Trying to navigate against the nature of media is not only naïve but useless when it comes to generate any value to people in the other end. Remediating TV on the web should be as disrespectful as possible, leveraging the strategic advantages of the web of which “choice” is at the top. Any form of content that is not transparently user-initiated is probably going to push the wrong buttons. In the case of advertising, the British motto “if it’s not welcomed, it’s not working” should always come to mind.
