Culture Intercom Redux

[beginPage: Intro]

08-10-2005

The convergence of PC and TV culture
Broadcatching, Podcasting, BroadSnatching, Torrents, PSPcasting... these are terms that are being used with increasing frequency in the downloading communities on the internet. They are the new lingua franca of a generation that actively rallies around the intersection of radio, TV and PC culture. According to a poll by the British research bureau Strategy Analytics,(49) today more than half of all Europeans are spending less time in front of their television, now that they have access to broadband.

The expansion of broadband networks has rolled out the red carpet for digital television - and the opposite is equally true. While in many European countries digital television signals are already being sent out through the ether and by satellite, now the cable and telephone lines are also being used as vehicles. This had led to a number of convergences in the area of networks, services and use. While traditionally telephone companies were only concerned with telephone connections for speech and cable operators delivered (analog) television signals by cable, both now want to expand their offerings and diversify to a 'triple play' of telephone, data, and digital video. The traditional media - particularly television and radio - are thus suddenly confronted with an impasse. Multimedial access, consumption and control has now become the stake in a battle between industrial players from various realms, among others the IT industry, the producers of consumer electronics, telecommunications firms, broadcasting networks and the entertainment world. Their attention is primarily focused on the various media platforms that are found in most households at present: television, radio, PC and game consoles, and with the advent of digital television further expanded with set-top boxes, multimedia PCs and digital video recorders. In time these different platforms will undoubtedly flow together into interoperational digital home networks, completely integrated into the domestic environment.

With the rise of new, powerful wireless broadband technologies (particularly WiMax(50) and UMTS(51)) there will be many facets added, not in the least because ever more private and public wireless networks are being constructed and an expanded assortment of mobile media apparatus and portable multimedial telephones are being brought on the market. All these producers and providers want a piece of the digital action and are searching for a manner of differentiating their offerings and finding a wider consumer base through new applications and interactive services.
The traditional boundaries between 'radio', 'television' and 'print media' are blurring, with the convergence of PC and TV culture as the most obvious evolution. PCs and mobile apparatus are increasingly taking on the attributes of TV, while much of the new equipment in the realm of television --digital video recorders and game consoles, for instance - is provided with an Internet connection, so that it is possible to also look at e-mail and internet sites while watching television programs.

Two worlds are thus coming closer to one another: the world of television --traditionally a central part of a 'lean back' environment - and that of the internet, a medium with completely different user expectations and characteristics. An 'on demand' paradigm dominates the internet: users themselves decide what, where, when and how they will use data, video or audio; they assemble their own program, free from prescribed time slots and stationary locations; they choose their own virtual/social environment, far from centralization and control. This becomes clear in practices such as 'broadcatching', in fact a variant of 'Podcasting' but in relation to video and other media files, by which with the aid of RSS feeds digital image fragments can be called up and downloaded via BitTorrent. Independently developed software such as the video download program Videora(52) and open source build-it-yourself internetTV applications such as MythTV(53) demonstrate that the restraints built in by the industry can be gotten around or overcome with little difficulty. Recently various communities launched a call to hack and modify the PSP (a new apparatus from Sony, actually a sort of iPod for video and games), which resulted in countless brilliant hybrid applications.(54) Within the internet ecosystem television, previously left to the tender mercies and arrogance of broadcast networks, is redefined as a flexible and often free instrument. Furthermore, a trend toward interaction and participation is rising to prominence.

Via the internet, initiatives such as the Dutch Submarine Channel,(55) and Superchannel, from the Danish collective Superflex(56) are exploring new relations among narrativity, interactivity and visual media techniques, in the form of Flashmovies, for instance, or game models, products of what Lev Manovich calls the Flash-generation.(57) Whether the television and film industry - an amalgam of copyright holders, content producers and amalgamators - can breathe new life into television with its VOD (Video-on-demand) and iTV (interactive television - what's in a name?) and can muster the courage to change over from a television paradigm (media consumer = couch potato with zapper) to a true network paradigm (media consumer = active player) remains to be seen.

In various experiments such as the Video Letters project in the Balkan countries,(58) Video Nation on BBC,(59) Community Channel on Telecom Italia and RAI Uno,(60) or Current.tv, the blogbroadcaster proposed by Al Gore,(61) several hoary or new content assemblers are indeed seeking to offer fill in Paik's idea of 'Participation TV' in a contemporary way. But most of the signals lead one to suspect that, in the light of the present neo-liberal broadcasting ideology, most networks and producers are concentrating on their competition position and have no immediate plans to acknowledge the dynamic changes created in media consciousness and realities by the internet. Here too there is something to be learned from the music industry, which in past years stubbornly continued to defend its traditional control of distribution and consumption and promptly turned its nose up at the new models that were offered by the internet. Their protectionist regulations and legal wrangling has somewhat suppressed the piracy, but has done nothing to resolve the core questions. In the meantime, the industry's grip on the consumer has weakened enormously, and with the introduction of iTunes and the iPod Apple - nota bene, an IT developer - has become one of the most important player in music distribution.

Although up to now the idea of 'High Definition' has not had any unequivocal definition,(65) it is generally assumed that in time HD will perhaps become a new standard, both for production, broadcasting and streaming (once the broadband networks generate sufficient band width) and for distribution by physical vehicles (presently the subject of a fierce competition between the Blu-Ray disc, the HD-DVD ((or AOD - Advanced Optical Disc)) and PDD ((Professional Disc for Data)), among others). In any case, as a result of developments in the field of digital acquisition, distribution and projection, the gap between film and video is becoming considerably smaller. There is no doubt that the introduction of HD and plasma screens getting larger and larger is going to have a great impact on the experience of video, and thus also on the future aesthetic of video art (what's in a name?), which will perhaps in turn begin to look more like that of cinema, through the use of 'wide shots' for instance. Once again this is a mixed blessing: for the re-presentation of older video works this will cause major problems, but the new technologies will nevertheless provide unprecedented opportunities.

This question gets a new dimension with the expansion of mobile broadband networks and the rise of mobile video, with apparatus such as Sony's PSP (for the rest, Sony will shortly begin with a video service) and multimedia telephones. What works will stand up to being watched on screens that are barely two fingers high and wide? That is a question that occupies a lot of media firms and artists. Both Nokia and Siemens, desperately searching for content for their smartphones, have sponsored competitions in the past years for short videos with and for mobile telephones. The big media firms in the United States are experimenting with short 'mobisodes' as teasers-cum-supplements for TV series like 24. The first specially made serials for mobile apparatus are surfacing here and there, such as the Australian low-budget light comedy 'Girl Friday'.(66) At the Microcinema International festival this year there's even an exhibition organized around mobile video, curated by Patrick Lichty, who posed some interesting questions:

To paraphrase Antin, what are the distinctive qualities of Mobile Video, and how do narratives from this technological set differ from its predecessors? Does the intimacy and mobility of the video-enabled cell phone create a change in perspective? Does it represent a culture of universal surveillance where there is a universal intimacy but a complete lack of private space? How does the mobile perspective shift our perception in the way the mediated image of the cellular/network individual is represented? Does its low-resolution somehow challenge the aesthetics, 'truthfulness', or technofetishism of the increasingly filmic nature of video? (67)

Is it chance, then, that Nam Jun Paik did a reworking of his 'Global Groove' for mobile telephones for Nokia's 'Connect to art'(68) project - in a time in which everyone is mobilly connected, in which the viewing and sending of video and audio is an everyday occurrence for young people in places like South Korea and Japan, in which video is freeing itself from its artificial environment, into an online, public world that is more connected to the real world than ever before? Or as William Wegeman, who like Paik has created new work for Nokia, puts it:

We are a mobile society. Man is doing all he can to push the boundaries that contain us and make us conform to obsolete norms. Today everything is push button... Unlike painting and sculpture, the video medium doesn't need to claim space on the wall or the floor to cast its spell. It can go anywhere. Use your imagination.

Coming from a director with several Oscars in his pocket, who in recent years has primarily hung around in vineyards and tropical paradises, a statement like this at the very least sounds somewhat ambiguous. Although we may not forget the rebel in Coppola either, who in the 1960s and 1970s stubbornly rowed against the Hollywood currents with his firm American Zoetrope, towing a load of filmmakers, writers and actors along behind him as he did so. We should also not forget that the industrial interference during production of films such as 'The Rain People', 'THX 1138' (by his then partner George Lucas) and 'Apocalypse Now' nearly finished off his firm - and in the last case almost finished him off too. His dream cannot immediately be called visionary; judged against the wealth of extraordinary experimental films and video works from the whole 20th century. What is however new is the idea of what philosopher Ivan Illich once termed 'conviviality': the idea of a maximizing of creativity, imagination and diversity as a social chain of processes of individual significance, rather than of the hegemony of standardized industrial productions. Now that the possibilities for access to instruments for production and distribution are more symmetrical than ever before, the dream appears to be becoming reality. The introduction of portable video cameras vitalized the hope that television would become a 'convivial' medium, that viewer conduct would be defined by viewers making productions themselves. Now that almost 'everybody' has access to means for recording video or audio, television seems however more popular and more shameless than ever. The internet has once again vitalized the conviviality concept, certainly now that the new broadband technologies (among them SDSL, VDSL and Eurodocsis 2.0) promise just as much upload as download capacity. Thus the traditional bottlenecks of media distribution are falling by the wayside one by one, resulting in an explosion of availability and variety. A growing acceptance of non-authorized and non-institutional sources is perceptible, resulting in a social commodification of content. Information sources are increasingly abstract: depending on the demand, data, video, audio and multimedia are drawn from a wide spectrum of virtual environments, through established or new television or radio channels, private or public networks on the internet, or the home network. The importance of contextualization and mediazation becomes incontrovertible, both for large media firms and small producers and aggregators. Broadcast networks such as BBC and commercial enterprises such as Yahoo and Google increasingly profile themselves as 'gateways', creating search machines for video, developing social and cultural contexts for interaction and participation.(69) Parallel work is ongoing on metadata systems and tools for speech and image recognition, which will make possible non-linear forms of video use, something to which Nam June Paik was already looking forward in 1980:

The only reason why videotape is so boring and television so bad is that they are time-based information. Human beings have not really learned how to structure time-based information in recording and retrieval very well, because it is new. No one says that the Encyclopedia Brittanica is boring, although it has lots of information, because you can go to any page of the encyclopedia, to A or B or C or M or X, whereas when you watch videotapes or television, you have to go A, B, C, D, E, F, G. While the comparison is simple, the difference is very big. That is why the book is alive and will be alive until electronic information conquers the random access problem. (70)

New formats organize video and multimedia in a structured manner and offer huge possibilities for interaction. For instance, with SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language)(71) video and audio can be embedded in a dynamic environment to which animation, graphics and hyperlinks to other media files can also be added. With MPEG4, not only is interaction possible on the basis of shots or scenes, but also on the basis of objects within the image. Programs such as Max/MSP and Jitter permit a composition aesthetic at the granular level of pixels, making new real-time relations possible between image and sound, object and space. New forms of audiovisual creation, such as 'machinima', are being developed in real-time, 3D spaces. Video is being resurrected in new digital environments, susceptible to algorithmic, generative or spatial processes, assumes hybrid narrative and interactive forms, is produced and exchanged within decentralized social networks that unite production with annotation and distribution. The social fabric of the internet will only become tighter. Broadband networks have generated a culture which no longer revolves around only broadcasting, band width, streaming or video-on-demand services, but around cultural and social experience of what a network means, entering into relationships and linkages that resonate in the cultural community.(72)

It is ultimately not just the pure collection and distribution of data, video and audio, but the vital contexts, the interchange and interaction, that makes the difference. Media like internet and digital television cannot and must not be red