Day 290: Video Revolutions

As tube, tape, and disc are replaced by file, pixel, and cloud, the present moment in media history offers a vantage point for regarding video as an adaptable and enduring term that bridges all of these technologies and the practices they afford. At different times video has been different things for different people, and its history is more than a progression of material formats: cameras, transmitters and receivers, tapes and discs, decks that record and play them, digital files, apps and interfaces. It is also a history of ideas about technology and culture, and relations and distinctions among various types of media and the social needs giving rise to their uses.

Champions and detractors have projected onto video a succession of fantasies, both positive and negative, at various moments of its history. Like television, video has been perpetually renewed, reborn as new media in relation to older iterations made obsolete by the relentless forward march of technology. It is something of a law of new media that emerging technologies are regularly invested with their users’ hopes and fears, with expressions of their societies’ tensions, contradictions, and crises. I aim to represent a history of video that accounts for these expressions in their specific contexts from the early period of television to the present day, identifying three broad historical phases. These phases are marked by technological innovations such as videotape and streaming web video, but also by the ways in which video has been placed in relation to other media, including radio, television, sound recording, and film, as well as networked computers, their hardware and software.

In the first phase, the era of broadcasting’s development and penetration into the mass market, video was another word for television. The two were not distinct from each other. In the second, TV was already established as a dominant mass medium. Videotape and related new technologies and practices marked video in distinction to television as an alternative and solution to some of TV’s widely recognized problems. It was also distinguished from film as a lesser medium visually and experientially, though at the same time it was positioned as a medium of privileged access to reality. In the third phase, video as digital moving image media has grown to encompass television and film and to function as the medium of the moving image. These phases are defined in terms of their dominant technologies (transmission, analog recording and playback, digital recording and playback) but more importantly by ideas about these technologies and their uses and users.

Video Revolutions is concerned with outlining the phases, but it also offers the example of video history as a way into reconsidering the idea of a medium as such. I propose adopting a particular understanding of this concept, a cultural view. From this perspective, a medium is understood relationally, according to how it is constituted through its complementarity or distinction to other media within a wider ecology of technologies, representations, and meanings. A medium is, furthermore, understood in terms not only of its materiality, affordances, and conventions of usage, but also of everyday, commonsense ideas about its cultural status in a given historical context. Cultural status refers to the ways in which a medium (or any cultural category or artifact) is valued or not valued, made authentic or inauthentic, legitimate or illegitimate. The medium of video exists not only as objects and practices, but also as a shifting constellation of ideas in popular imagination, including ideas about value, authenticity, and legitimacy. We can apprehend video’s materiality and its significance only through the mediation of discourses of video technology and the practices and social values associated with it.

I will be most concerned in my discussion of video’s three phases with describing and explaining each way in which video has been understood historically, particularly in terms of cultural status. When video was synonymous with television, its cultural status was television’s cultural status. When video was distinguished from television, its cultural status was opposed to television’s, unless it was associated with TV rather than with the movies that were the content of videotapes offered for rent at video stores. And as video has become a category bigger than either movies or TV, its cultural status has still been the product of enduring ideas about these media and their value and legitimacy. In my conclusion I will return to a more abstract discussion of the medium as a concept, elaborating on the examples offered from video history and extracting higher-level meanings from them.

In considering video’s history I have relied in particular on sources that speak to the ways in which people have understood popular media and culture. Reading the popular and trade press and the writings of prominent intellectuals and looking at advertisements and newspaper or magazine illustrations does not give us direct access to anyone’s thoughts, but it does establish a horizon of meanings available to individuals and communities in a particular place and time. It also shows us what some dominant meanings were, and how powerful interests tried to assert particular kinds of values and ideals. It is these dominant and typical available meanings that most interest me, as they speak most directly of video’s cultural status.

One key insight throughout will be the centrality of one medium in particular in relation to video. No matter whether video has been associated with television or distinguished from it, TV’s cultural status has often been the most important factor for understanding video. Television’s place as society’s dominant medium, and its shifting fortunes over time, will never be far from the surface in the events to come. Since television’s ascent to mass medium status, all media have been in some ways defined in relation to it. In the next chapter, the story begins with video and television sharing an identity in a period of optimism and hope for the future of communication, broadcasting, and the moving image.

~~Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium -by- Michael Z. Newman.

Day 209: The Content Machine

Publishing is the primal creative industry qua industry. It was the reproductive potential of the printing press, the first technology to mass produce and widely distribute cultural and intellectual items, which threw up new modes of organisation around the workshop, the humanist printer and ‘typographical fixity’. The spread of printing across Europe was astonishingly rapid and ignited revolutions in religion, science and education (Eisenstein 1980). Arguably, more than anything else, printing, publishing, created modernity itself. Even before Gutenberg, in medieval scriptoria and the great centers of ancient learning, there were still many functions of publishing; after all, books (or scrolls) were still produced. Publishing occupies a unique place in cultural history, and we should ask what affect this had on other creative industries.

So we have a strange practice, but also an ancient proto-industry acting as a template for one of the fastest growing areas of the contemporary economy. Now we also have an industry in crisis.

Perverse as it may seem, even setting digital media aside, publishing is in crisis. Publishing, famously, is always in crisis. The present one has some nasty symptoms. Across the industry consolidation has been rampant. New working methods and cultures have displaced gentlemanly Old World orthodoxies. Bricks and mortar retailers fight for survival, particularly in Anglo-American cultures. Costs, inevitably, keep rising. Alarming macro-trends, like the decline in long-form reading, the rise in alternative media and audience time pressures, only worsen. Trade publishers see their mid-lists hollowed; academic publishers face pressure from higher education spending cuts, while educational publishers encounter increased competition across their markets.

Then along came the digital challenge. Centralising power, eroding value and breaking publishing’s time-worn business models with parvenu ease, publishers have been caught in a race to catch up, scale up and tool up. Trade publishers are trapped, like traditional computer manufacturers, between powerful upstream producers (i.e. authors, agents) and downstream distributors and retailers, like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Profit lies in the efficient coupling of the two, creating a structural vulnerability now exposed by the web.

Self-publishing – whether for the callow novelist or seasoned academic – has never been easier, raising strategic questions not just for the industry but about what it means to publish in the first place. Publishing can be difficult for outsiders because it is already intensely competitive. In few sectors is there an equivalent expenditure of intellectual capital on such low financial returns. In short, in few fields do equivalent levels of talent work flat out for, by the standards of many globally scaled industries, such meagre pickings. From old media giants to nimble web native startups, new entrants are nonetheless circling. It remains to be seen what difference merged entities like Thomson Reuters and Penguin Random House will make or how publishers will grow in emerging markets. The calculus is changing in the digital world with its low barriers to entry, fast growth rates and direct consumer relationships.

Over the centuries change was the norm for publishers, whether they liked it or not. Somehow book sales kept on rising. Yet this masks missed opportunities – by, erroneously, defining their role as makers of books, publishers have straitjacketed themselves, missing new formats ripe for publication and so backing themselves into a corner. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of specialisation and market segmentation. Perhaps not. Either way, publishers need a more informed idea of their role, allowing them to focus on core competencies in difficult times while building a more expansive notion of their activities. In future they might react more nimbly to technological change and see it as an opportunity, not a threat. Ignoring big questions is easy but leaves publishers without a clear identity when having one has never been more important. Lacking definition leaves publishers horribly exposed to the whims of history and technology.

On a more theoretical plane, our concept of mediation is troubled. In the now standard textbook on communication studies Denis McQuail (2010) lists some of the metaphors for mediation: as a window, a mirror, a filter, a gatekeeper or portal, a signpost, guide or interpreter, as a forum or platform, a disseminator, an interlocutor. Mediation, like publishing, is conflicted and elusive. A theory of publishing is a theory of mediation, of how and why cultural goods are mediated. It is the story behind media, rather than the story of a medium itself (like books or words), and has a big role to play in our understanding of communications.

Publishing is an activity, a mode of production; it is difficult labour. At the same time, it is about judgement, taste, aesthetics and the exercise of reason, the considered deployment of resources, financial or otherwise. It is anything but straightforward. Nonetheless, most books on publishing, the history of the book or cultural studies are premised on an unexamined understanding of publishing. Publishing has been thoroughly explored, both historically and in the present, but not adequately theorised.

People will always communicate. More books, by far, are published than ever before. On the one hand, we have a human need, a booming sector and, with the Internet, a general flourishing of communications unprecedented in history. Long-form reading isn’t going away, it’s in a golden age. We also have an industry, a set of standards and way of life under threat. What’s going on here? We need to go beyond folksy descriptions, untested assumptions, industry propaganda and workmanlike dictionary definitions to really get publishing. We need to test those assumptions and see what, if any, conception of publishing stacks up.

We need greater clarity. Publishing is often equated with making something public. Is that enough? Does publishing always need to be commercial and what is its relationship to profit making and capitalism? Does publishing work with or against technology and technological change, and how? Dissenting pamphlets and the Financial Times web app, Bach sonatas and The Sims are all published material. How can that be? In order to understand publishing, how it might survive and thrive in a period of unparalleled challenge, we need to appreciate why it was a problem before digital technology.

Beyond the theoretical or strategic questions, this is important. Publishing really matters. It’s at the heart of our literature and our learning, our civil society, our public spheres and political discussions. Publishing carries forward our sciences and powers our culture. Publishing isn’t a passive medium; it is a part of our lives and societies, shaping them, guiding them, sometimes even controlling them. Rarely looking inward, publishing helps define our world. Over the centuries that classic combination of hustler and humanist has had an outsized impact. That should be worth a closer look.

~~The Content Machine -by- Michael Bhaskar

Day 193: Hidden Agendas

There is something in journalism called a slow news day. This usually falls on a Sunday or during the holiday period when the authorised sources of information are at rest. Nothing happens then, apart from acts of God and disorder in far-away places. It is generally agreed that the media show cannot go on while the cast is away.

This book is devoted to slow news. In each chapter, the setting changes, from Iraq to the East End of London, from Burma to the docks of Liverpool and the West of Ireland, from Vietnam to Australia and the 'new' South Africa. In all these places, events have occurred that qualify as slow news. Some have been reported, even glimpsed on the evening news, where they are unremembered as part of a moving belt of images 'shot and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola advertisement', wrote one media onlooker, pointing out that the average length of the TV news 'soundbite' in the United States had gone from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.9seconds.

That is the trend. In American television, a one percentage point fall in the ratings can represent a loss of $100 million a year in advertising. The result is not just 'infotainment', but 'infoadvertising': programmes that 'flow seamlessly into commercials'. This is how commercial television works in Australia, Japan, Italy and many other countries. Britain is not far behind; the ever-diminishing circle of multinational companies that control the media, especially television, take their cue from the brand leader, Rupert Murdoch, who says his role in the 'communications revolution' is that of a 'battering ram'.
...
Diego Garcia Is a British colony in the Indian Ocean, from which American bombers patrol the Middle East. There are few places as important to American military planners as this refuelling base between two continents. Who lives there? During President Clinton's attack on Iraq in 1996 a BBC commentator referred to the island as 'uninhabited' and gave no hint of its past. This was understandable, as the true story of Diego Garcia is instructive of times past and of the times we now live in.

Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Archipelago, which ought to have been granted independence from Britain in 1965 along with Mauritius. However, at the insistence of the United States, the Government of Harold Wilson told the Mauritians they could have their freedom only if they gave up the island. Ignoring a United Nations resolution that called on the British 'to take no action which would dismember the  territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity', the British Government did just that, and in the process formed a new colony, the British Indian Overseas Territories. The reason and its hidden agenda soon became clear.

In high secrecy, the Foreign Office leased the island to Washington for fifty years, with the option of a twenty-year extension. The British prefer to deny this now, referring to a 'joint defence arrangement'. This is sophistry; today Diego Garcia serves as an American refuelling base and an American nuclear weapons dump. In 1991, President Bush used the island as a base from which to carpet-bomb Iraq. In the same year the Foreign Office told an aggrieved Mauritian government that the island's sovereignty was 'no longer negotiable'.

Until 1965, the Ilois people were indigenous to Diego Garcia. With the militarisation of their island they were given a status rather like that of Australia's Aborigines in the nineteenth century: they were deemed not to exist. Between 1965 and 1973 they were 'removed' from their homes, loaded on to ships and planes and dumped in Mauritius. In 1972, the American Defense Department assured Congress that 'the islands are virtually uninhabited and the erection of the base will cause no indigenous political problems'. When asked about the whereabouts of the native population, a British Ministry of Defence official lied, 'There is nothing in our files about inhabitants or about an evacuation.'

A Minority Rights Group study, which received almost no publicity when it was published in 1985, concluded that Britain expelled the native population 'without any workable re-settlement scheme; left them in poverty; gave them a tiny amount of compensation and later offered more on condition that the islanders renounced their rights ever to return home'. The Ilois were allowed to take with them 'minimum personal possessions, packed into a small crate'. Most ended up in the slums of the Mauritian capital, leading wretched, disaffected lives; the number who have since died from starvation and disease is unknown.
~~Hidden Agendas -by- John Pilger