From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
Multimedia is a word that is gaining currency in the computer world as I write this in early 1990. No one really knows what this means--except that we are accelerating towards an integrated handling of text, sound, and pictures to convey information in new and exciting ways. Laser printers, scanners, fax machines, new ways of storing images and noises in less space, VHS and slide interfaces, MIDI, and more are coming together with frightening speed. What might all this mean for the alternative networks?
It seems to me that the networking possibilities of audio and video are still underused in the underground. A few people have used cassette or videotape as educational or interactive media, but most producers are still firmly in the entertainment paradigm, where the artist and the audience are clearly separated. The networking pioneers have used strategies such as the recording of local ambient noise and the circulation of add-on/pass-on video letters to break down some of the split, but the process is far from complete.
In the long run, I suspect that we will see the incorporation of multimedia into more interactive modes of networking. Right now paper is still leading the way here, from personal letters to "amateur press associations" (think of a cocktail party in print, if you're not familiar with the latter--lots of people all talking at once, and occasionally interacting with one another). Electronic mail has also proven itself to be very conducive to freewheeling discussions, as members of The Well and other virtual watering holes already know well. The only barrier to adding vision and hearing to these processes is the cost of the equipment involved--and such costs are dropping all the time.
What might a networker's day be like when computerized multimedia is a reality for many of us? Let's look in on Josh, who a decade or so into the next century, at only fifteen years old, is already a confirmed networker.
Josh's day starts out after a leisurely breakfast at 9 a.m., but his computer has already been on the job for most of the morning. At 5 a.m., when the rates were still low, it was on the phone to The Network, a decentralized collection of computers used by alternative artists and writers to trade their works. Besides downloading messages and files addressed directly to Josh, the computer scanned through all the new files posted in the past twenty-four hours, using a list of personal keywords with fuzzy search heuristics to capture those which Josh would likely be interested in. It also created a list of files it doesn't think Josh wants to see. Later, when Josh picks one of these for downloading, the program will automatically update the search process to better reflect his tastes.
Like most of us, Josh can't wait to see his incoming mail, so directly after breakfast he calls up a menu of the files captured overnight. In addition to the stuff downloaded from The Network, there are also a few fax messages, sent via satellite by friends in underdeveloped countries who can't yet afford the latest equipment. A quick scan of return addresses on these shows that he knows all but one of the senders. He calls that one up to the screen and finds a chain letter: "Send two integrated circuits to the name at the top of the list, and in four weeks you'll get enough chips to build your own computer." Josh knows that the ease of making copies has completely destroyed the effectiveness of chain letters (everyone who might be interested has a copy before anyone can get the payoff), so he dumps this and tells the system to print out the rest of the faxes while he reviews his other mail.
Josh decides to review the message from Ed Johnston in London first. He highlights the message with the mouse cursor and clicks on EXECUTE. Instantly he gets Ed, in living color on the screen and full stereo on the computer's speakers. Ed is excited over one of his latest projects, the SpeedTravel Saga. "Watch this," he says, and then plays the latest cut for Josh. The video starts with a baby crawling, then a boy walking, a young lady jogging, a four-minute mile, a skateboard, a bicycle, and so on. Eventually there is an image of the Mars probe gliding by on the screen, which pans off into the stars. The soundtrack, which has been getting progressively more manic with a combination of bagpipes and harpsichord (both created, of course, on Ed's keyboard), suddenly hangs on a long chord on this final image, then fades away. "Well, what do you think?" says Ed, smiling at the camera. The message ends and a freeze-frame of the sender recedes quickly to the upper left corner of the screen.
Josh thinks it's pretty good, and says so. First, of course, he puts his computer in record mode; a red light comes on under the built-in video camera, and the mics on either side are active too. As he speaks, his words and picture are run through a fractal compression filter and stored on the optical drive. A thumbswitch pauses recording when he wants to think, and he can use the joystick to search rapidly through the incoming message to find parts he wants to reply to. "Just one minor criticism of the piece, Ed: I don't think you should have used a modern bicycle. What you want is a period piece, so that the speed progression is also a historical one. Here, let me send you a clip I have." Josh freezes the image on the screen--it recedes to the upper right corner--and scrolls rapidly through a list of his own image files. He finds the one he wants (taken from a movie on the Wright Brothers he was watching for his history class) and pulls it into the message. Satisfied with the final result, he presses SEND. This evening, when the rates are low again, it will be dumped back into The Network. The mail passes routinely, with only a few pieces worth archiving on videotape for later viewing on the large screen TV. Most of the rest are dumped, after short clips are indexed on Josh's own storage disk. Members of The Network agreed long ago that senders would keep archive copies of everything, and make them available on demand; no longer does everyone frantically try to store everything. Why bother, when the original is only an automated phone call away?
That done, Josh turns to his own current project, a history of multimedia networking. His thesis is that it resulted from a convergence of various primitive technologies, including the cassette tape, which could at least be duplicated quickly even if it was troublesome to distribute the copies. One of Josh's friends recently ran across a neat old book and scanned it in, so this morning he is going to splice in passages, perhaps with sound accompaniment from one of the archive optical disks. He opens a book window on the screen and begins to read Cassette Mythos...
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But if we can avoid being blown up by overgrown boys with dangerous toys, I'm convinced that the convergence of media into something resembling enhanced personal contacts is inevitable. I'll be wrong on a lot of details, of course. But hearing and vision are so much a part of our in-person modes of communication that I'm sure they'll creep into our distant ones as well. And someday, as users of The Network we'll look back on these audio and video tapes as seminal sources of inspiration.
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