TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE #19 - DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY #6

III.8 The Television Industry:

Since visual images require much more bandwidth than print or music, the digital revolution has only recently begun to affect the motion picture and television industries in the past decade. However, once the changes began, they moved with astonishing speed, and digital technology is now the standard for most film and television production around the world.

 Since television already was an electronic medium, the television industries of the world have adapted relatively smoothly to digital technology; once the initial speed bump of the cost of upgrading infrastructure from analog to digital was passed, business was able to go on as usual with greatly improved audio and picture quality.

However, in the very near future, internet television, will completely demolish the traditional business model for commercial television, which is dependent upon control of consumer. As a result, as is the case with print media, many television stations are creating internet channels which can be seen on YouTube and other websites. Sponsors for commercial television are already dwindling, and, as they disappear, so will commercial television as we know it; in 2012, Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, Inc, has been making hints about the creation of

some form of i-TV in the very near future, so it is likely that consumers will be getting television over the internet.[1]

III.9 The Motion Picture Industry:

For the American motion picture industry, digital technology has been a mixed blessing. While production techniques have been streamlined and made more efficient, production costs for commercial features have actually increased as producers aim for bigger blockbuster, hoping to cash in on ancillary markets and spin-offs when the blockbuster becomes a hit.

This strategy necessitates determining the lowest commercial common denominator to reach the mass market, which means minimizing variables like creative expression. In his essay “Conglomerate Aesthetics- Notes on the Disintegration of Film Language”, American film critic David Denby describes the aesthetic results:” Constant and incoherent movement: rushed editing strategies; feeble characterization; pastiche and hapless collage – these are the elements of conglomerate aesthetics and there’s something more going on here than bad filmmaking in such a collection of attention-getting swindles…What we have now is not just a raft of routine bad pictures but the first massively successful nihilistic cinema.”[2]

Denby is cautiously optimistic about the impact of digital technology on production, noting that cheaper production costs might well result in the birth of new cinema movements around the world, though he cannot name one.

Meanwhile, the clock would seem to be running out on the analog motion picture industry. In January, 2012, Nick James wrote in the British cinema periodical Sight and Sound that: “ January 2012 will apparently mark the point at which there will be more digital screens in the world industry than analog, and by the end of 2012 it is estimated that 35mm production’s share of the global market will decline to 37 per cent. What’s more, mainstream usage of 35mm will have vanished from the USA by the end of 2013, with Western Europe set to be all digital in the mainstream one year later.”[3]

 As was the case with the American music industry, the American motion picture industry has made the war on file sharing a top priority, and has embarked upon international crusades to shut down file sharing sites such as Limewire, Megaupload, Demonoid and Pirate Bay. Owners of these websites have been tracked down and arrested under international warrants in countries like New Zealand and Cambodia.

Meanwhile, ISP providers in Europe have begun to police the downloading habits of their customers, punishing those who download from file sharing sites with fines and removal of access to internet.[4] Nonetheless, sales of DVDs are still falling every year, and soon the video store will be as obsolete as the music store, not to mention the bookstore.

 Meanwhile, cinema attendance figures continue to decline around the world, as the increased availability of increasingly inexpensive widescreen HD digital televisions make staying at home to watch movies with family and friends a more convenient and, in the long run, a more economical option than going to the movie theatre.

The decline of the international motion picture industry began over two decades ago, according to the late American intellectual and film critic Susan Sontag , who wrote in 1995 :”Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20^th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art. Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia – the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired…” [5]

Like Denby, Sontag attributed the decline of the medium primarily to the astronomical rise in production costs of Hollywood productions and the concurrent reliance on the huge blockbuster loaded with special effects and stars. She concludes her essay on a pessimistic note:” … if cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too..”[6]

Nonetheless, today, a bit over a decade and a half later, cinema is still very much with us, albeit permeated by a digital technology which is changing the medium profoundly and dramatically. Among other things, digital effects have created the potential for entirely new dimensions of artifice of a kind the early French cinema pioneer George Melies could have only dreamt of. Indeed, some critics have gone so far as to predict that:“ all movies will be animated or computer-generated within fifteen years.”[7]

In addition, the entire viewing experience has been radically transformed from a group endeavor in a movie theatre to a very private one -  on a cellphone or a laptop. Some, like the legendary French cineaste Jean-Luc Godard, also see a profound difference between the rhythmic flicker of analog film 24 frames per second, and the unbroken stream of digital light even when moving digital images are projected on a screen.

Regardless, there appears to be a general consensus that, although Hollywood studios are still finding inventive ways to make money, the Twentieth Century art form known as cinema no longer exists. [8]In the words of James Monaco,” After ninety years of dominating the way we view our world – a long, tempestuous and rewarding life- cinema has quietly passed on.”[9]

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[1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/06/01/munster-itv-in-the-works/

[2] David Denby (Do the Movies Have a Future?) Simon and Schuster, 2012, p.32

[3] Nick James ( Editorial in Sight and Sound, January, 2012) as quoted in David Thompson’s THE BIG SCREEN, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. P. 509

[4] The many copyright issues raised by the Digital Revolution will be dealt with in greater details in Chapter VIII, Fair Use and Copyright Conflict

[5] Susan Sontag  (Frankfurter Rundschau, 1995) southerncrossreview.org/43/sontag-cinema.htm

[6] Susan Sontag ( ibid)

[7] Bruce Goldstein(“Flashback; The Year in Movies”)   Village Voice, December 28, 1999

[8] Even in 1987, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was quoted by Lasse Svanberg as saying that he did not think the film medium would survive.( ibid)p.74

[9] Monaco ( ibid) p. 421

TED's DIGITAL JUNGLE #18 - DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY #5

III.7 The Transformation of the International Music Industry:

A major international media industry that has been battling the onslaught of digital technology over the past three decades has been the American music industry. As musicologists such as Barry Kernfeld have noted, the American music industry has fought every major technological innovation since the beginning of the recording industry in the 1930’s, seeking to criminalize practices that were filling a consumer need that corporate entities were ignoring. These practices, like bootlegging, Kernfeld terms “disobedient” practices.[1]

Invariably, the music industry would come around and find a way to incorporate some of these practices, and even employ some of those individuals previously labeled as criminals. Kernfeld makes the case that the same pattern applies to the music industry’s reaction to digital technology.

For the music industry, two of the most terrifying aspects of digital audio technology is that it: a) makes it easy for virtually anyone to make a decent quality recording using cheap equipment, like a DAT recorder; 2) it makes it possible for anyone to make a “perfect “copy of any recording – or a copy that is identical with the original. Thanks to digital technology, anyone of reasonable intelligence and minimal means can become a music producer and distributor.

One of the immediate results was the sudden explosion of the hip-hop movement in American urban centers in the 1980’s. Hip hop artists would sample bits of music created by more established artists and transform them into new works.

The technique had aesthetic precedents in such techniques as Cubist collages and

Bauhaus “cut-ups”, and was tolerated  until the late eighties, when some of the hip hop artists became big stars and began to make a lot of money.  Then the music industry dropped the hammer in the form of a series of copyright prosecutions of

hip hop artists, which were all victories for the industry.[2]

Today, the American music industry vigorously enforces copyright laws by promoting prosecution of digital artists accused of sampling even a few seconds of a composition, leading to substantial economic penalties. Industry representatives often claim they are protecting their artists’ copyrights, but the truth is they are more often than not just protecting their own financial interests.

 In the process, some musicians, such as the legendary George Clinton, and many others, have been financially ruined by some of these legal cases; meanwhile, the development of hip hop music, one of the most intriguing contemporary musical genres has been crippled. [3]

 The same music industry, noting that young consumers were no longer buying CDs because they were sharing MP3 files with friends, then attempted to intimidate the same consumers by pursuing extremely harsh penalties against individuals who have shared music files with their friends for personal use, and not for profit. As a result, some young consumers have been financially ruined for indulging in what they thought was a harmless social activity.

Again, music historians such as Kernfeld see these measures as desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, and that eventually the music industry will be forced to accept the realities of digital technology, just as they were forced to accept the invention of analog tape decks and digital recorders.  While the industry may succeed in making a few examples of some unfortunate individuals, Kernfeld and others feel that the practice of file sharing is so prevalent around the world that it cannot be stopped by legal means. Kernfeld notes that that the younger generation which grew up with digital media sees nothing wrong with file sharing, just as previous generations saw nothing wrong with purchasing bootlegged song lyrics which were otherwise unavailable.

Indeed, the governments of many non-Western countries see nothing wrong with file sharing, since the practice provides cheap entertainment to impoverished masses. And since the internet knows few borders, Kernfeld believes the American music industry will be forced to find a compromise that enables the consumer to obtain music by downloading at home, while providing some revenue for the industry. The bottom line is that there is no market for CDs anymore, and the music store is obsolete.

The late Steve Jobs of Apple managed to create such a compromise with the I-Tunes application, which allowed consumers to download songs for a small fee – 99 cents per song – and then miraculously managed to convince most of the notoriously suspicious owners of the music companies to buy into participating. After all, if Apple were involved, Apple would take a cut of the revenue, so for many media observers, winning over the hard-bitten music business moguls was a truly remarkable accomplishment by an audacious young Mr. Jobs, and one which helped make Apple the most successful company in the world. [4]

Another successful compromise has been the Swedish-based Spotify, an internet-based music distribution system that has met with considerable success. Originally created by a group of Swedes in Stockholm in 2006 as a system by which paying subscribers could have access to Spotify playlists in Sweden, Spotify soon expanded services to the United Kingdom in 2009.  The terms of service evolved as Spotify ironed out technical glitches and sought new possibilities for expansion. Then, after years of negotiation, Spotify was able to enter the American market in July, 2011. The company promptly grew, and raised over $100 million in funding through the American investment bank Goldman Sachs.[5]

However, the growth of digital technology has created another challenge to the established music industry that is perhaps even more threatening; in recent years, a new generation of artists, like Radiohead, have realized they can now produce music and distribute music directly to their audience on their internet websites internet for free, bypassing the established music industry altogether.  

The artists would then make money either from concerts or from the sales of special products promoted on their websites. This would indeed be a radical transformation of the traditional music industry economic model, since it would eliminate the middle men altogether. Similar new business models have been proposed by internet visionaries such as Jeff Jarvis.  Jarvis, for example, cites the possibility of internet financing by such websites as

www.kickstart.com/[6]

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[1] Barry Kernfeld ( Pop Song Piracy – Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929) University of Chicago Press, 2011.p 6

[2] Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola (Creative License – The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling)Duke University Press, 2011

[3] McLeod and DiCola ( ibid)p.

[4] Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs) Simon and Schuster, 2011

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

[6] Jeff Jarvis, (Public Parts – How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live) Simon and Schuster, 2011 ( more on this in Chapter VII)

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE #17- DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY #4

III.3 The Cyber Utopians:

While there is general agreement that we are in the midst of a Digital Revolution, there is manifest disagreement as to whether or not this is a positive development. Today, the contemporary debate on the Digital Revolution can be divided into three fundamentally different schools of thought: The Cyber Utopian , The Cyber Agnostics and the Cyber Manichaean.[1]

The Cyber Utopian argument runs along the following lines:

Digital technology is changing the lives of people around the world and, in most cases, demonstrably for the better. In developing countries with weak infrastructure, cellphones are an invaluable, and relatively cheap, communications tool used for everything from keeping in touch with families to banking and organizing political rallies by SMS.

Farmers can find out the international prices for their crops, and can find buyers online. As countries get increased access to broadband and hi-speed internet, citizens can now dispense with a costly and bulky computers, and instead use their 3G cellphones for internet communications, watching television programs and, as was seen in the Arab Spring, filming real time events and uploading them to websites like YouTube for instant mass consumption.

On the ground in the developing world, digital technology has been a powerful democratizing force for people who had previously been living in pre-industrial conditions. Indeed, there are cyber utopians who see social media and the internet as a panacea which can cure all social ills ranging from weak infrastructure to authoritarian regimes. These cyber utopians see the internet itself as an intrinsic force for good. 

III.4 Cyber Agnostics:

The rosy cyber utopian scenario is opposed both by the cyber agnostics, or those who deny that the internet is inherently positive or negative, as well as by cyber Manichaeans, or those who see the internet as inherently sinister or evil.

 Perhaps the best known proponent of cyber-agnosticism is author Evgeny Morozov,[2] for whom cyber utopians   fail to see that the internet and social media guarantee nothing, and that these media are only technological tools that can be used either or for good or for evil.

 Morozov urges that we adopt a more dispassionate approach in our evaluation of the internet which he calls cyber-agnosticism: “For cyber-agnostics, the goodness or badness of the internet is besides the point altogether; individual technologies and practices are what deserve our attention.”[3]

Morozov introduces a healthy note of skepticism for all wishing to better understand and analyze the digital revolution; Morozov overlooks the fact that any new technology changes us even as we use it, and sometimes changing us in ways we never could have imagined.

For example, while he reports how dissidents employed the internet and social media as communications tools in the Arab Spring, he fails to consider the possibility of a generation gap due to the younger generation’s use of digital technology itself.  The content of the message being communicated is only part of the picture.

Another, perhaps equally important part, is the effect of the technology being used itself; as Marshall McLuhan noted, “The medium, or process, of our time – electronic technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of personal life… Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication…”[4]

In other words, one cannot properly assess the impact of a new technology without taking into account what some might call the unanticipated side effects the use of that technology might have.

For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, medical authorities recognize that a given medication might work well for a specific condition, but that the same medication might also have very unpleasant side effects even worse than the original problem. A classic case was Thalidomide, initially considered a “wonder drug “ for insomnia, but which later was discovered to cause horrendous birth defects in pregnant women. [5] The same potential for unintended side effects exists today in contemporary communications technology. For example, the now ubiquitous cell phone is generally recognized as an invaluable tool around the world for facilitating communications.[6]

However, the American Cancer Society now recommends minimizing use of hand-held devices because radiation from cellphones may cause brain cancer for your brain, and most authorities around the world would now agree that cell phones do not enhance driving at all.[7]

The sheer speed of technological change has seemingly presented government authorities with an almost impossible challenge; while the new technologies offer such great promise of economic and social progress, there is simply not enough time to explore the negative implications of any given technology until after it is already in widespread use. Such is the case with the internet. The popular demand for access to hi-speed internet has been so strong that even all but the most repressive regimes have been forced to offer some form of access to their population, albeit frequently with great ambivalence.[8]

III.5 The Cyber Manichaeans:

The Cyber Manichaeans are those who believe our exponentially increasing reliance on digital technology is inherently evil or destructive. Disparaged often as technological Luddites by cyber utopians and cyber agnostics the cyber Manichaeans often express strong emotional attachment to threatened analog technologies such as print, music and film. American author and media critic Nicholas Carr might be described as a cyber Manichaean when it comes to print.

 In the early days of digital technology in the 1980s, the speed of change was limited due to a lack of bandwidth. Lack of bandwidth means lower capacity to transmit information, and , as a result, the first media to have been threatened were those requiring low levels of electronic information, such as print and music; today, there are a few endangered species in the print medium. First and foremost, perhaps, is the newspaper, which was already struggling to survive after radio and television began to provide competing services and siphon off advertisers. The internet has effectively provided the coup de grace, and it has been estimated that newspapers will no longer be commercially viable in the United States by the year 2016. [9]

For those generations, which have grown up with newspapers as an essential element in the domestic and cultural environment, this will be a dramatic change. Some, like Nicholas Carr, have compared the digital revolution to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press; in this respect, Carr is in complete agreement with McLuhan’s famous thesis that  “the medium is the message.”

However, unlike McLuhan, Carr laments the displacement of traditional print media such as newspapers and books by electronic media like the internet and digital tablets. In his book, “The Shallows”, Carr makes the case that, for centuries, the very activity of reading has trained our brains to concentrate for extended periods of time, thus enabling serious thought. He fears that reliance on digital media will cause us, as a species, to lose this capacity to concentrate.[10]

As a result, Carr fears that future generations may be incapable of serious thought or contemplation – which most would agree would be a serious unintended side effect. However, while Carr makes an impassioned case, he neglects to explore what new positive cerebral capacities might evolve from exposure to digital media, capacities envisioned by McLuhan when he wrote :”The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”[11]

 In their book, “Born Digital- The First Generation of Digital Natives”,John Palfrey and Urs Gasser express a classic cyber utopian view when they write that:  ” the digital revolution has already made this world a better place…we are at a crossroads. There are two possible paths before us- one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet, and one in which we make smart choices and head towards a bright future in a digital age.”[12]

The Digital Revolution has thus swept the world into a technological crossroads, and international decision makers have few road maps to help guide them. Indeed, all they possess is empirical data derived from past human experience, along with a a vague belief, supported by general consensus that technological progress is good because all progress is inherently good - even though we know from many scientific studies of the environment that some technologies can cause major problems no one could have envisioned when these technologies were created.

In this context, it is worth noting that once prominent Cyber Utopians like Julian Assange have become increasingly Manichaean. In a recent op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune, for example, Julian Assange describes Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s new book The New Digital Age as “ a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism”, and warns that “the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable.”[13]

III.6   The Choice:  Entropy or Negentropy?

In the laws of thermodynamics and biology, entropy describes the state of being incapable of change, or adaptation to ever-changing biological imperatives, and which ultimately perishes. These terms from biology are sometimes used to describe the spiritual state of a culture or a civilization as a living organism.

American media critic Gene Youngblood employs this analogy in his visionary work “Expanded Cinema”, when he writes, ” We’ve learned from physics that the only anti-entropic force in the universe, or what is called negentropy (negative entropy) results from the process of feedback. Feedback exists between systems that are not closed, but rather open and contingent upon other systems…for most practical purposes, it is enough to say a system is “closed’ when entropy dominates the feedback process.”[14]

Confronted by the rapid onslaught of technological change, it is important to note that institutional and corporate responses to the digital revolution around the world have frequently been both reactionary and negative.  Change is seen as a threat to vested political and economic interests, and the telecommunications revolution certainly threatens the status quo in a multitude of ways.

For example, in countries like France and Brazil, newspaper publishers have seen what has happened to their colleagues in the United States, and they are refusing to participate in the Google Search engine; they do not see why they should hasten their own demise by giving Google data free of charge that Google will then use to augment its user base, thereby becoming ever more attractive to advertisers.

These publishers are absolutely correct, of course, but one suspects even they realize they are only buying time, and that they cannot delay the inevitable.

Such, at any rate, as shall be seen, has been the case with the music industry

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[1] Followers of the Swedish media debate may remember a similar breakdown of attitudes towards technology in the late Lasse Svanberg’s excellent “ Stalsparven – Om 90-talets medier och om” informationssamhaellet”.Prisma, 1991, p.4

[2] Evgeny Morozov ( The Net Delusion)Public Affairs, 2011, p. xii

[3] Evgeny Morozov  ( ibid.) p.337

[4] McLuhan and Fiore ( ibid) p.8

[5] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

[6] According to the International Telecommunications Union, an estimated 86.7% of the world’s population had cellphone access in 2012. Mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#subscribers

[7] www.ehow.com/list_6088733_cell-phone-side-effects-html/

[8]  North Korea is currently the only country that does not offer any internet access to its citizens. En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_North Korea

[9] WCIC

[10] Nicholas  Carr (The Shallows- What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”)W.W. Norton and Company, 2011

[11]   McLuhan and Fiore,(Ibid,) P.67

[12] John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (Born Digital- Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives ) Basic Books, 2011, p.7

[13] Julian Assange ( The Banality of ‘don’t de evil’) International Herald Tribune, June 3, 2013

[14]  Gene Youngblood ( Expanded Cinema)E.P. Dutton, 1970. P.63