Andrew Repasky McElhinney's thoughts on the development of Net-based Video on Demand
Hello All,
I was asked for some sound bites on my thoughts on Net-based Video on Demand which I thought might be something you'd enjoy thinking about...
Andrew------------
Hi Andrew,
I am doing an article on the newest development in Net-based Video on Demand (see a similar article below). I wanted to know if I could get a couple of quickie quotes from you on this subject.
Specifically, I want to know what you think about the 3 questions below...
1. What will the development of Net-based Video on Demand do in regard to building public interest in Video on Demand?
ARM: What is video on demand? What will we be seeing? What is being sold to us as necessity?
Cinema is dead and died some time around its hundredth birthday at the last turn of the century. How did this happen, you ask? Cinema first started to lose its purity (and potential) with the advent of sound and the domination of the template of “filmed theater†and three-act dramatic structure. America became post-literate in the 1970s when allusion stopped being socio-literary in favor of referencing visual/audio pop culture. Viewer/consumers have changed their dissemination of media so that the “literal†or actual is eschewed for an immediate grab at the interpretive. (It’s behavior akin to just eating the cheese on top of French Onion Soup.) The Ibsenite sense of “the well made play†was thusly fragmented into sound bites – sound bites signifying everything, but meaning nothing, because they have no context.
Which brings us to today. Now the “sound bites†are evolving into a multimedia device that will ultimately allow viewers to access this "new media" (a term I use to denote the hybrid of film/program/videogame) in a more and more intimate (i.e. first person) way.
New media will feed both need of the consumer to project his or her status in society and the apparent (but falsely constructed) definition of the self that most modern American individuals glean from consumerism and the act of consumption. Just as Andy Warhol’s films were “better talked about than seen,†new media is about owning the ability to define self, not actually defining self. Alas, content is now secondary and ultimately valueless because the dramatic climatic catharsis of modern drama has moved from the third act to the act of buying the ticket, DVD or video on demand. With Walkmans, wireless internet and camera phones, media’s hardware has become fashion and totems of self. Self is defined as worth (i.e. perceived value) in modern America culture. America is a society that defines itself by its consumption and its (short-sighted) luxury, the ability to waste.
Ergo, in answer to your question, America will love Video on Demand and the Net will make it popular. But the question I want to ask is “what’s next†after that? Not this month, or year, but in the next decades to come? I believe it is the natural evolutionary mutation of new media that the hardware of self next be installed into the user -- both for entertainment and as a (perhaps nefarious, perhaps secret) system of biodata collection. After all, aren’t we constantly told that “freedom isn’t free...�
Narrative has been collapsed into sound bites -- on the other side of this (black) rabbit hole of post-modernism is (self-) constructed animated video games (represented today in most Hollywood “Blockbuster/Event Moviesâ€). Sadly, there is no real opposition because everyone in the industry, from almost all studio heads down to most film critics, make their money (i.e. selfworth) by promoting the evolution of packaged sound bites.
Over a hundred years ago, William Butler Yeats sought to establish an “unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society where admission is by favor and never to many.†While I am not an elitist like Yeats, insomuch as I believe everyone should have free and total access to information, I also suspect that it is only by the adopting the “unpopular†that new media can earn any context – not to say purity, poetry and truth. How to transcend the thesis that the “unpopular†equals the “uncommercialâ€? Obviously, all art/media/information should be free. But money and transfer of funds have replaced critical thinking and the need for real information. Money is the new freedom for many Americans. As Donald Trump once said, “It’s the art of the deal.â€
Right now, the new media is in the realm of fantasy and wish fulfillment, yet soon, like any piece of advertising, it will be shaped to appeal to more and more specific niches of consumers. The Apple Corporation’s Mac and Final Cut Pro have made professional production of home movies affordable to the moneyed (i.e. debt incurring) classes. Home movies are about documenting self . Look at the popularity of "reality TV" – already the personal is fused with the (false) epic narrative device of new media which has replaced context.
Susan Sontag told us in 1964 that “self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.†This is why I am not interested in consuming the new media. In the next 50 years it looks like movies, tv, videogames, iTunes will all become one until finally the new media offers a full, personal alternative to real self. In a culture of violence such as ours, where Frank Wedekind proposed that individuals are so isolated from themselves that violence ceases to have meaning, the ultimate annihilation of self happens on the greedy altar of consumerism. America finds meaning in its isolation at the expense of the unconsidered. This will no doubt delight many viewer/consumers, allowing them to enjoy something they have no responsibility to. But at what costs really? A few “art films†not getting made? Most of American society is only interested in beer and TV and of course viscera without moral (or even amoral) context. To this end, the first-person shooter video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) is the most important piece of cinema of the last few years. The computers, which have almost fully replaced the cameras, will lead us to a new age of the primitive. We've peaked the mountain of modernity and are cascading down the other side. Corporations will replace the crucifix with the iPod. Infotainment is now the opiate of the masses.
But as cinema has collapsed, so human relations have suffered. New media doesn’t offer the glimpses of dreams (silent) cinema once did, but rather a blitz of anesthetizing escapism and lies. When infotainment is all-encompassing, why dream? Today, in 2006, Global societal collapse seems more possible than ever before. New media just distracts the American citizenry from the real problems in our great nation’s infrastructure, because the corporate cult of consumerism is moving all product towards the first person (shooter). Because new media is a pacifier, there is no desire for ambiguity or uncertainty or even unhappy endings, and thus new media has no real possibility to represent actual context. Thus new media has no emotional value.
For example, consumers are less reliant on journalism to form their ideas. Things like Video on Demand make third party mitigation unnecessary in its soulless communion with (misguided or deluded) self. The real question you should ask is how long can the new media insulate America in its bubblem like a great ostrich with its head in the sand? Eventually, when the unjust war we cannot afford or the ecological disasters that grow more furious with every hurricane season turn off the nation’s power and the food supply from country to cities stops, Americans will be faced with their true selves, without the blanket of “new media.†We’ve all seen Forbidden Planet (1956), right? America is the Krell.
2. Will the development of Net-based Video on Demand encourage Hollywood to put more contemporary movies online for download?
ARM: Maybe for a time, until all other markets (video stores, Netflix, theaters) are smothered. Then there will be no need to lavish capital on the creation of niche product. For example, Borders Books had quite a nice selection until they put every independent bookstore out of business, and now every Borders' stores are a morass of pop detritus. Everything will be homogenized, yet people will accept it, because of the fact that the new media is “first person†(i.e. it interacts, interfaces with the user/consumer) and therefore must represent a “truth.†As long as consumers believe they are individually part of something bigger, and that it is made for them, their desire to acquire it will not abate as long as their individual, selfish identity-needs (i.e. definition of self and status of worth) are being meet. After all, “new media†is only interpretive and can not exist without a consumer’s interface. America is “post-literate,†remember?
3. Will the development of Net-based Video on Demand disrupt DVD sales and rentals?
ARM: What an unimportant question! DVDs are a temporal form of compressing new media’s data. DVDs do not matter. Eventually DVDs will go the way of the laserdisc or the 8-track or 35mm film. Eventually people’s TV, movie theaters, computers, internet and cell phone will all be the same device. I do not think it unlikely that said devices will be installed into a person, maybe at birth, maybe under law. Whether this happens before a global collapses plummets everyone into modern primitivism in our lifetimes is anyone’s guess. To some extent, it is up to who we elect to lead and represent us. This is why the apathy of new media is so malignantly cancerous. Oh yes, but God forbid DVD sales are interrupted!