www.labyrinth.net.au/~saul/essays/01prehist.html#harold
Technologies of Time and
Space:
a prehistory of multimedia
Many of us remember when
'multimedia' just meant using different materials within the same creative work
-- paintings, for example, were multimedia if they included a few objects stuck
onto the canvas as well as paint. During the 70s and 80s, at least within the
art world, its usage became narrower and was usually restricted to works which
included a temporal and/or performance element. This included, for example, the
use of slideshows and film. More recently, since the advent of widespread use
of personal computers, its meaning has become further restricted. Cotton and
Oliver, in their 1993 publication 'Understanding Hypermedia', define it
as "born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies. Its raw
ingredients are images, sound, text, animation and video which can be brought
together in any combination."(*1). Most
commentators include some notion of 'interactivity' within their definitions
and, increasingly, reference the growing usage of telecommunications networks
to deliver content to users. 'New Media' is an even more vexed concept. There
is little agreement in what does or does not constitute it -- although most
people think it has something to do with computers.
As with any other creative
medium it is impossible to more than subjectively react to 'new media' or
'multimedia' works unless you have some grasp of the history and concepts which
have informed its development.
Let's look first at what
we mean by 'media': My dictionary doesn't even mention the press or television
-- although the use of egg white as a medium in painting does gets a look in.
In fact, the closest the dictionary gets is to say; "means or
agency". On the other hand when we say media we mean
'communications media' and we probably mean something like SF writer Bruce
Sterling did when, in his alternate life as an archivist, he wrote:
"Media
is a commodity. Media is something that is sold to us. Media can be something
that we are sold to, even. Media is an everyday thing. You can buy bandwidth in
job lots. You can watch television, buy books, videos, records, CDs, but that's
not it. That's not what's interesting.
·
Media
is an extension of the senses.
·
Media
is a mode of consciousness.
·
Media
is extra-somatic memory. It's a crystallization of human thought that survives
the death of the individual.
·
Media
generates simulacra. The mechanical reproduction of images is media.
·
Media
is a means of social interaction.
·
Media
is a means of command and control.
·
Media
is statistics, knowledge that is gathered and generated by the state.
·
Media
is economics, transactions, records, contracts, money and the records of money.
·
Media
is the means of civil society and public opinion. Media is a means of debate
and decision and agitpropaganda."
Bruce Sterling "The
Life and Death of Media", Speech at Sixth International Symposium on
Electronic Art ISEA '95Montreal
This represents a profound
transformation of our understanding of our lives and reality. Media, many have
argued, has come to constitute our reality. The advent of each new
communications technology increases our ability to reach out and access an ever
larger world and, in so doing, changes us and that world. McLuhan's
aphorism; 'the medium is the message' has become famous because it sums up this
reality. McLuhan goes on to note,
"This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any
medium that is, of any extension of ourselves result
from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of
ourselves, or by any new technology." He points out that a medium does not
have to have interpretable content - a message as such, (he uses the example of
electric light), and notes that the content of any medium is always
another medium - the content of writing is speech, the written word is the
content of print etc., whilst its message is the change of scale or pace or
pattern or possibilities that it introduces into human affairs.
So technology both alters
our picture of the world and fundamentally transforms us as well. Widespread
literacy and the advent of printed books changed us from intuitive to
analytical thinkers and expanded our ability to generalise and reason about
cause and effect. The development of computers in the post-World War 11 era has
brought profound and far reaching changes in our social interactions and our
concept of the universe -- indeed we have come to think of the building blocks
of life as being information and growth as being the result of communication
between parts.
What is now known as
interactive multimedia grew out of a very wide range of parallel developments in
fields as diverse as art, film, television, telecommunications, digital optical
storage, psychology and computer science. The major
'hard' technological developments which made interactive multimedia/hypermedia
available were the invention and deployment of the telegraph, telephone and
cinematography in the 19th century, radio at the turn of the century, the
invention of television in the the 1930s, the digital
computer in the 40's and 50's and the emergence of the personal computer in the
70's. Each of these 'stepping stones' has had a profound effect on the
development of interactive multimedia not just because they were essential
enabling technologies (in the sense that we needed to be able to capture, store
and transmit or display pictures, sound, and text), but because the
communications models that each of these set up have provided the basis for and
continue to inform or affect the ways in which we think about, create and
consume multimedia. And, of course, there has been a reciprocal effect back on
these technologies with, for example, the development of web radio, interactive
TV (although we are still waiting for this one to eventuate in any useful
form), CGI in cinematic post-production, computer animation, video
conferencing, etc. Other technologies have been superseded; for example, the
telegraph has been completely replaced, initially and partially by the
telephone, then the fax machine and today by email.
American
writer, Harold Innis, has observed that
prior to the advent of digital technology, media either extended communication
through space or through time. He cites the development of alphabetical writing, movable type printing, musical notation, painting
etc as technologies that extend content through time; the telephone and radio
as examples that extend content through space. Interactive multimedia is
the first media which extends communications through both of these dimensions
simultaneously; it allows the extension of communication through time in its
role as a storage mechanism, and through space particularly through the
Internet. It also overturns previous technologies' relationships with
users/audiences. Most communications technologies of the 20th century have been
'one to many' technologies providing fixed programming to mass audiences (think
cinema, television, radio), or 'one to one' communications devices (the
telephone and the photographic print). Interactive multimedia, and by this we
increasingly mean the Internet, allows both of these possibilities as well as
everything in-between. Other media, with some minor exceptions and of course
the major exception of print, temporally constrain their audiences both in when
they will receive their content and by having an unchangeable extension through
time -- you can't fast forward through a radio show or flip to the end of a
movie or telephone conversation to find out the conclusions. Even print media
cannot generally be cross-referenced in real time. The exceptions, of course,
are all in individual storage media -- video tapes and various audio recording
formats. Digital media, on the other hand, collapses time -- both in storing
its content, no matter how linear in display, as an indistinguishable mass of
'1s' and '0s', and in displaying its content which can be called up at any
time.
For our purposes in examining the
roots of digital media, although speech, the alphabet, printing and art are all
important enabling technologies, the telegraph and photography are really where
it all began. These two constitute a matched pair in that not
only were the developed more or less concurrently but each was a major
step in the extension of time or space. The photograph allowed the extension of
a single visual moment, objectively recorded on a durable surface, into the
future; whilst telegraphy was the first technology to bridge spaces greater
than the throw of the human voice. It initiated the birth of the 'skin of
electric communications' which now wraps the entire globe and is exemplified by
the Internet. It was the first electronic medium, the first industrial use of
electricity, and the most abstract form of communication ever invented.
A brief
history of the Morse Telegraph
Morse's invention of the telegraph
in the 1830-40s was also a precursor to our contemporary communications network
in that it transmitted its messages as a series of dot and dashes, a binary
code, in an almost instantaneous manner. It did this at time in which
information had had to be physically carried from one location to another and
was therefore limited in its dissemination by the speed of its conveyance
irrespective of whether it was via the postal system or carried by private
messenger. Time lag for transmitting information was expected and could stretch
into months when the source and destination were widely separated
geographically. At first the very speed of telegraphic communication was a
cause for distrust and this was exacerbated by the sheer abstractness of the
medium of communication, dots and dashes, which required training before
messages could be encoded or decoded. Trained telegraph operators were a
prerequisite and messages could only travel via special telegraph stations
connected by cables to each other. It took several years before the public
trusted information which had arrived to them via cable -- newspapers, for
example refused to print news which had arrived via cable as they doubted its
veracity. Reuters, now the largest news agency in the world, had its beginnings
in the 1840's and initially became successful because it operated a
bio-communications (pigeon post) network in conjunction with its telegraph
network. Major newspapers would only print information transmitted via pigeon
post or human agency up until 1858, when the London Times consented to print a
speech by Napoleon III received by Reuters via the Channel wire -- this despite
the fact that the cable had been in place for some seven years.
This distrust of
telegraphic communications was scarcely a lone example of general resistance to
change -- it seems that the veracity and/or morality of information stored
and/or transmitted by almost every new communications technology has been
questioned and for some time refused. Even
writing was condemned, most famously by Socrates, when it was first introduced
into
Telegraphy not only made the
telephone conceptually possible, it laid the material grounds for its
dissemination with the telephone networks extending the cabling already put in
place for the telegraphy network. Telephony was an 'accidental' invention.
Graham Alexander Bell, was actually trying to develop
an hearing aid for his deaf wife. He had seized upon telegraphy as a paradigm,
seeking a 'harmonic telegraph' to transform speech into electrical signals
which could be written visually as in a telegraph. Telephony, from its
patenting in 1876 (just hours before a patent application for an almost
identical device was lodged by Elias Grey), was far more publicly popular than
the telegraph despite being derided by experts as simply an 'electric toy'. By
the turn of the century telephone calls outnumbered telegraph messages by 50:1
and it provided the catalyst for the invention of the radio.
Alexander Graham Bell's Path to the Telephone
Telephone History Series by Tom Farley
Hacker Crackdown: CRASHING THE SYSTEM, by Bruce Sterling
Paul Levinson positions
the popularity of the telephone as residing in the fundamental role of speech
in the human condition -- a role so central to our understanding of humanity that
it seems odd to call speech a medium at all. Speech seems to be 'hardwired'
into the human brain -- we learn to speak unconsciously and it is the one
communicative act that all undamaged human being partake of. People needed
minimal amounts of training to use a telephone and it provided a possibility
whose usefulness in the their everyday lives the
public could immediately grasp. The
telephone is also unique amongst communications media in that it is intrusive
-- it makes each of us individually available to other people whether we want
contact with them or not (despite answering machines) -- in a very real sense it has made every space a public space,
particularly since the advent of cellular phones.
The other aspect of
telephony to be noted is that it has remained little changed from its original
form -- sure, we now have cordless and cellular phones, but all those other
possible developments, and in particular 'picture phones', have failed to transpire.
Of course, video conferencing and internet applications such as CUSeeMe are available, but they have not become central to
people's communications with each other in the way in which telephones very
rapidly did, and they have certainly not superseded or affected telephony in
the way in which television did radio.
Marconi originally intended the
radio to be a 'telephone without wires for the populace' -- a 'many to many'
communications device which has only seen its fulfillment
in the Internet He was stymied in this intention by the high cost of
transmitters compared with the relatively low cost of receivers which ensured,
instead, its development as a 'one to many' mass communications device.
Marconi's first trans-Atlantic test took place in 1901 in which he transmitted
the simple message 'S' (3 dots in Morse code). It took Sarnoff's
notion of a 'radio music box' for a use to be found for radio -- however, once
that use was found, the radio, with its
potential of transmitting in realtime to millions of
receivers, changed the world. Once the radio was understood to be
something other than a wireless telephone, its political uses and consequences
were quickly grasped by governments. In the States this government interest
took the form of control and censorship building on the 1927 Federal Radio Act
which insisted that radio was to serve the public convenience, interest and
necessity. The 'public interest' came to be judged as whether or not content
was obscene or seditious.
More influential, however, was the potential that
radio embodied as a propaganda tool. Radio brought public 'theatrical' entertainment
into the home. Previously theatrical entertainments were only accessible in the
public sphere -- the cinema, concert hall, or theatre. Radio, as did television
later, brought the world into the home -- and gave political leaders a hitherto unimagined access to
entire populations. Radio, and later, television, were technologies for an
increasingly 'antisocial' society. Changes in industrial production, a distinct
rise in the general standard of living, and the mass embrace of the motor car
was changing the landscape of society. Workers could own their own homes and
suburbs sprung up. An increasingly large management class was expected to
relocate at the whim of their employers and workers were also increasingly
mobile as they changed jobs or were fired in response to economic cycles. The
extended family, which had persisted in an attenuated form through the
Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, disappeared and the nuclear family
became the standard social unit. People no longer lived their entire lives
within walking distance of their birthplaces and with people they had known
their entire lives; suburbs were communities of strangers whose major
relationship was that of similarity of income and lifestyle. Competition
between print media 'barons' led to the sensationalisation
of the news, with newspapers seizing on each and any lurid assault, rape or
murder in their attempts to boost circulation. The serial killer became a media phenomena. Mass migration after both world wars
tended to further cut traditional community ties and people retreated into
their homes, exhausted by their workaday world and increasingly fearful of that
outside their doors. Individual social space shrunk to a narrow orbit;
workplace, home, shop, designated entertainment area -- and as space shrunk so
too did social contacts. Radio, and
later television, provided a substitute community -- but without demands or
stress of personal involvement. Consumed within family settings, media took the family as its main subject,
replacing direct involvement in the local community with an ersatz intimacy
with glamorized fictional families.
'Mother
Listens In': Winner of 3LO's Photo Contest, 1925
Source: Archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Social education used the
popularity of the continuing narratives of radio 'soaps' -- so called because
their popularity ensured their sponsorship by soap manufactures -- the BBC
series The
Archers, for example, was funded by the British Government to educate the
rural population regarding new and more efficient agricultural techniques. In 1934
Lewis Mumford warned that ...the secondary personal
contact with voice...may increase the amount of mass regimentation.,
he noted that overcoming the tyranny of distance has ...mobilised and hastened
mass-reactions. Political leaders were not slow to use this to their party's
advantage. In Russia, a huge country with low literacy rates and a highly oral
culture, radio provided the Communists with an extremely effective means to
mobilise the population in favour of their policies -- perhaps most
influentially Stalin's July 1941 appeal to 'scorch the earth' in resistance to
the German invaders. In America Roosevelt used radio to project an image of
action and strength, despite his confinement to wheelchair. His 'fireside chats'
were so effective that he was returned to power 3 times. 
It was Hitler however whose regime was most dependent on the power of
radio. He had always had a strong belief in the superior power of the spoken word,
writing in Mein Kampf that all
great, world-shaking events have been brought about, not by written matter, but
by the spoken word. (*3) More importantly, given that he espoused a doctrine of
Aryan superiority whilst looking anything but, radio allowed people to focus on
what he said rather than how he looked.
It is important to remember that radio was
essentially a live medium until the 50s --indeed, playing recorded material was anathema to
broadcasters. In addition, radio was a hugely profitable business generating
huge amounts of advertising revenue by virtue of its ability to reach into
every home and compel listeners to hear sponsors' messages if they wanted to
hear the programs. Television, invented early in the century
but not commercially viable until the 50's, changed all that by compellingly
combining the intimacy of radio with visual images. The invention of
television can be traced to early mechanical devices such as Nipkow's scanning disk for transmitting images (1884), but
the complete development of a functioning television system is credited to both
Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin in the 1920's. The rise of the
television paralleled the development of radio with the sponsor firmly in
control of programming. Some have suggested that television's 'Golden Age' was,
in fact, primarily a strategy to market television sets -- 'sell-o-vision',
using programs with beautiful or spectacular scenic locations. Advertisers quickly realized that TV
presented an unparalleled opportunity to reach consumer markets which could be
used to create 'needs' for new products. "In the 'American system of
broadcasting', television has become far more that a commercial enterprise, it
is a marketplace of far reaching social, political and economic consequences --
a 'technology of cultural domination'." (*4).
Whatever, the immediate effect of
television was that radio seemed a dead duck. Its
lifeblood, advertising revenues, dropped alarmingly as sponsors deserted for
the glamorous new medium and radio seemed fated to go the way of the telegraph
until it found a new raison d'ętre through parallel technological development.
Ever smaller portable radios broke the tyranny of the living room and allowed
people to listen in the car, at work, at the beach... and incidentally shifted
radio listening from a communal familial activity with its concomitant of
control by parents, to being an individual and self-determined activity.
Advances in audio recording and storage technologies, including multi-tracking
and over-dubbing, allowed recorded material to approach live-broadcasts in
terms of quality of sound at a fraction of the cost. And social and economic
changes created the concept of 'youth' as a distinct socio-economic market
symbolised by the fiercely partisan positions taken vis-‡-vis
rock and roll. Radio survived because it
transformed itself into a promotional tool for the new music industry and
because it could be listened to anywhere and whilst doing something else --
that is, it allowed multitasking in a way in which no other medium did.
Audio recording and storage
technologies had developed more or less independently of audio transmission. The phonograph was
invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. He initially saw its chief commercial
potential as being a telephone recording device. However, despite improvements
in recorded sound quality due to improvements in storage medium (from wax
cylinder to wire to Bakelite disc), the phonograph remained essentially
unchanged for 70 years in that once a series of sounds were recorded they could
not be reconfigured. It was not until the 40s that audio tape, invented in
1928, became available and allowed editing first via splicing, and then multitracking and overdubbing. Nothing much changed until
the 70s when the audio cassette sparked a home recording boom which, at the
time, seemed to threaten the dominance of the record companies.
Audio recordings' greatest effect
was in relation to cinema, itself an outgrowth of photography. Humans have
always tried to record the appearance of things but until photography was
invented in the 19th century such representations were intrinsically subjective
and dependent on the skill of the artist. The 16th century saw a huge outburst
of scientific interest and research following the invention of the movable type
press in the mid-15th century. Optics was one of the hottest topics as
concurrent advances in glass-production and lens grinding technology allowed
the production of ever more precise and flawless lens. Camera obscuras and camera lucidas
were common as both artists' tools and as amusements. The magic lantern, a
simple device consisting of a box containing a light source and a curved
mirror, was invented in 1645 by a Jesuit
scholar and was an essential technological and conceptual step towards
cinema. It was not until the 19th century that a means was found to fix
reflections of reality onto a surface. Photography's ability to record, in
seemingly objective and complete detail, real images, at once threatened arts
primary purpose -- recording the world. Painting retaliated by finding a new
purpose in stressing and celebrating the subjectivity of the artist, accusing
photography of being g incapable of ever being more than a record of reality.
Despite almost immediate use of the medium as a creative tool, photography
still is considered by many to be a minor art at best.
The ability to fix images to a
durable surface afforded by photography, in conjunction with the independent
development of moving pictures through the 'philosophical toys' such as the zoetrope
and praxinoscope
of the 19th century led to cinema, via Edison's Kinetiscope,
at the end of the century. Credit for its invention usually goes to the Lumiere
brothers. The most important technological innovations include the development
by Eastman of celluloid film, the introduction of synced sound in 1927, and
Technicolour film in 1935. What perhaps has been more significant innovation in
cinema have come from developments in concept and practice -- how cinema has
been thought about and made.
Commentators, and
bureaucrats, have often used cinema as a model for multimedia, comparing its
current state of development to that of the early days of cinema. By this they
mean two things: firstly that the technology is still at ar
relatively primitive stage -- display and storage is still very limited and
clumsy whilst improvements such as virtual reality and reality engines are
extremely expensive. More i importantly the second
similarity that they are drawing attention to is the
way that we think about multimedia. And the use of the cinema metaphor is part
of the problem. We are making and thinking about multimedia as though it is
simply a superior kind of cinema or television, just as in the early days of
film its major creative use was as a means of recording staged entertainments.
Once over the sheer excitement of seeing moving images of real people early
cinematographers quickly realized that to sustain their audiences they needed
to appeal to them with stories. And the theatre was the obvious source of
previous content and experience in staging fictional entertainments. So early narrative cinema tended to be made as though the camera
was a theatre audience member. Long unmoving takes
operating through time in a linear manner -- telling the story from the
beginning to end. However film is not theatre and in those early days it
suffered from a variety of technical limitations including shortness of film
stock, and lack of sound and colour.
Of course it did not take
long for someone to notice that film could do something that live performance
could not -- it could be edited. The French animator/vaudeville artist, Melies, Melies is credited with having invented stop-motion
cinematography, and in-camera editing, when, in 1898, his camera jammed
whilst he was filming passer-bys on the Place de l'Opera
in
However, stopping and
starting the film inside the camera was cumbersome entailing that each shot was
set up in sequence and any mistakes could mean starting over from scratch.
Luckily the rolled celluloid film patented by George Eastman for still cameras
in 1889 proved to be an ideal medium for motion pictures and allowed for
mechanical splicing. This allowed film to be more than a copy of life in
action; scenes that followed one another in real life could be separated on
film, and scenes that had no connection to each other in real life could be
brought together. American filmmaker, Edwin Porter saw the creative possibilities
of Melies discovery and added to them by physically
cutting and splicing film together in 'The Life of the American Fireman' and
' The Great Train Robbery', both
produced in 1903. Despite arguments that such editing went against natural
order and audiences would not be able to follow them, viewers loved the
innovation and had no trouble following the narratives as they jumped from
place to place and back and forward in time. DW Griffith built on these
innovations as well as inventing a whole host of new cinematic tricks including
the moving camera and variable focal length shots a decade or so later, whilst
the advent of Soviet montage, particularly through its most famous exponent,
Eisenstein, completed the transformation of film from being a passive copier of
the real to being an active creator of cinematic realities.
In a famous 1919
experiment, Lev Kuleshov edited footage of an actor's
face before three other images; a bowl of hot soup, a woman lying dead in a
coffin, and a little girl playing with a toy bear. Each sequence was shown to a
separate audience, and each audience saw three very different emotions --
hunger, horror, parental love -- expressed by identical images of the actor. Kuleshov had demonstrated that editing, the concatenation
of separate shots, was more powerful than the content. Eisenstein went on to
further explicate that narrative is created not by the content of the
individual shots in a film but by their interaction. This was really the birth
of cinema as we know it and the basis of comparisons between film history and
contemporary multimedia. It took three decades for cinema to find its own
unique identity, what it was good at, and to stop trying to apply the
conventions of earlier media.
Many think that it still
remains for multimedia to do the same thing. Jay David Bolter and Richard Guarin in their recent book, 'Remediation' disagree. For them no media can be as purist as formalist
critics like Harold Greenberg would have it -- they see each succeeding media
'enfolding' the styles, techniques and content of earlier media, 're-mediating'
them and forming a new identity from old components. This process has become
increasingly rapid as digital technologies transform the production and
transmission of all media.
N E
X T : Computers and
the development of Interactivity
On-line Sources (not credited within the text)
The Life and Death of
Media; Bruce Sterling
Griffin
University Dead Media Project
Persistence of Vision:
Animation Technologies and concepts
A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N D
Radio 4's - The Archers, as Postmodern
Drama. by Linda
Tame
Lewis Mumford; Art and Technology 1934 - Writings and Theories
Make a
Thomas Edison Phonograph
Footnoted Books
*1 p. 8, Bob Cotton & Richard Oliver, Understanding
Hypermedia: From multimedia to virtual reality, Phaidon,
*2 p 56, Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A natural history and future of the
information revolution, Routledge,
*3 p. 469, Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A natural history and future of the
information revolution, Routledge,
*4 p. 3 Peter D'Agostino, 'Transmission: Theory and practice for a new television aesthetics', 1985
*5 Jay David Bolter &
Richard Guarin, Remediations,
1999
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Shiralee Saul: Originally authored
1998, last updated January 2001