i think you're all crazy for getting rid of your optical drives: notes from a technophile luddite

asking around, it's clear that almost nobody has optical drives around their home anymore, unless they have a blu-ray player or a game console attached to a television. young people in particular simply do not have access to an optical drive in their life. in truth most people don't seem to care and won't miss them, convinced that streaming provides a convenient and inexpensive push-button, remote-control access to everything that matters. the removal of bulky optical drives from laptops makes them thin and sexy, because the market has been repeatedly convinced by Apple Computer that thin and sexy is the best thing for laptops to be. and look at that – Apple has a streaming store, one of the first big ones on the internet. how convenient that for almost ten years now they haven’t allowed their customers the choice to have an optical drive in their systems

forget the fact that independent media productions are almost universally locked out of the streaming services that people actually use (except youtube, a platform on which the only way to make any money at all is to be immensely popular). ignore the ability to trade media with friends or like-minded communities, to borrow media from libraries, purchase titles from around the world, or sell media on used markets when the user is finished using it. nevermind the fact that streaming services in fact have only a very limited archive of media currently available, and almost universally present little depth or breadth to their available media: no controversy, no history, nothing which is too weird or hard to understand, nothing from other times or other countries. just the same collection of corporate material found on walmart shelves and gas station discount bins three for five dollars. these are inconveniences, certainly, but the more significant reason that i think everyone should keep an optical drive around is control

it is important to recognise that tangible benefits do exist for media streaming, not the least of which are environmental in nature. while streaming services use more electricity than Netflix, Apple, or indeed almost everyone would like to admit, over a period longer than ten years optical media have a tendency to end up not on the shelves of domestic or public libraries but rather in landfills, and at many times in their lifespan their physical presence signals the expenditure of gasoline for shipping. it is encouraging that optical media are able to be industrially recycled, but since doing so costs money which municipalities are not paying, only the most dedicated and wealthy consumer would ever worry about the environmental footprint of their optical media use and take the time to expensively ship their garbage discs to recyclers. furthermore, from the point of view of media users it is far more convenient to select a film from a streaming archive than to go to a store or shop online for an optical disc. streaming services also allow access to a more broad community of users, as geographical isolation tends to cohabitate with media isolation. with access to streaming services, rural communities are less dependent on the habits or economic realities of their local retail store owners, for example. the immediacy of the archive provokes a false sense of media expertise, of falsely enjoying a position of privilege and control. “i’m no sucker,” says the Netflix streamer. “i am more in control over my media experiences than anyone ever before”

however, it is not likely that Netflix will ever pick up that interesting bela tarr film people sometimes write about. those interesting Iranian films from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s which poetically blended fiction and non-fiction into potent political allegories are not likely to be bought by streaming services, given the chameleon nature of geopolitical happenstance. inspired by a friend’s recent binge of japanese underground cyberpunk films of the 1990s, a search online only leads to disappointment when learning that no current service offers even Tetsuo the Iron Man, which is a million times more visible than any of the other weirdo films mentioned by that friend. in fact Netflix has nothing at all approaching sections for art and experimental films, silent films or the early hollywood studio era, european modernism, Bollywood musicals, or guerilla documentaries from the margins of latin american and african post-colonialism. due to competing licensing concerns, Netflix isn't even the best place for blockbuster films, as the studios are slowly trying to each have their own smaller netflixes, presenting a future in which fans collect apps instead of movies or music

while Spotify is smart enough to have licensed weirdos such as :zoviet*france: to their platform, the business model they offer to artists (aka no money at all) will not allow the next weirdo band to emerge, unless those weirdos happen to be independently wealthy. my guess is that if they are still around in twenty years, Spotify will be a frontend for Top40 artists whose new licenses give them copyright access to the archives of recorded music history for free 'as a service to their fans'. sure, weirdos and independent media could set up their own websites to allow consumers access, but the reality is that those attempts rarely work. as any independent media person could tell you, the vast majority of people simply will not go out of their way to access your independent media. in the early days of the internet david bowie and prince offered fans a direct sales model which in addition to music and video material also provided email and music licensing services, but not too many people used them. it is definitely tough for artists to sell to fans directly, however with optical drives at least there remains a possibility for such an exchange to occur. randomly go to a bar and be impressed by the band to the point where you buy a disc – it can be played in any optical disc player. some random street vendor in taipei is selling local music on disc – it can be played in any optical disc player. for a long time profits in the music industry were sustained by artificially inflated compact disc prices, and consumers were rightly pissed at being asked to pay $15 for 74 minutes of crap to hear the 5-minute song they actually wanted to purchase. but streaming and downloading music does not sabotage the profits of the record industry, whose artists are essentially multinational media investments backed by sufficient financial capital to use 'songs' and 'music' as advertisements for fan participation in a celebrity 'experience'. music fans who don't pay for music are not 'striking back at the industry'; they are failing to provide artists who aren't superstars with a revenue stream on which they can tour and produce music, rent an apartment, and buy food

now that optical drives are increasingly not owned by media consumers, the vast majority of optical disc content not transferred to streaming services will remain arcane mysteries except to the most dedicated of media scholars, existing as a hazy ‘there-be-dragons’ cloud of bytes locked behind an artificially antiquated viewing practice. after all, in both cases the viewing practice is the same; what has changed is the means of distribution, with new forms of distribution falling under the control of an increasingly smaller elite of corporate entities. after a number of years teaching film and media studies classes, it is clear to me that media content which is not immediately clickable simply does not exist for the streaming generation. content is somewhat secondary to convenience of access: students will click and watch a maya deren film on youtube, but will not watch an older version of Star Wars on DVD. perhaps such is inevitable, and the media consumption of the masses has always been of concern to media scholars, but i understand the termination of access to physical media as signalling something else, something a bit more consequential. not quite the tired end-of-history talk common to end-of-media discourse, but worry rather about a more precisely prescribed history to come

the point i wish to make here is much less about what is available on streaming services than what is made unavailable by the loss of optical media drives. as a Netflix subscriber myself – for the tv shows they produce – this article is not intended to convince anyone to drop their subscriptions. rather, i want people to reconsider the loss of an optical drive from their lives. optical drives are relatively open standards, whereas online streaming protocols are not. anyone incorporated or not can freely produce material (granted, within the confines of national obscenity laws) and distribute it to media consumers who have a technical platform capable of reproducing it. of course there exist a number of methods to restrict access to the optical disc as an open platform, most notably the numerous digital rights management (DRM) methods implemented for the protection of copyrighted materials. while optical drives attached to computers provide the greatest amount of flexibility for reproducing the contents of optical media, consumer optical devices such as compact disc, DVD, and blu-ray players are also relatively open platforms when the inexpensive and often freely-available protocols they use are adhered to. in other words, any musician, individual, or company may produce and sell any audio signal they want knowing that disc will be reproduced properly for all listeners so long as the disc conforms to the ‎IEC 60908 protocol for audio reproduction (also known as redbook audio for compact discs). currently there exists millions of individual media titles on optical disc formats and all of them can be reproduced by all users of optical disc drives. the paradoxical point here being made is that in practice optical drives are more open as a media distribution standard than is a digital network connection

no such analogy as independent music exists with streaming services. let us put aside the false binary of physical and non-physical media, for streaming services and file sharing and every other computational medium is a complex articulation of silicon chips, magnetic and electrical storage devices, network hardware, software protocols, and financial assets which all manifest as physical ‘things’ whose physical use and ownership have physical and non-physical implications on the media they deliver (the ‘internet of things’ is really just ‘more things on the internet’, the continued application of the physicality of networked computation to an increasing number of ‘things’). i watched as friends sold off their disc collection after ripping their music and movies to hard drives. after all, why keep the disc when it can be sold and my friend can keep watching their rip? consumers empowered by optical disc rips enjoy a false mastery over the consumer market however, as over the long term – say longer than ten years or so – that rip and sell strategy does not work unless my friend has a professional data management plan in place, ensuring yearly backups to new hardware with file integrity validation procedures. hard drives crash, operating systems and user activity often fail to keep data intact, and magnetically-recorded bits can flip polarity (1’s become 0’s and 0’s become 1’s) over time, and unless a person has expertise in long-term film management or is paying someone else to have that expertise for them it is almost certain that they will lose access to their data at some point, and probably much sooner than they expected. much as many users lost access to the files they kept on floppy disks but did not transfer to a hard drive before purchasing a computer lacking a floppy drive (Apple users who in the late 1990s purchased the first iMacs as perhaps the most famous example), users who expect permanence to their files often forget that those files exist as physical instantiations, with access requiring a performative interpretation by a specific hardware architecture. as this truth renders computational media highly volatile and fragile, it is best to embrace open rather than proprietary standards. the point, and one which for many readers will perhaps be overly belaboured, is that optical drives represent a significant open standard which we should not be so quick to abandon

that being said, it is indeed possible to discuss some issues related to a changed physicality. it is not possible to ‘lend’ or ‘sell’ streamed media after use, and it is not possible for content to be shared between services or with users who have not subscribed to any service, or with devices incompatible with the service. for example, for DRM purposes Netflix currently requires computer users to have very specific processor and operating system architectures in order to stream 4k video, chipsets so specific in fact that computer users who are not official ‘Microsoft Insiders’ as part of the Windows 10 operating system subscription model are not able to stream 4k content. Apple mac users cannot officially stream Netflix in 4k and are forced to either hackintosh a workaround or limit themselves to 4k selections in iTunes. streaming is a tenuous network of gardens walled by proprietary protocols and DRM efforts and held together by legal and financial discursive practices, whose commercial existence precludes any function as a stable personal archive or cultural repository. here's the thing about streaming that media consumers aren't considering: all those streams exist on servers owned by companies which are guaranteed to either 1) go out of business at some point, or 2) be acquired by a larger media conglomerate. when either of these eventualities happens, the licensing arrangements media consumers previously made with companies become null and void. long story short, consumers get to purchase their media access all over again, and in the process it is guaranteed that specific titles will become lost in the legal shuffle, unavailable once a user has reset their subscriptions

while this process (of legal ‘censorship’) occurs with formats previous to optical media (witness for example the loss on home video media due to music licensing arrangements of many sequences from the originally broadcasted episodes of WKRP In Cincinnati), but this process is exacerbated by the ease with which streaming services and other media companies change their relationships with their customers. for example, Netflix periodically removes content for reasons related more to marketing concerns rather than licensing issues. another example involves the digital game series No One Lives Forever (NOLF), well-produced parodies of James Bond and the 60’s spy tv show fad with a solid female protagonist and released by Fox Interactive on computers between 2000 and 2003. as the copyright for the series is enmeshed in a complex history of corporate mergers, bankruptcies, and acquisitions while the companies involved are not allowing anyone to license the game for sale while not themselves selling it (despite the games’ first-person action mechanics remaining commercially viable in 2018), the only way for anyone to currently play NOLF is to purchase a retail copy of the game on the collector’s market. while the game is neither easily nor inexpensively acquired, it is possible to do so only as long as one has access to an optical drive. more to the point, if you have an optical drive i can lend you my copy

drives remain quite inexpensive but are no longer as ubiquitous a retail presence as they were only a few years ago, and as computer optical drives and stand-alone consumer optical disc devices disappear from stores the inexpensive acquisition of an optical drive is going to change faster than optical media fans such as myself are probably prepared for. small companies, especially in the audiophile market, will continue to service optical drives for niche markets, but those niche markets will have to pay a luxury price for their rejection of the mass market. we laugh at the weird names of craft beer companies started by bearded millennials and then get mad at the expensive results (re: the PC of ontario 'buck a beer' electioneering promise), but as the mass market quickly abandons optical media over the next seven years the same trend will apply for currently-obsolescing media forms such as music, films, and software on optical media (and magazines, newspapers, and books in print media). at that point, it will be increasingly difficult for media to be shared among people without passing through one of the corporate media streaming keyholes, controlled by shareholders who do not wish controversial media content to affect their bottom line, even if some consumers are willing to pay extra for the controversy. at the inception of its streaming service, Netflix was notorious for censoring much of the content it was distributing. while the Blockbuster chain of video stores was known to have censored some of the films it offered for rental, viewers could readily acquire media from other sources and play them on the same video device as used for watching videos rented at Blockbuster; furthermore, they were able to purchase unedited versions of films – otherwise known as the standard retail release – directly from Blockbuster itself. there was no way for Blockbuster’s corporate interests to limit a user’s ability to use their device; equally, there is no way for Netflix, iTunes, or any other streaming service to keep users from watching other streams. media consumers are however limiting themselves to the contemporary business arrangements of a very small number of corporations when they chose hardware incompatible with previously-established open standards such as optical discs. in short, gilles deleuze was correct in describing a 'control society' in which lives are voluntarily mediated by access rights

while desktop and laptop computers could eventually alter sufficiently to the extent that they are no longer useful as media consumption devices (looking at you, phones), it is likely that whatever happens to computers as work and leisure tools most homes will incorporate servers into their structure, much as they incorporated other once-separate technological functions such as delivering water and regulating heat. as a person is no longer likely to purchase or build a house without a furnace or central plumbing, future homeowners will likely view home servers as mandatory components of their domestic lives. given that such servers would likely follow developments from present server technologies, optical drives will indeed have a place in such computer platforms, if people want them to be there

do not ditch your streaming service subscriptions, but equally do not rush to ditch that bluray drive under your television, or choose a laptop, tablet, or other computational platform with no ports to attach external optical drives. for myself, it’s media apocalypse bunker time: next time i build a computer, i'm going to buy four or five extra optical drives and put them in storage. a drive lasts about ten years (smoke-free environments are key to the lifespan of electronics...), and properly stored those drives should keep future generations happy that we have been outlived by our libraries of media

[image from Wasteland 2 copyright inExile Entertainment]

Let's Play... Paradroid

Paradoid
1985, Hewson Consultants

originally played on Commodore 64

Don’t let Apple’s Siri fool you into complacency about artificial intelligence. Automatons have been a worry for a while now, and not just in our home appliances and digital devices. Humans being overcome and ultimately destroyed by the robots who serve them has been a longstanding trope of science fiction literature since its inception, and earlier literary examples include E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and Johann Richter’s satires. Indeed, primitive mechanical automata were often darling court entertainments for the aristocrats of the European enlightenment. More pragmatically, automatons and the automation of human endeavour they represent remain the playthings of the wealthy elite. Anxiety toward robots manifests real fears of human obsolescence, as technological developments within modern capitalism tend to displace workers from their jobs by making their work obsolete and the workers hopelessly uncompetitive. Such exploitation is really only one articulation of the possibilities enabled by the automation of human labour, and not the inevitable outcome of technology. This anxiety – which famously and somewhat apocryphally brought the word ‘sabotage’ into the English language after French and Dutch labourers halted the machines which were intended to replace them – is really directed toward the ontology of the human experience, as since the mastery of fire our existence has been predicated on our technological capacity. If the human is defined primarily by the non-human tools which displace our previous sense of ourselves, then is the purpose of the human experience to transcend itself? Robots stand in the place of our worry that we will not live up to ourselves.

Paradroid is a strategic action game in which players act as both robot and (offscreen) human. Released for the Commodore 64 in 1985 by the English developer Hewson Consultants and programmed by Andrew Braybrook (whose previous game Gribbly’s Day Out had received favourable attention from the British gaming press, and who would go on to develop the equally well-regarded shooter Uridium), the game situates players as being in remote control of an ‘Influence Device’ on board a derelict space craft, tasked with destroying a ship full of robots which killed the human crew after their circuits were damaged when the ship passed through a spatial anomaly. These derelict spaceships are now travelling into enemy territory, with grave consequences for humanity should the ships fall under control of enemy forces.

you play as the 'hat', not the 'head'

The Influence Device earns its name by allowing players to take control of any other robot on the ship, thus opening access to a variety of different capabilities according to the type of robot captured. Robots are depicted with a number identifying their rank, with higher numbers in general being more powerful robots than lower numbers. But of course, power is a relative thing. While most of the robots are equipped with weapons which increase in destructive power according to rank, some high-ranking robots have other useful capabilities but no weapons. Capturing robots involves a strategic gameplay sequence in which players have a limited amount of time to dominate a circuit board by routing electricity through logic gates in favour of an opponent’s routes, respectively identified as purple or yellow in colour.

capturing robots through power electronics

Different robots have different capabilities for capturing other robots, reflected in the number of electricity nodes each player is able to deploy on the circuit. Generally speaking, higher-ranked robots can more easily dominate lower-ranked ones, but this is not always the case, and players are often provided opportunities to punch outside of their weight class, as it were. Players use these robots to destroy the other robots and access other parts of the ship. Robots are destroyed either by ramming (given sufficient armour on the host robot), capturing, or shooting them.  

Of course, like most games of the period almost nothing of this narrative or atmosphere is found in the game itself, but rather in the manuals and box art, with differences extant between the British and North American releases (the box description of the NA version suggests that the crew of the ship is still alive, and renames the Influence Device to an “anti-Droid weapon”). The game itself focuses on presenting the core mechanics of the game – exploring large, contiguous maze-like levels to capture and destroying or capturing fast-moving robots while avoiding being shot – using a responsive and efficient game engine which effectively convinces players of the vastly different capabilities each robot the player inhabits (the reviewer in Zzap!64 praises the varying movement patterns for effectively depicting each robot’s personality).

one of 24 different droids encountered

Indeed, the smooth scrolling of the game engine was rightly praised by critics at the time of the game’s release, as only basic hardware scrolling had been implemented on game or computer platforms (Nintendo’s Famicom, which implemented a useful hardware scroll, had only just arrived in North America; in any case, early Famicom games did not extensively use the scrolling feature). Shooting elements can get quite challenging when multiple high-ranking robots are involved, and the varied environments of the ship levels (varied in terms of layout, not graphical elements) allow for a variety of tactical situations. Elevators allow access to other levels on the ship, which players may explore whenever they like, a fact which often gets less patient players in trouble. Computer terminals located throughout the ship provide maps and information about other robots, and each level has at least one device to heal and restore a player’s energy.

ranks are important; 139 is a loser

Damage is aggregated but not visually rendered until a robot is close to destruction, at which point it begins to flash and the player has a limited amount of time to transfer to another robot before the Influence Device is destroyed. Furthermore, some of the higher-ranked robots are unstable when captured by the Influence Device and only allow players to inhabit them for a short period. After destroying all robots on a level, the level darkens with a ‘powering down’ sound, with the player expected to continue clearing levels until the entire ship is free of hostile robots. Like many action games of the time, there is no real ending, as once a ship is fully cleared the player is simply transported into a new one full of robots at a higher difficulty setting. Although it is oddly fulfilling to clear a ship of homicidal robots and attain the loneliness of a powerdown, the goal is to master the skills required for a high score, not fulfill a narrative agenda. Indeed, the reclamation of the ship by the humans who transported the Influence Device there (a theme which might have made interesting subject matter for a sequel) is left unexplored.

While the game’s graphics, sound, gameplay, and atmosphere were universally praised – most contemporary magazine reviewers were highly effusive about the game’s merits while publications such as Amiga Power and Retrogamer have listed the game as among the best computer games of the 8-bit era, and the game's popularity proved sufficient to allow a 16-bit remake of the game on the Amiga in 1990 – in retrospect it is the minimalist aesthetic of the game which allows it to stand out when viewed against its contemporaries. 

good level design, great 8-bit graphics

Indeed, much like the survival horror games which began to emerge in the 1990s, the atmosphere of the game is nearly entirely dependent on its minimalist audio presentation. Avoiding the wildly creative use of the Commodore 64’s SID chip for music common to the British game dev scene of the 1980s, Paradroid is soundtracked by the low continuous pulse of the ship’s engines as well as the synthesized noises of the various robots, punctuated by the sounds of doors opening and weapon fire from the robots. While pulsing music is often appreciated in action games, and was certainly a staple of the English coding scene, such enthusiastic soundtracks tend to undermine the atmosphere of the stalk-and-be-stalked gameplay found in Paradroid. This tension is further emphasized with the implementation of a basic fog-of-war mechanic which hides enemies from view when they are around corners and behind objects and doors. Rarely do players feel safe on a level, as even the powered-down levels clear of robots invoke the dread and isolation of deep space.

Like most games on the Commodore, Paradroid was heavily pirated, finding its way into the libraries of almost everyone who owned the machine. I remember discovering the game during a rain-filled weekend in the summer 1987 on a floppy disk full of other arcade-style games including Jumpman, Hunchback, and Miner 2049er, which had been copied onto the back of the game Impossible Mission, which was the only game I knew about when I copied the disk from a friend. Most of my experiences with Commodore games were similarly exploratory, with hidden treasures emerging with each directory listing. LOAD “$”,8 >> LIST was a holy mantra opening the digital cave of the forty thieves. Before my father started bringing home lists of pirated software available from an emergency room doctor he worked with, friends and I would exchange games with each other by copying whole disks at school. Disks labelled with only one or two games often contained many more, and it did not take long to discover that what was once a collection of dozens of games was in fact a library of many hundreds. It was usually the strange titles which captured interest. British games such as Monty on the Run, Blood and Guts, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Jet Set Willy were not only cheekily titled but also wildly subversive and unpredictable, with odd art and sound effects and surreal characters and gameplay. Nothing like these games was available on consoles. Indeed, after having access to so many games at once there was no way that I could ever go back to gaming on consoles, whose expensive cartridges limit consumptive excess to the rich. Commodore gaming – whether on the Vic 20, the 64, or the Amiga – was often a continual stream of new experiences, a flow of content unmatched until the internet democratized software distribution.

Small teams and independent programmers working autonomously produced a hugely creative game development scene, especially in the UK where the market was dominated by low-cost computers and cassette storage media. Ideas were allowed to develop into commercially-released games often for the simple pleasure of exploring the frontiers of computing and the burgeoning new media such as digital games which accompanied affordable home computers. A DIY aesthetic which emerged from punk music informed the development of the British gaming industry in its early years, with new companies springing up and quickly disappearing and programmers allowed near-total independent authorial control over their games.

clear robots from each deck of the ship

As the UK scene was centred primarily on cassette tapes as storage media for software, game developers could readily replicate and distribute their own software outside of any corporate (read: committee) control of their product. Significantly, the average price point for games in the UK was considerably lower than in the US, allowing people to purchase games on a whim rather than save up for them. Games purchased for £2-5 could be short diversions which presented one or two gameplay ideas and didn’t even need to be fully developed in terms of graphics or sound, rather than the long investments of playtime and elaborate art budgets expected from a game purchased for $50-60. While my research into game pricing is currently not complete enough to provide the statistical rigour requisite to a causal analysis, it is likely that for a variety of reasons the UK market can be described as situating its products in accordance with what could be described in terms of the North American market as ‘low-budget’ and ‘casual’ demographics.

It is interesting to note the parallels between this period and present-day indie game development on Steam, where inexpensive ‘idea’ games such as Goat Simulator, Pony Island, Dropsy, and The Stanley Parable have found a commercially-viable home (and sometimes become a commercial hit). While large publishers have been known to release interesting titles, the general trend for commercial game development is akin the Hollywood production model: exceptionally large capital investments are deployed to continually shift audience expectations for games toward a dependency on large capital investment. When executed well, corporate production strategies beget money printing machines, as old gameplay ideas are exhaustively recycled with new art assets and franchise expansions (witness any EA sports title, or DICE’s Call of Duty series). However, such successes (or need for such success) often compromise and even stifle interesting ideas which lie outside of the commercial mainstream. Worryingly, Steam’s competitor in computer game distribution has started to close its platform to better enforce strict control over games and game developers. With Windows 10 and the Universal Windows Platform, Microsoft is taking cues from Apple, Sony, and Nintendo’s strict control policies for their platforms. No longer will independent studios and developers be able to release games at their own discretion, but must comply with Microsoft’s policies for the platform. Obviously, such service will not be freely given, so developers can expect to pay licensing and developer fees, much like they do to Nintendo or Sony for being able to release on their platforms. As of the end of April 2016, the games released on UWP have been relative disasters, likely souring developers who have not yet adopted Windows 10 exclusivity. It is likely that the contemporary computer game scene will soon be defined by open versus closed platforms, with the mainstream market likely following Microsoft into the walled garden. If such control represents the automation of game development relative to the corporate strategy of a handful of companies, then perhaps we must admit that the robots are winning the influence war.

Let's Play... International Karate

International Karate+
1987, System 3 Software

originally played on Commodore 64

Sometimes you just have to beat a person down. Punches in the face, kicks to the ribs, whatever. We can tell each other that we shouldn’t, but the reality is that we love the pleasure of overcoming our own weaknesses by overcoming the weaknesses of some other fuck. Especially through punches to the face, in fact. Of course, with most respectable elements of society thoroughly frowning upon violence – unless it gets ritualised for financial gain through military conquest and sports, or is hidden as slave wages within industrial society – there are only a few outlets for the realisation of this pleasure. Mainly, there’s the whole ‘trying to be a civilised person’ thing that most people won’t shut the fuck up about. And so we have violent films and videogames and aren’t we all so much better for them. Surely.

One reason for the goodness of violent media is that they let my brother and I punch each other in the head without damaging our future cognition-oriented careers. My own enjoyment from mediated martial arts was provoked by an unsuccessful attempt to learn aikido, a failure caused not by lack of discipline or coordination but by my inability to pay for classes. From grades four through eight the school board subsidised a month-long period of phys ed lessons (called ‘options’) in activities expensive for kids such as hockey, football, skiing, dancing, and one or two martial arts. For a lot of us, this was the only time we could do some of those kinds of things. Equipment rentals were a cost I couldn’t afford, so martial arts and dancing were my choices. The military industrial toy complex which ascended with Star Wars and patterned masculinities into rigid forms of consumption and behaviour rested its guiding hand on my shoulder – aikido it was. Four weeks of twelve lessons and I was hooked and like a junkie I couldn’t afford to continue.

Martial arts culture was everywhere in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the west having rejected pop trends for pacifist and spiritual elements of eastern culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s in favour of a mythologized culture of violence and discipline anachronically appropriated from the aristocratic warrior class, and which was more easily commodified than Indian ragas and Buddhist meditation, Beatles be damned. Toy weapons and war-themed action figures were best-sellers in major department stores, ninjas made cameo appearances on late-night television, and the philosophy of the samurai code was adopted by Wall Street wolves. Right-wing teenage male power fantasies such as American Ninja, Lone Wolf McQuaid, Big Trouble in Little China, and The Karate Kid linked the libertarian elevation of individual agency with the conservative desire for social order, deference to authority and tradition, and personal discipline, all captured in the symbol of the ninja superhero.

New martial-arts action superstars emerged, as Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Stephen Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan replaced the gun-toting Dad types of the previous generation such as Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Charlton Heston, and Clint Eastwood. ‘Martial Arts’ was its own section in video rental stores, often next to the horror section as gloriously shitty (and often quasi-amateur) b-movie and direct-to-video releases like Enter the Ninja, Miami Connection, and Ninja III: The Domination as well as badly-dubbed Asian imports like Ten Tigers of Kwangtung, Five Element Ninjas and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky were much more violent and weird than the Hollywood mainstream. It wasn’t long before every action hero and pretty much anyone involved in a fight on television and in the movies was able to break out top-drawer fighting techniques without breaking a sweat or ever appearing to train. Of course Van Damme and Segal can turn every encounter with a bad guy into a death ballet; that’s fine and no one has a problem accepting that. But the sheer absurdity of a non-stop stream of anachronistic ninja clans proliferating in contemporary crime syndicates and police departments quickly overstayed its welcome, and guns once again emerged as the cinematic death tools of choice, mainly because any idiot can shoot ninjas dead without much hassle. Action film and television retreated from action stars being preternatural jujitsu masters with convenient helicopter piloting skills to their mastering an amorphous, generic, rapid-edit fighting style suitable for exploitation within a broad range of distinctive genres: witness the culturally-indistinct fight styles presented in modern James Bond films, superhero franchises, revenge films like Taken, or the Jason Bourne series. Suddenly, every IRL wimpy non-fighter from Matt Damon to Scarlett Johansson to the old man version of Harrison Ford can be made to look like a kickass fighter. Perhaps it’s even more ludicrous to cast Liam Neeson as a Dad assassin than it is to use ninjas in a bank heist, but fuck it. For big-budget entertainment, production efficiencies have always punched logic in the head.

stellar power lines

Wimpy white people kicking ass on screen is one legacy of 1980s martial arts culture. Another was its influence on hiphop, figuring not among the fashion trends of street culture and the videotape fetishism of mainstream ‘90s rap, but also in the ritualised emcee battles which replicate ninjitsu agility and Shinto philosophies in language. And of course, a videogame genre emerged focused on martial combat, staring with traditional martial arts before exploring more fantastic, cartoon-like themes, and this is where my virtual fist most often struck my brother’s virtual face.

stay down

International Karate is a one- or two-player arcade-style fighting game which came out for most home computer platforms in 1987, the same year that the first Street Fighter game hit arcades. Unlike that most famous of videogames, IK does not provide a health meter for fighters. Action follows the rules of tournament karate, in which two fighters (three in the updated International Karate+) score points adjudicated by referees who halt the fight after each strike. Animations for the original 8-bit releases are detailed and evocative, and hit-boxes are pixel-accurate. Bonus rounds between fights allow players to defend themselves from balls and bombs. Button mashing will work to some degree, but players will have to strategically place and time their attacks and defences in order to defeat more challenging opponents. Punches and kicks which land are awarded either half or a full point, with three points winning the match. Being an early fighter which adheres to The Karate Kid rules, there aren’t any combos or advanced moves to learn. To strike your opponent or defend yourself, you press the only button and move the joystick in one of its eight directions. Someone has to go down before the timer runs out, you know the drill.

IK+ motivates everyone to greatness

The 1987 UK release from System 3 on Commodore 64 (released the following year as Chop N Drop by Activision in North America) is perhaps the most well-known version of the game, thanks to pirating but more importantly because of Rob Hubbard’s fantastic score, which fully exploited the famously idiosyncratic SID chip in the C64. The 1988 releases for 16-bit Atari and Amiga computers feature significantly upgraded sound, graphics, and animation, with detailed character sprites and very fluid motion, although Hubbard’s score was replaced with the kind of percussion-heavy ‘80s midi funk which soundtracked movies plotted around Kawasaki ninja attacks. 

Two-player videogame duels are the oldest form of digital games, with the earliest games relying on human players to provide gameplay when artificial intelligence and enemy strategy algorithms were non-existent or in their infancy as processor and storage requirements for artificial opponents were too high. (For comparison, IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine – the first to beat a grandmaster human opponent in 1997 – used 30 central processors and 480 specialised chips). Once artificial opponents did start to appear in digital games, intelligence routines were often simulated rather than actually computed in real time, leading to the necessity for pattern recognition of enemy behaviour to succeed in games (and infinite play once the patterns are learned). Of course, games which were not played in real time but were instead turn based, such as many strategy and role-playing games, could more readily implement intelligence routines. The inevitable progression of computational capability has allowed for the utilization of increasingly complex intelligence routines. The first digital game – 1962 mainframe-based Spacewar – predated arcades and was an academic marvel of violent destruction as grad students and professors took turns lasering the living shit out of each other. Spacewar came to arcades in the form of 1971’s Galaxy Game and Computer Space. Many of the early and mid-70s arcade games such as 1972’s Pong, 1975’s Gun Fight, and 1976’s Barricade required two players to operate, as did Atari VCS launch title Combat. As computer hardware continues to develop, digital game players have continued to engage in multiplayer mayhem, although in the 1980s and early ‘90s competitive social gaming occurred more often in arcades than in the home. The release of Doom in 1993 and Warcraft in 1994 inaugurated a new era of competitive multiplayer gaming, a phenomenon centred on networked digital computers and thus unavailable to consoles, which were limited to fight games until the release of Halo on the Xbox in 2001. For most people, multiplayer digital gunplay is a 2000's thing. Social gaming in the ‘80s and ‘90s was dominated by fight games.

Not every threeway goes according to plan

So you kick and punch your friends to beat and humiliate them for hours of joyful play. Most everyone likes that. My brother and I certainly did, at least a few thousand rounds in International Karate+. We never did fight all that much IRL, at least in the ‘punch that bastard’ kind of way, or more accurately we stopped fighting once my little brother got big enough to punch me back. “Just hit him, he’ll stop,” my Dad always told him when he cried about me bullying him for toys or the TV remote or just because teenage boys try being assholes before hopefully figuring out other strategies. And so one day at the age of twelve and a height over six feet he did punch me back and it hurt so I stopped being a low-level dickneck bully. Fights became verbal, markers of quick wit with a touch of emotional abuse, more like the verbal swordplay of the Monkey Island games than anything approaching real violence.

the sound effect is pain

Videogame fighting was a good release for us, and so we moved on from International Karate to Palace Software’s amazing Barbarian and Barbarian II (which uses the two-player combat style for a one-player game), published by Epyx as Death Sword and Axe of Rage respectively in North America, but nobody bought or pirated those versions because everyone in North America was apeshit Nintendo and the most widely-pirated software came from European cracking groups. Barbarian was amazing not only because of the amazingly cheesy mid-80s fantasy cosplay box art (cleaned up for America, of course), but also because you could decapitate your opponent at any time, bypassing their health meter. A grumpy lizard would then swear at you before cleaning up the corpse and kicking the head off-screen. Slick shit. Somehow I could destroy my brother at this game, which gave me an unfounded confidence betrayed by the next decade of fighting each other.

With occasional diversions into Thai Boxing (which was amazing because between rounds your trainer would clean up your bloody, broken face like a window washer), Knight Games, and the brutally hilarious Blood ‘N’ Guts, my brother and I chopped off each other’s heads well into 1991 before the Street Fighter II arcade machine came out and everybody lost their collective shit for the next decade of game design clones. There was a very brief interest in Tongue of the Fatman, largely because of the box art and surreal fighters, but the game itself was kind of shit. After SF2 every fight game used combo moves, hopefully dozens of them, and allowed for character selection from a collection of mutant cartoon weirdos and psychopaths. Of course, as consoles began to totally dominate the digital game market by the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, computers suddenly weren’t the best place for fighters. Other than decent SF2 and Mortal Kombat ports, the only decent fighting game to come out for computer systems in the ‘90s was the excellent manga-inspired giant robot fighter One Must Fall 2097, a shareware title which thoroughly outclassed its big-budget corporate competition by incorporating equipment upgrades and RPG-style skill system elements.

It was with the robots that my fights with my brother ended: a Tuesday in September 1995, just back from school, and my brother challenged me in OMF2097 with a new joystick he picked up. Overconfident from almost a decade of punching my brother’s virtual face really murdered, distracted from videogames by a bullshit sixteen-month attempt at being a musician in a string of unheard weirdo bands, I took up his $10 challenge that he could beat me left-handed with his eyes closed and turned away from the screen. Of course you can’t win, fucker. I’ll destroy you in 90 seconds or less you dumb... and I lost without landing a punch in slightly more than thirty-one seconds. Pay me, bitch! was the last thing I remember before figuring out that in addition to being blind and handicapped my brother was also drunk and realizing suddenly that I actually hate motherfucker fight games.

Cinema, Television, and New Media -- comprehensive exam -- 24-hour essay 2

CINEMA, TELEVISION, AND NEW MEDIA
Question answered: #2. Are the essential distinctions (if they indeed exist) between media eroded by recent transformations in production and exhibition practice, and do specific media respond to these transformations in particular ways?

The twenty-first century has witnessed profound developments in the production and consumption of media. As Marshall McLuhan (1994), Harold Innis (1951), and Friedrich Kittler (1999) argue, the most profound transformation has been the introduction and development of electrical technologies to communications practices. With electricity came the possibility to reproduce perceptual experiences in order to enable such experiences as new media, distinct from the media associated with the reproduction of speech in written language. The most obvious examples in this regard involve the recording and distribution of sound and motion images. The development of technologies related to these perceptual activities quickly crystallized into media relative to fundamental technological differences; for example, radio and consumer recording formats distributed recorded sound (music, conversation, audio dramas), while film and television distributed recorded motion images along with accompanying sound (films, television shows). A further technological distinction centred upon speed and ease of accessibility can be made between distribution systems and consumption practices relative to such recordings. While this paper will illustrate a few arguments in favour of such essentialist determinations for the differences between media, ultimately a more flexible understanding of the ontology of media will be presented. Indeed, as this paper will demonstrate, it is computer technologies – and specifically home computer technologies – which signal the true transformation in media (and, by extension, mediation), largely due to the new forms of media which have emerged along with the technology.

Cinema demonstrates how definitions of media can be grounded in both essentialist and non-essentialist claims. Critical activity has focused on the manner in which the materiality of film production and reception practices defines the medium. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, outlines an “apparatus” in which the production and reception of film takes place: the photographic process of inscription onto film by means of lenses and photochemistry, the optical projection of film onto a white screen, the spectator in the cinema (1986 288). For Baudry, grounded as he is in historical materialism, such an apparatus is an ideological one at each stage of production and reception. Consequently, any change in the orientation or constitution of this apparatus will alter the ideological effects which can be determined as a result. Christian Metz (1982) argues that the technological configuration of cinema is analogous to the processes of the human unconscious. Metz’s connection of psychoanalysis to a technological apparatus condemns his theory to obsolescence as the technologies which form that apparatus develop and new ones are introduced while old ones are subtracted (Manovich 294), as well as by developments in psychoanalytic theory which may subvert or emphasise the Freudian theoretical apparatus foundational to Metz’s work. The work of other scholars such as Laura Mulvey (1975) and Žižek (2004), who have deployed psychoanalytic readings to define cinema in less essentialist terms, has proven more adaptive to technological change. By means of a reading of Bergson’s conception of durée, and a reflexive negation of psychoanalytic theory (fully expressed in Anti-Oedipus), Deleuze (1989) argues that the gap between static images which enables the illusion of motion for cinema to occur temporalises the spectator, interpellating them into subjectivity by means of an affective involvement with the image (47), and anticipates montage, itself commonly understood (Metz 1985; Bordwell 1986; Elsaesser 2012) to be the grammar of cinema. Scholars such as Schatz (1989) and Elsaesser have extended the definition of this apparatus to include the hegemonic forces at play within the market. Both scholars define Hollywood as the articulation of a material and symbolic hegemony positioned to institutionalise and standardise its narrative forms, production processes, and distribution and consumption practices. Elsaesser argues that by means of their dominant position in the production and consumption of film, Hollywood can be seen to determine and define the medium of film as a whole into an experience between particular types of films and particular types of spectators, going so far as to state that the function of narrative in Hollywood films “lay in the resources and organizational assets which could be accumulated around it” (2012 152) and order audiences accordingly. These institutionalised forms actively displace certain forms and definitions for the medium while enabling others. As Bordwell, Doane (1989), and Adorno (1991) argue, film has come to be defined as a medium primarily by the market forces which affect its production, distribution, and consumption. Indeed, the same forces which integrate media companies into multinational conglomerates force the various media created and distributed by the newly integrated subsidiaries to interact, cross-pollinate, and subsume each other (Mattelart 2000). Indeed, Grossberg (1992) argues that popular culture, as the result of such processes of media hegemony, is a significant agent in the dilution of the boundaries between media.

Viewed as a whole, then, many of these definitions for cinema do not maintain their coherence in the wake of new technologies for the production and reception of film. One wonders, for example, how Deleuze’s elevation of the ‘ontological’ gap at the heart of the cinematic process if cameras recorded at much higher speeds than the twenty-four frames per second adopted as the standard for cinema by the 1920s. If Hollywood can be seen to adapt and incorporate elements of the avant garde and international and marginalised cinemas — which may themselves be empowered by being influenced by Hollywood – then what does it mean to define a medium around the dominant forces within it? In a similar manner, notions of spectatorship dependent on the public exhibition of films have been challenged by the private consumption of cinema by means of television and home video.

Indeed, as a medium for the reception of broadcasting as well as the device enabling other media such as home video and videogames, television considerably problematises essentialist boundaries between media.  Arguing in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1990) that the serial and segmented nature of television programming is shaped to a considerable extent by television’s existence as a commercial entity, Raymond Williams identifies the concept of “flow” to define the medium (86). It is precisely this ephemeral and amorphous conception of television which has allowed the medium to adapt to technological change and the development of competing media such as film and the internet. Television, according to Williams, has the “technological capacity to absorb and circulate every kind of cultural energy” (Dienst 13). Furthermore, broadcast media such as television and radio, unlike other media, exist within what may be described as the perpetual present of their exhibition. While there is no technological reason for any broadcast medium to broadcast perpetually (twenty-four hours per day), an extension of Innis’s (1951) notion of the space bias of ephemeral media such as radio and television may explain the reasons behind this perpetual present, as the ease by which broadcast signals are ‘transported’ into the homes of consumers, as well as the fact that such media are consumed for ‘free’ in exchange for advertising (Browne 175), destines broadcast media to an existence of continuity. Furthermore, while film, ostensibly the closest analogue to television, can be understood as having incorporated aspects of theatrical and musical performance, painting, photography, dance, and literature, Williams argues that television can be understood as having further incorporated aspects of radio, journalism, advertising, and live spectatorship (1990 44ff). Television incorporates the many discreet aspects of itself – advertisements, announcements, news, “introductory and interstitial materials” – into what Nick Browne (1984) describes as a “supertext” whose essence is “one of flow, banality, distraction, and transience” (176), as spectators order their own viewing experience among a multiplicity of constitutive elements.

It is this multiplicity of function and form which differentiates broadcast media from non-broadcast media. According to Williams, unlike a book, a play, a song, or even a film, which constitute discreet objects and experiences, in broadcast media “the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences” (1990 87). It should not then be surprising that as new technologies related to the distribution of television have developed, the notion of flow as foundational to television has been challenged. William Uricchio (2004) argues that “the present day’s convergent technologies, economies, and textual networks have ... subverted ... the logics of television [and] have also transformed the medium’s content and cultural place” (165). If, as Lynn Spigel suggests in Make Room for TV (1992), the introduction of television served to order spaces within the household and define television spectatorship along lines contingent with the consumption of consumer products, then it is possible to extend this interpretation to contemporary changes in forms and patterns of television spectatorship as contingent with changes to the home inaugurated by home computer technologies which are in the process of subsuming television into the internet. Disrupted first by technologies of home video recording and storage, the capacity for broadcasting to order the reception practices of spectators has been undermined by the digital distribution of television. Home video, on-demand and time-shifted video services, and internet streaming (as well as ‘illegal’ downloading) of television programming has further altered spectator relations to the television “supertext”. A recent example of a television show broadcast under two different configurations of television serves to illustrate this point. The British show House of Cards, broadcast as a mini-series in 1990, used a ‘cliff-hanger’ ending centred upon the murder of a prominent character by the show’s protagonist. The narrative significance of dramatic events such as this often provoked their deployment as ‘cliff-hangers’ at the end of television shows or seasons to provoke viewer anticipation of the next episode and encourage them to schedule future instances of viewership.[i] For the 2013 American remake, distributed (‘broadcast’) as an entire season without delay between episodes on the digital streaming subscription service Netflix, a similarly dramatic killing by the show’s protagonist is located in the middle of the first episode of the season, indicating that the event is structured in a manner suggesting the ‘binge watching’ habits typical of Netflix (and, by extension, digital streaming and home video) viewers.

Spigel argues that television served to “reassemble the splintered lives of families [and] .... reinforce the new suburban family unit” (1992 39) centred upon the new postwar consumer society. Ultimately, such changes were inaugurated by technologies of mobility and communication which extended ideations of inclusion and privacy from the home to a virtual space bounded by the reach of transportation and communications technology, which in turn orders the real space in which patterns of mobility and communication occur. Williams subsumes the social relations inaugurated by such technologies and living conditions under the concept of mobile privatisation, the social product of which is “[b]roadcasting in its applied form” (1990 20). Spigel thus traces the incorporation of the machine elements of industrial activity (dishwashers, sewing machines, etc.) into the home as contingent with “the spatial condensation of work and viewing” (1992 89), while Anna McCarthy (2001) outlines the incorporation of television into public spaces such as workplaces, transportation hubs, and shopping centres. By means of the surveillance and production of consumer activity, broadcast media such as television realise what Mark Andrejevic (2002) names “consumer labor” (230). Jhally and Livant (1986, quoted in Andrejevic) characterise the value exchange between viewers who watch ‘free’ programs and advertisers who pay for television programming as the “work of watching” (235). Such labor relations form the initial gesture of spectatorial participation which, as outlined below, will come to define the ontology of media.

As suggested by Spigel’s illustration of the extent to which daytime programming was informed by the daily chores performed by the women who were the primary audience, television was itself ordered by spectators as much as it ordered their patterns of viewership and stimulated the consumption of consumer goods. In other words, as television presented and ordered itself as a consumer product, audiences responded by altering television to meet their needs as consumers. As Matt Carlson (2006) illustrates, consumer products related to the consumption of television have altered not only patterns of viewership, but also the content of television programs. In this capacity, television can be seen to order time as well as space. First, home video recording freed television audiences from the broadcast schedule and, by means of the archival nature of video cassettes, allowed television programming to be reified as an object of secondary relation to television as a broadcast medium. The digitisation of television broadcasting as well as the development of digital video recorders capable of time-shifting and altering programming nearly in real-time has further transformed viewer interactions with television from a process of scheduling (viewers watching shows at specific times not under their control) to one of surveillance. For Carlson, surveillance indicates the manner in which digital broadcast technologies allow broadcasters to precisely monitor viewer activity and accordingly alter the products offered for viewing (102-103). In this capacity, it is possible to extend conceptions of ‘liveness’ related to the television “supertext” to the real-time surveillance of the audience itself. Arguably, the surveillance of digital television media merely extends to television producers the feedback processes between audience and performer which informed not only live studio television but also the live forms of performance (theatre, Vaudeville) which provided the content for television in its earliest years (Williams 64-65).

In a somewhat abstract manner, it is possible to locate ‘liveness’ as both reifying and enabling the structures of life described by mobile privatisation. In addition to Williams, other critics have also focused upon television’s ‘liveness’ as a distinguishing element of the medium. Jerome Bourdon (2000) argues that while ‘liveness’ was inherent to television before the advent of video storage technologies, live broadcasting has since been institutionalised as a means of affirming the hegemonic position of television broadcasters by providing a closure of space and time between event and spectator (534) and as a means to confer a degree of “‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’” (533) to the programs being broadcasted. Indeed, ‘liveness’, which incorporates the viewer into media exhibition, can be understood as the precursor to spectator participation. As Bourdon notes, “liveness should be interpreted as a development within media history as a whole” (551). He likens viewers switching to the news from other programs – multitasking between shows and other media – as a new form of liveness (553). Indeed, ultimately the ostensibly minimal amount of spectator participation demonstrated by television viewers using their remote control to order the sequence of television programming belongs on a continuum of interactivity and media control which leads to computational technologies which demand ‘spectatorial’ participation. In this context, Richard Dienst (1994) notes that the apparatus of television as constructed by Williams ignores “the possibility that the very notions of transmission and reception ... belong to the apparatus itself” (16). Accordingly, Williams’s conception of ‘flow’ in Television, whose publication predates the development of home video and home computer technologies, does not account for the capacity for audiences to construct and modify the programs they are watching. Notably, the capacity for commercial television to structure the ideological responses of viewers is undermined by the ability of viewers to ignore or remove advertising from shows and structure patterns of viewing around their personal schedules due to home recording and digital distribution, and ultimately use consumer digital video technologies to produce their own televisual content and distribute it on the internet. Indeed, the digitization of media undermines the ‘integrity of the medium’ not only for television and for television studies, but also for all media which undergo processes of digitization.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), Friedrich Kittler notes that the digitization of optical, acoustic, and writing media allows their “distinct data flows” to be reunited (170), and concludes his examination by identifying the computer as the logical conflagration of other media technologies and real-time computation, in the guise of “machine subjects”, as the contemporary terminus of the development of technologies of inscription (259). He rather boldly states his lack of respect for the distinction between media, noting that the traditional differentiations of media based on recording technology and human perceptual apparatus (seeing and hearing, for example) are fundamentally undermined by electric communications and recording technology. With the advent of digitisation, the variety of information forms “are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface” (1). Indeed, it is by means of interface that consumers come to understand and differentiate digital media. Under the aegis of digitization, digital video, for example, is not an experience of ‘television’ or ‘cinema’; rather, it is enabled by the interface which exhibits it. The use of computers to consume audio, visual, and textual materials indicates that the screen-as-interface is more informative to understanding a mediated process than are traditional conceptions of media distinction grounded in differences in perceptual or recording technology. Television programming is easily adapted to distribution and ‘exhibition’ on the internet due to the fact that, in reductive terms, high-resolution computer screens make great high-resolution digital televisions.

More importantly than simply providing another platform for the distribution and consumption of audio-visual material incorporated from other media distribution apparatuses, home computer technologies signal the extent to which spectator participation has been incorporated into systems of media production and consumption. As Lev Manovich (2001) argues, the “meta-medium of the digital computer” (6) instantiates new media not dependent on perceptual or aesthetic characteristics but rather as “subject to algorithmic manipulation” (27). The algorithmic nature of digital media has two effects, the first of which serves to explain the transformational nature of digitisation. Manovich argues that digital media are modular, variable, and iterative, and in this capacity recent transformations in television broadcasting can be rationalised. The second effect of digital media is more philosophical in nature. In addition to signalling the increasing involvement of audiences into the ‘text’ of media on account of developments in the technologies of broadcasting, the above examination of television demonstrates McLuhan’s principle that all media contain within them previous forms of media. Of course, the incorporation of one medium within another is not a one-directional process of ‘new’ media incorporating ‘old’ media, as demonstrated by the incorporation of photography into newsprint. Rather, the response of cinema and television to the advent of computing technologies illustrates that media often deploy whichever other popular or useful media can be reasonably incorporated into them. From such a position, it is possible to extrapolate from Rick Altman’s suggestion regarding film that “[g]enres must be understood discursively” (1999 121) and conclude that media themselves function similarly as discursive practices.

One vector of such a discursive practice is indicated by the notable sense of determination present in McLuhan’s thought. The incorporation of media into new forms enabled by the development of technology implies what Walter Benjamin (1968) describes within history as the “weak Messianic power” (254) in which the past involves the present. Indeed, it is thus possible to read McLuhan’s belief that media subsume within them previous forms of media through a Heideggerian lens, as such a process describes what for Heidegger was the essence of all technology to gather into itself all forms of potential energies as “standing-reserve” (1977 24). In such terms, the destining of all media is toward a totalising sense perception and recording which reveals all possible information to the user. In order to fully understand the implications of computerisation on the media examined in this essay, we must turn to Dienst’s rather Platonic suggestion that “all actually existing television systems are in some sense a failed totalization of an ideal visuality” (1994 11). If the contemporary configuration of television has incorporated (or is being incorporated into) forms of digital content and distribution (i.e., the internet), then it is possible to position television, as Meyrowitz (1995) does, as a “widening of sensory experience” (40-41). Accordingly, contemporary forms of television incorporate aspects of visuality and ‘liveness’ from other media: news programming which, like the internet, structures textual information as visual elements; social media (message boards, Facebook, Twitter) interaction between viewers and show producers or fictional characters of dramatic programs, such as The Hills and General Hospital; and webcasts and podcasts which supplement or augment the broadcasting of shows. However, the digitization of media has had a more profound transformative effect on media than is represented by the increasing interaction between audiences and media content. It is possible to further extend Dienst’s notion of “ideal visuality” by means of Paul Virilio’s equation of processes and technologies of visibility with calculation, as elaborated in War and Cinema (1989) and The Information Bomb (2000). Arguing that technologies of visibility emerged as tools for war and the colonial organization of space, Virilio describes modes of visibility aided by computation as active optics (2000 14). Such optics exponentially increase the capacity for individuals to generate and process information, with the consequence that individuals will experience “a speed change in the order of time as it is lived” (1989 45), and thus “leave intact neither the old aesthetics ... nor the ethics” which came to define traditional media and the societies in which they circulate (2000 121).

As outlined above, the polyvalent nature of digital media, as algorithmic processes, fulfils the Heideggerian ‘gathering’ of the possibilities for vision into a singular technical apparatus enabling the successful realisation of “ideal visuality”. Home computer technologies involve media in a computational process which interpellates spectators as users. While videogames, software, and the internet represent the most obvious insertion of interaction and participation as an essential component defining the medium, these forms of media are merely the most contemporary articulations of long-extant trends in media. Consequently, it is difficult to determine contemporary communications media with the essentialist formulations which often served to inaugurate the critical apparatuses which arose in response to them.

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[i] It should be here noted that the ‘cliff-hanger’ serves a slightly modified purpose for the British House of Cards. By using such a narrative device at the end of a four-episode mini-series which was not intended for development into a broadcast series, the cliff-hanger ending serves (much like its use as a genre convention in horror films) to confer a mark of reality to the show by invoking in viewers a projection of the character from the temporality of the show ‘offscreen’ into the imagined temporal space ‘after’ the show ends.  

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