So, HD-DVD “lost” the new HD format wars to Blu-Ray…check out this short article at Wired for more details and links:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/
It brings up an interesting question: with more and more of us watching video in completely digital formats, are physical manifestations of “content” relevant anymore? In the days of LPs, there was certainly a fetishistic quality about the records themselves, and part of the joy of “listening” to them came from an experience of ownership and organization (High Fidelity, anyone?). I know that I personally value having a binder of DVDs organized alphabetically by genre and title; many people make playlists in iTunes for similar reasons. As the article suggests, however, we seem to be entering an age when much of the media we consume is literally nothing more than trillions of bits of computer memory expressed as 1s and 0s, translated by software into audiovisual grammar we can understand. The one aspect of media consumption that this transformation seems to be affecting is the notion of ownership; to what extent does our ownership of a copy of a song, movie, video game, or television show factor into our reading of it? Has “ownership” become a quaint notion of a bygone system of cultural expression, if anyone can edit and redistribute content at will?
It seems to me that a shift to all-digital media content is in one sense simply the addition of another layer of abstraction; the content of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, for example, is essentially the same whether we listen to it on a CD or an mp3. As McLuhan would point out, however, the practices that surround our listening of the 5th symphony have radically changed. Whereas before we might peruse our collection of records or CDs and find that we were in the mood for Beethoven’s fifth, now (in iTunes, for example) we must specifically seek out the fifth symphony from our 58 days and 30 GB of music. Whenever I have a vague idea about the kind of music I’d like to listen to, I find myself simply hitting “shuffle” in iTunes and stopping on whatever song that pops up that I feel like hearing…there’s simply too much music in my library for me to realistically “browse” it all in any reasonable time. While I “own” all of the songs and albums in my library, I don’t own them in quite the same way I own my DVDs. I expect that something similar will happen to movies and TV shows in the next few years.
I agree with the “shuffle conundrum” as a result of too much music (and “browse my tunes in the same way you do), but I wonder if that is more a result of the sheer amount of music more than the format they are in. Wouldn’t you face the same problem with one of those 500 CD changers?
As a fellow musician and music lover, I wonder if its more the environment we listen to music in now. With LPs (so I hear) listening to music was an activity. You put on the record and sat and listened to it. With the miniaturization of music media, it seems like 9 times out of 10, listening to music is a secondary part of a different activity, be it surfing the web, doing homework, or walking to the CFA.
I wonder if the SACD will survive long enough to bring back listening to music as an activity in itself. For those of you who haven’t listened to one, its a real treat. A sampler came with my family’s Sony DVD player\Receiver, and the music is encoded in a completely different way from the standard PCM audio CD. Listening to a SACD multi-channel version of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” or Maynard Ferguson playing “Birdland” is unreal.
It is true that the sheer amount of music plays a factor in the “shuffle conundrum” (nice phrase, by the way). But I think you could also argue (to use McCluhan) that the medium of iTunes and the digitization of music has made owning massive amounts of music possible for people who aren’t necessarily LP or CD aficionados. Some of the music in my iTunes library is stuff I have never listened to–ever. I just happened to burn a friend’s CD intending to listen to it later, or I burned an entire CD for one track, or something like that. The medium makes that kind of ludicrous consumption/hoarding possible.