A dread fever which strikes only on a Saturday

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about divergence, about how modern communications technology gradually makes cultural artifacts more fragmentary.

Like, say, my Dad, you can know all there is to know about a subject which almost no-one cares about. That’s always been possible. But now, speaking proportionally, something can be legitimately considered “famous” which almost no-one has heard of.

I have said, with a confidence that I don’t feel is unwarranted, that no news story on the scale of Prince Harry’s service in Afghanistan can ever be kept a secret again, because newswriters and newsmakers alike will know that whatever you offer, someone will figure they can make more money by breaking the story on their own. It’s the same principle by which the stock market works (or used to): there is always someone who will buy a crashing share.

Drudge broke the Harry story, and now the American election has retired Drudge in favour of a plethora of more openly-ideological sites in the same style. There may well never be another news site in the “insider” mould with the reach and influence of Drudge, because as his haegemony dissolves his users will go their seperate ways to new sites, based on past experience or word-of-mouth. Or, more likely, they’ll fill the gap left by Drudge’s nadir with several sites which together provide a similar sense of coverage.

When tv-links went down, it was international news, albeit page 4 stuff. Similarly with Pirate Bay. The users scattered, and many sites stepped into the freed niche. There will never be, for instance, another Napster. Limewire, Soulseek, whatever it is the kids use today: they haven’t followed one another in natural technological generations, but the staccato progression of indie popularity: people migrate out of one program because another one has become “the” place to download”

And in filesharing programs, or anything which encouraged community, such shifts are incredibly, mathematically obvious. They’re probably still updating Limewire: I could probably re-install and load it up and there might be 500,000 people online, yet it’s still fair to call it irrelevant. I would consider Achewood and ninjavideo.com and Nathan Fillion popular, even famous, but the perfectly normal and pleasant people with whom I live probably wouldn’t have heard of any of them. This is all nothing new, but I’m arguing that the effect is only to get moreso. As is often said, in the 17th Century is was at least possible to know more or less everything about everything known. Now it is mathematically impossible for anyone even to watch every video on YouTube.

Heroes are heroes to a few. Even “everymen” are specific men. Look at Dilbert.

There may never be another technology battle as vital as the late 90′s Console Wars or, say, VHS vs. Betamax. Probably no technology will ever again be as ubiquitous as Windows or the iPod. It is still possible to determine what will be “the toy” for a given Holiday Season, or “the film” for a holiday weekend, but these increasingly are only marketers’ terms for sale spikes that are diminishing and puddling into the Long Tail. This is what happens to conventional capitalism when endowed with some form of wacked-out supercommunication.

One problem about this continuous multifarious branching is that since there is so much to choose from, “taste-makers”, the cornerstone of modern marketing theory, will become ever more influential on the individual’s decision-making; but also ever more multifarious and scattered, and consequently harder to “recruit”, to influence or predict.

The Dark Knight had by far the best ARG campaign yet devised, but it would be presumptuous to mark out any of the movie’s sales demographics as sale-dependent on the ARG. I.e., the campaign may have been a huge exercise in preaching to the choir. The type of person who would research, get hooked and go and pick up a Joker Cake is the sort who would see the film anyway.

I believe in the ARG as a medium for storytelling, but since up to now it’s been essentially nothing but an experiemental marketing technique of uncertain cost-effectiveness, the medium as a profession might die in its infancy. There will be more and more ARGs, of course, and great things coming out of them, but history has shown that the more you mak it possible for people to make things in their bedrooms, the more great-but-obscure things you get.

Now, if this means that more people make a living creatively, and large publishers and other middlemen corporations have to work harder for lower margins, then so be it. The change to the average creative person’s income will likely be little.

In the past “all boats rising” has been a pretty misleading allegory, never more so than today. But with the radical democratisation of attention,  industries like entertainment that are dependent on Attention might well find that the same amount of “leisure” money is spread around a little more evenly or, dare I say it, deservingly.

p

My brother once said, with a tipsy seriousness not entirely unwarranted, “Molten Core man, Molten Core… It’s our generation’s Vietnam.”

Well, that may be so. In twenty years’ time my brother will still be able to make the reasonable conversational gambit of mentioning Ironforge or Epic Sets or damn Paladins getting nerfed in 1.7, and if it pays off he will be able to have an effortless conversation for hours with a total stranger about their shared experience. Because of the sort of people I hang out with I see that sort of thing all the time, but never before has it been true of eleven million people. And it never will again.

I pray that there will never be another generation’s Vietnam. It’s not totally unreasonable to hope that the 2004 Asian Tsunami will be the worst thing, numerically speaking, to happen in my lifetime. There may never again be another shared experience of trauma as widespread as incinerating the Weighted Companion Cube. There will probably never be “another Snakes on a Plane”. The argument that people are thematically scattering has always been my defense against the argument that the internet causes them to polarise. It remains to be seen which is worse. The future’s not ours to see.

p

—————————————–

p

I mean honestly, what kind of a world is capable of making a dumb-looking film of Watchmen, but a film of Max Payne which looks far cleverer and more entertaining than the game?

Maybe films just wear “parodic” better.

then you shoot him in the back of the face

Advertisement