trees are people too

In today’s lecture Adrian identified changes in media during the industrial and post industrial era. We are watching the transformation of media and communications as it moves from the ‘clean’ and ‘ordered’ media of the industrial era (the 50s) and rapidly develops into the dirty, noisy media we are consuming today.

Industrial modes of practice are being completely revolutionised by new media and models of distribution. We are accustomed to having our public sphere bombarded with ‘ambient’ media – ‘background noise’ provided via print, posters, pamphlets and background music – but now we are seeing the rise of public spaces for video, and video filling more and more spaces as another ‘ambient’ media.

Video demonstrates very well the shift in media from an industrial model – professional, restrictive, specialised, industrial and ‘tidy’ – to a post-industrial model – one that is amateur, generalised, prosumer, mobile and ‘messy’. Video has seen this more significantly than any other media. Video recording, once exclusively available to the few (film makers and professional cameramen), is now available, in fact almost unavoidable, to everyone – it has become the medium of the people.

Video is an inherently reflexive media, offering instant playback. This reflexive nature, the ability to give humans insight into themselves, instantaneously, is potent and fascinating, and drives the development of the medium – vlogging is a pertinant example of this. We like to watch us.

The video medium is democratised through availability and access, and this in turn is changing the way video is made. Remember when desktop publishing revolutionised print, allowing everyone to harness the powers of a printing press in our own homes?? Desktop video is allowing everyone to be the next film director, news presenter or music video visionary. What was once prohibitively expensive is now almost so cheap it is disposable. Video, once so constrained in terms of access to create and distribute, is now saturating our media consumption, and it comes from an astounding variety of sources.

Once only created by specialists, creating and sharing video (and media in general) is now a skill employed by everyone, everywhere – we are all multimedia multitaskers, without even realising it.

As such video becomes dirty, messy, noisy, polluted. It’s changing from an elitist form of communication to encompass the common man’s voice (in the form of mentos and coca cola, hurray!!). It is, again, the people’s media, and as such is bound to become dirty, messy and noisy, just like they are. Makes perfect sense, really.

As media ‘experts’, we need to understand and identify the the dirty so that we can establish what is the ‘professional’…

But we’ll get to being professional later. For now I shall relish in contemplating something that can be messy and dirty, and ambient at the same time. Possibly my favourite combination.