Banal Retention

One of the most surprising boom sectors in consumer electronics over the last few years has been that of the camcorder.  Significant and constant price cuts brought about by impressive advances in technology, themselves driven by fierce competition between manufacturers, have now put these compact devices within the reach of millions. And millions are indeed reaching out and buying what once seemed an exclusive luxury item.

Given their cost and ease of use, it was perhaps inevitable that camcorders should begin to replace ordinary still cameras for the primary purpose of memorialising our daily lives. But there is a problem with this transition.

Still pictures are essentially for reference, acting as guarantors of experiences and handy distillations of the past. They can be leafed through privately as quickly or as slowly as desired, and selection and rejection is easy. Not so with the video. Watching one tends to be a public experience, carried out with family or friends. Once begun, a video traps you within someone else's vision of the world; you are locked into their time-frames, marching alongside them, seeing with their eyes, however boring their gaze, however uncritical their choice. Camcorders' power and portability mean that they can be used anywhere and for hours. And they are. The result is a visual nightmare: personal, junk TV. 

Music will soon follow. Samplers and synthesisers are becoming cheaper and more intelligent. It is not hard to envisage systems which will require only the most rudimentary of input - half a drunken memory of a maudlin chorus, the buzz-saw sound of a child's high-pitched whine - to produce fully-fledged pop songs. Only one ingredient will be missing: inspiration. What comes out will make Muzak sound like Mozart.

In the domain of words, technology in the form of desktop publishing has led to some increase in the flow of text, but it has affected mostly design. Where once you sent out a memo straight from the typewriter, you can now spend - that is, waste - hours prettifying it with all kinds of fancy fonts and garish graphics. The focus is on form not content.

Despite this apparent reprieve, we are not in fact safe from the evil of endless written banality. Currently, there is still a considerable barrier to pouring forth pages on a computer: words must first be typed in physically. The laborious process of typing acts as a simple but effective filter: only the most persevering of would-be authors will hunt and peck those letters for a book that has no need to exist.

But soon, something terrible will happen, Voice-driven computers - micros you can talk to - will become as cheap as a camcorder. Within five or perhaps ten years, most machines will have the ability to take dictation from you.  Imagine then the floods of verbal diarrhea that will be unleashed, the mad memos, the poor epic poems, the interminable novels, the reams of random mind-dumps without structure or content. Every poor, pointless waking thought will be preserved for posterity. Worse, these may then go on to form the book of the video.... 

(1.3.92)

Index