Eric Kluitenberg on Mon, 14 Jul 1997 15:27:07 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Bandwidth and Content |
Dear nettimers, Here is the latest content production from the Bandwidth Workspace in Kassel: Contact: URL: www.documenta.de/workspace & www.waag.org/bandwidth EMAIL: bandwidth@waag.org ----------------------------- Bandwidth and Content In the context of the 'We Want Bandwidth!' workshop @ Hybrid Workspace, documenta x - Kassel, July 12, 1997. On the threshold of the era of high-capacity connectivity we (our group in Kassel) is investigating the demand for more bandwidth. That demand of corporate, state, individual and activist players in the Net game, which in a collective form we have called 'The Push for more Bandwidth'. At this moment we are still very much immersed in the questions of the distribution of bandwidth, geophysically and within a given society, the question who owns the bandwidth, and who will be the virtual stakeholders in the bandwidth of the future, the ratio between the bandwidth of institutional and private connectivity, and so forth. All these questions point out important, if not crucial, problems in the present as much as in the future. One question that we have not yet addressed is that of the relationship between bandwidth and content, i.e. the kind of communications the digital infrastructure can carry and will be able to carry in the not so distant future. There is a significant relation between the availability of bandwidth and the kind of content that the information infrastructure allows for. There also is, however, an even more important but less obvious relationship between the increasing bandwidth of mainstream connections and the marginalisation of certain types of content production for the networking structures. First of all this problem cannot be reduced to a simple position in favour or against the expansion of bandwidth. High bandwidth connections will enable certain empowering practices, while at the same time they threaten to marginalise others. The special PUSH Media bulletin in Wired Magazine outlined a future of networked media that relies very much on a further development of high-bandwidth connectivity. The outdated future of the web was over, the future of hybrid communications was what the new future was all about, at least it was that month, according to Wired. Leaving the sales-rhetorics of Wired aside for a moment, quite an interesting model was presented in the bulletin; a hybrid interconnected networking structure that offers familiar services such as e-mail, the web, news groups, etc., combined with a highly diverse set of broad/narrow/point cast information and entertainment services, generically coined as PUSH Media (media that push content towards the consumer, rather than the consumer 'pulling' it in themselves). The hybrid nature of the structure is constituted by the combination of familiar models from the old broadcasting systems (such as radio and television), where a pre-fabricated info-product is offered to a periphery of consumers, and an interconnected digital support structure which exploits the potential of digital networking to create much more diversified models of distribution. Broadcast inherited much of the rigid 'phalanx' like structure of industrial production. Bulk produced in a linear fashion, marketed according to the traditional production / sale / consumption split, distributed via standardised channels that allow for profitable economies of scale. Digital networking instead offered a model of ultimate flexibility, where any conceivable model of distribution could theoretically be made feasible, but which offered only extremely constrained possibilities for the transfer of image and sound, and consequently only functioned well as a (written) text medium. With rapidly evolving high-bandwidth connections the fusion of the two offers itself as a new perspective. The idea is not simply to create a broad- or narrow cast system that will enable consumers to react to the offerings. Rather, endless new forms of tailored, made to measure, special interest tele-casting can be conceived of. Broadcast implies a large homogenous group of consumers, mostly in a localised geophysical region (a country, a city or an area). The need to meet the demand of a greater audience implies the need to tune the program to the lowest common denominator in terms of complexity and content. Narrow casting more subtly tries to address specific audiences, but was almost necessarily a marginal practice given the limited availability of bandwidth for tele-communications in general. Pointcasting was economically not viable, because of the costs of infrastructure and production. High-bandwidth digital networks eradicate these old categories: - programs can be produced for specialised audiences, which because they may be distributed world wide can still be of substantial economic interest. - High value added services can be offered on subscription to a finite number of users and thereby become commercially interesting. - Social and cultural information for marginal groups can exploit the possibilities of digital narrow-casting models to send out their messages, potentially world wide. - Pointcasting can be made viable by the fact that individual users can access the information, service or program in their own time, while access no longer needs to be limited to a certain time or place, much like the traditional web operates right now, but the type of content can be different (i.e. video and audio footage, music, interactive multimedia programs and services, etcetera), while the means of production of content have become dramatically cheaper. - The potential of broadcasting to bind a large group into a process of simultaneous cognitive processing (as McLuhan has described television) can still be maintained, as broadcasting of live and/or recorded programs can still be supported by this digital infrastructure. The overall picture of PUSH media just means that the digital networking structure becomes a hybrid of interactive and tele-casted forms of content distribution. As radio and television are slowly turning digital, the Net is moving closer to the classical models of mass media. The idea of PUSH media has been criticised heavily as a threat to the horizontal and open structure of the Net as it has existed in the 90s so far. This is not all obvious, as it is easy and to some extent justified to maintain that the new fusion of mass tele-casting and networking can be exploited as an empowering practice for marginalised expression of culture and society, which it could do. Yet another dangerous effect could be the marginalisation of existing and flourishing forms of content production and distribution on the Net. The problem is threefold. Within those regions of the earth where bandwidth is expanding rapidly the big players in the media and entertainment industry are much better equipped to seize the larger part of the audience, with well designed, engaging programs and services. In the current low-bandwidth structure of the Net, the focus is directed at content and interest. Rather than providing content for a wide general audience, the Net producers try to address special interests of Net users, as the interest is what spurs the users into action, not so much the design of the structure. In the world of high-bandwidth connections the design of the service, program or content provided will determine much stronger whether or not that offering will reach its audience. Marginal groups in culture and society are generally not well equipped to deal with this new situation and they are certainly no match for the highly professional commercial media conglomerates. A second aspect is the communicative dimension of the Net. Aside from its function as a content distribution medium, the Net is primarily a communications medium. The Net supports personal communications such as e-mail, but also offers more public forms of interaction and communication, such as MUDs and MOOs, virtual environments shared by multiple users simultaneously, and chat lines offering virtual text conversations between two or more persons. Low bandwidth connections focused attention very strongly on this communicative dimension of the Net. Because of what the Net had to offer for itself was not so much (in the classic form ASCII text exchange) the interest had to be found outside the Net, in the people communicating on-line. With the advent of multimedia on-line the passive role of the entertainment consumer is given precedence over that of the active communicator, on-line cultures may be directly under threat because of this. The third, and undoubtedly still the most important problem is that of bandwidth distribution. Because bandwidth was low, content, communication, special interest and access could be high. As more and more content migrates to higher bandwidths, less and less will be available to low bandwidth regions and users. The equal distribution therefore directly interferes with the quality of content distribution and interaction across the social and geo-physical divides, and only a more equal distribution of available bandwidth can ensure the long-term quality improvement of content, which relies on access for all. Eric Kluitenberg Kassel, July 14, 1997. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de