One of the things technology promises is convenience. Anyone who has ever cried in frustration on the phone to a customer service robot, glared at a printer nagging for toner until it just breaks after approximately 14 uses, or had their self-driving car speed off a cliff, knows this to be a lie.
Danny Hillis, the computer scientist and inventor, described technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet”, and he has a point. In my opinion, the quality of digital formats of music, film, photography, for example, don’t improve upon what’s already there. They’re talked about “almost as good as” something that already exists. They’re cheaper, but they mean less.
Digital photography has turned the camera on ourselves, and what nut job would store physical album after album of photos of themselves pouting, humorous cafe sandwich boards, and nail art? Shooting films has become much easier, but stuff shot digitally five, ten years ago looks ropey now. The quality just isn’t as good. The fidelity of music depends on how it was recorded and what speakers it’s played on, but the feel of a physical format such as vinyl is always going to be better. And “feel” matters. Convenience isn’t beautiful or enjoyable, otherwise we’d all be going around on our flammable hoverboards eating three meals a day in pill form.
Human beings are tactile and sentimental. Tactility and sentimentality are key components of empathy. We reach out to touch people’s lower arms, and look for things in the attic. We sometimes want to preserve the past, but more often than not, we want to be reminded of it. We like the familiarity that references evoke. It’s why salt on a newly boiled potato almost mystically conjures the pattern on your parents’ kitchen floor, and why people share listicles of long defunct brands of chocolate bars. It’s why aspects of technology itself concede to skeuomorphic characteristics.
Anyway, I was thinking about this the other week when I joined Apple Music just to listen to Frank Ocean’s new album, Blonde. The rise of “platforms” (not trains) means the convenience of technology is diluted. When it comes to music, you join Apple Music to listen to Frank Ocean and Tidal to watch Beyonce’s Lemonade. The fragmentation of music streaming “services” (not pre-NCT tweaks), turns the department store back into a village; the butcher for the meat, the fruit and veg shop for your apples, the hardware store for a lightbulb. When ridiculously overpriced CDs were the main way to listen to music for a while, back when major record labels were making hay and indie musicians could actually buy houses, there wasn’t different CD players for different artists or labels. The format fit the player, the player fit the format. The format died, the way of delivering it changed, and now the players are platforms.
It’s not just music, of course, but television too. Cable television companies pioneered tailored media packages, but now on top of that you join Netflix to watch Stranger Things and Amazon Prime to watch Transparent. You used to have a phone bill, and electricity bill, and a gas bill. Now you have a phone bill, an electricity bill, a gas bill, a TV bill, a Netflix bill, a Spotify bill, a mobile phone bill, an internet bill…
The music industry refused to give things away for free, so people just took everything. “It is our right,” the internet kids said, “to get your art for free. We want it, we want it now, and we’ll take it.” And they did. I did, you did. We might have got rid of €27.99 CDs, but we also made it harder for the musicians we love so much to actually make a living.
A bloated industry imploded, the fans took everything for free, and the evangelists of digital progress cheered. Now musicians earn a pittance for every play, and different platforms box off different artists. Adapt or die! Terms such as “disrupt” often feel like the digital-era version of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Print media threw itself on the pyre of “free”, acting first and thinking after. The music industry ate itself with a reluctance to adapt, but print media opened the doors to free culture and then tried - and failed - to put the genie back in the bottle. The clarion call of the early internet was that you had to be online. There was initially no alternative global news media structure that existed online to compete with print media.
In digitising itself for free, print media allowed itself to be stripped and skinned. It gave itself away, and then tried to put a value on itself. When the industry started collapsing due to the fact everything was being paid for apart from at the consumer end, people talked about different models, and the opportunities of the digital sphere, but these opportunities primarily exist for new companies with new ideas, not old ones with the same ideas who are turning oil tankers around in a lagoon of jet skis. Now words people write are called “content”, and bashing “legacy” media (who still, even in their crotchety old ways do much of the story-breaking, investigation-making, and quality writing) is a professional sport. People make money from that, at least.
Book publishing has things tied up, probably. At least people still pay for books, even if they do all come from one giant warehouse called Amazon, which means the people in the small shop in your town can no longer put food on the table, and even though bookcases are increasingly virtual. At least authors and publishing houses are getting paid for their work. At least readers value it.
Television has either subconsciously or consciously learned from the music industry’s collapse and the decimation of the print media industry. You play you pay (unless you illegally download, which is what anyone who knows how to does as well.) Television has got part of the convenience bit down. By rights, Netflix should have gone under in the mid-00s, when it was a DVD postal delivery service. Now, browsing through its bought and original titles online can take up almost as much time as actually watching something, such is the paralysis of choice. Hard to choose, easy to use.
Perhaps the fragmentation of platforms echoes our own fragmentation, as we disappear off into our smaller niche worlds, and surround ourselves only with things that we like. If one platform does one thing, and another does another, we don’t seem to mind - it’s only when we have to go to several for similar things that it begins to grate. Where will television platforms go? Traditional broadcasters are losing audiences to streaming services, that’s for sure. It’s no coincidence that this has coincided with a golden era of television, one in which streaming services can take bigger risks, and programmes can be more intelligent when they’re not bound by being all things to all people.
RTE’s new director-general, Dee Forbes, said this week that the broadcaster must “be clearer about what our brand is and where we want to go.” She’s right. RTE isn’t viewed as cool or dynamic or forward-looking. At least a bit of that isn’t its fault, considering a national broadcaster has to be all things to all people in one country. Streaming services with their global audiences, just have to be one thing for a certain type of audience, and that audience can be gathered and replicated from country to country until it makes up the size of a national audience. The future is in those niches, the inconvenient and convenient platforms, a media and entertainment industry that gives itself away as much as it begs for attention and custom. As much as the tyranny of platformism irritates, it speaks to our new consumer behaviour, where we seek and recommend, rather than slump and accept what we’re given.