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'Dead Media' Never Really Die
joabj writes "A streaming music service was available 100 years ago by telephone, through the Teleharmonium. A primitive version of Photoshopping was possible with Black Mirrors in the 18th century. While technologies and media platforms go obsolete at an ever more rapid pace, the ideas they engender never really die. They get absorbed by newer technologies, or are at least preserved by hobbyists (carrier pigeons) or niche markets (Morse Code), argued NYU postdoctoral researcher Finn Brunton at the USENIX conference. Myself, I'm waiting for an update to the visual cortex-stimulating Dream Machines of the 1960s."
Brunton questioned whether any media is "truly dead," except in rare cases, such as the Rongorongo tablets found at Easter Island, which no one now knows how to read or even decipher the reason they were created.
This whole 4 page article came off as a bunch of gum flapping over semantics. If I say something is a “dead technology”, I generally mean that very few people are using it.. not that it has completely disappeared from the face of the earth. I think the same is true of most people. Was the whole point of this to say that for most technologies, someone, somewhere, is still using it? If so it took a long damn time to make that point.
Also the fact that an older technology is somehow embodied in the new technology that supersedes it is a pretty damn obvious statement. We invent new things to do old things in a better way. Of _course_ my word processor incorporates the same concepts of the typewriter, it was designed to be a replacement for it!
My collection of stone tablets disagrees with this.
Good, I'm glad to hear than the 5+ senses we each possess are not degrading!
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
How on earth is a Claude glass ("black mirror") anything like photoshop?
There is a whole spectrum of these gadgets available, and I imagine many of them are quite good. Still, the best dream machine is the one that will lie next to you and excite some circuits you never thought existed... Shagadelic, baby!
In this mysterious place called a dark room, perhaps people have heard of them.
This whole 4 page article came off as a bunch of gum flapping over semantics.
Perhaps we can define a "dead" technology as one that no longer enjoys economies of scale. Hobbyists and niche markets often pay a premium for the technologies they use.
Which brings me to another question: Often participatory media die and are replaced with consumer media. For example, video game consoles replaced 8-bit microcomputers with TV output, Compact Disc replaced cassette, DVD replaced VHS, and walled-garden tablets have begun to replace laptop computers. These media create a barrier between those who can produce and those who can only consume, and one must pay dearly to surmount this barrier.
Myself, I'm waiting for an update to the visual cortex-stimulating Dream Machines of the 1960s.
It's called AVS (Audio Visual Stimulation), also known as AVE (Audio Visual Entrainment). Basically, they're visual bio-feedback machines that use data from an EEG recorder. You can find many products online. I personally don't use them so I can't vouch for their build quality and/or effectiveness. At the very least, it's just snake-oil. At best, the placebo it provides is therapeutic.
Life is not for the lazy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandcastle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_sculpture
etc.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
almost entirely quoted from a 1995 talk, doesn't really say anything interesting, draws some pretty far out conclusions, and page 4 is just a credit
but they sure shoved in 18 tons of ads
I understand Apple have patented iTeleharmonium so keep quite or it will be patent hearing for you, young fellow me-lad!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
VHF omnidirectional radio range radio's are used for navigation by basically every aircraft in the sky, and the signal sent out by each airport is just it's IATA Identification code, broadcasted as Morse code.
Soooo.... we're facing a media zombpocalypse?
... meth.
While technologies and media platforms go obsolete at an ever more rapid pace, the ideas they engender never really die.
Gee - people have a range of activities that brings please, facilitates work, allows them to be creative, etc.; and they adapt and adopt newer technologies that allow them to continue to do those things. When they discover the newer technology is better (with a wide definition of "better") at providing them what they want they stop using the old in favor of the new. Except for a few, who for whatever reason, prefer the old.
Hmm, if you can get post doc funding for the above, maybe I should get a grant for my proposal to determine "old technologies will come back into vogue, even on a limited basis, when it is discovered they can do specific things in different ways or better than the new.
Film. or at least presentation of my paper, at 11.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
All the media that no one remembers, die. I'm sure Ogg the caveman scratched marks into a boulder that meant something to him, but nobody else knows how to decipher it.
There could easily be media sitting in someone's attic that can't be read on any working hardware. (Or a farmer's barn, I've seen old computers gathering dust on a farm)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
How would you know?
out of 3D glasses, white LEDs and an Arduino (you know, for blog cred)
Some technologies die because they require a substantial infrastructure to sustain them. Kodachrome is a recent example. The special dyes, the factory that made then, and the elaborate, specialized processing labs are all gone now.
Steam locomotives are getting there. They require a major overhaul every 100,000 miles or so, and the massive infrastructure needed for that is long gone. There are people restoring the things as hobbyist projects, but they're taking a decade to do a job that a proper shop once did in a week. (Yes, I know about Tornado. It took them 19 years to build one locomotive, and when it had a boiler problem, they had to ship the thing to Germany for repairs.)
There's a lot of dead technology in the amplifier area. Before electronic amplifiers, there were decades of kludges, built to desperately try to make a big signal from a little one. The Teleharmonium in the original article was an example. They couldn't amplify audio, so they had to generate enough power at the head end to drive every speaker in the system. Each note had its own sizable AC generator, which is how they got to 200 tons of gear. Edison's "chalk telephone", the electromotograph, was an early amplifier Bell Telephone used electromagnetic speaker coils driving resistive carbon button transmitters as amplifiers. There are a number of mechanical amplifier types based on friction clutches. There were amplifiers based on electrical rotating machinery, like amplidynes and Ward-Leonard drives. All of these sucked so bad that they were discarded once tubes and power semiconductors became available.
(OK, Ward-Leonard drives live on. If you get into an elevator, and it's not moving but you hear a sizable motor running, that's a Ward-Leonard speed control, 1890 technology. It's an AC motor driving a DC generator, with the field current on the DC generator being adjusted to control speed. This has the advantage that the flywheel on the drive provides some of the energy for starting the elevator, and peak current is reduced.)
I put all my important records on clay tablets and store them in a cave by my house.
Yeah, we use 3.5 inch floppies (AKA the "hard disks" of the early 90's to the unwashed masses) as door stoppers.
I fail to see how CD's, DVD's, and tablets have in any way created barriers.
How much did it cost to get a low-volume CD pressed before CD-R was invented? Or a low-volume DVD authored and pressed before before DVD-R and DVD+R were invented?
the Andriod tools are free
I wasn't including Android in "walled garden" seeing as how every Android device supports adb install and usually even "Unknown sources". Even AT&T plans to push out updates to restore "Unknown sources." I was referring mostly to iOS and Windows Phone, which leads to the next point:
the iOS tools are $100 a year (I could very well be wrong on that one).
Plus the cost of a Mac if your current PC happens to have come with Windows or Linux, or if you currently don't own a PC in the first place (iOS 5 can run without iTunes). And if Apple rejects your application on some dubious grounds, your users also have to pay $99 per year to use it. Finally, I've read rumors a couple weeks ago that as iOS matures, Apple may discontinue the iMac and MacBook (not Pro) in favor of iOS-based products, meaning one would have to buy at least a MacBook Pro to create works for publication on iOS.
I suspect it's from repeatedly licking his mother's cooch.
Does this title make anyone else think "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" or is it just me...
Although the concept of an instrument being played real-time by a musician and piped into public venues is archaic, the base technology of the Telharmonium is still well-known to numerous rock and R&B musicians. The tonewheel-generator, additive synthesis concept was miniaturized into what is now known as the Hammond B3 Organ. They even engineered a rudimentary percussion component into the organ; one of the best examples of this in use is the mid-song interlude in Sugarloaf's "Green Eyed Lady."
Hammond also created a completely electronic subtractive synthesis instrument, the Novachord, in the 30s. The trouble was, given the musical abilities at the time, no one really knew how to use it to its full potential and few were made. There are some really good samples of a Novachord being played by a modern keyboardist on Youtube.
Don't you mean Microfiche?
The author of this article doesn't seem to understand the talk he's describing, much less the meanings of certain large words, such as "canonical".
I remember listening to an NPR tech podcast where they had (I think) a Wired contributor who bet the host that he could not name a single technology in the last century no longer being made. By this, he meant farm equipment. And it's not semantics. They literally make the EXACT same equipment, same name. They used a turn of the century catalog as their guide. And sure enough, no matter what piece of equipment they looked for, they found someone who made it today.
Now, you say, farming hasn't changed. Well, with the exclusion of the Amish, farming has changed, a lot. There aren't too many horse drawn seed burying at variable depth devices being used... or are they? They still make them, and you can still buy them.
So, this story is really a rip off of that, but it's still true, even in the pure sense.
I8-D
Myself, I'm waiting for an update to the visual cortex-stimulating Dream Machines of the 1960s.
Those weren't machines, those were drugs. And believe me, they have been regularly updated with new mind-bending versions.
Yeah, that just happened.
This is somewhat akin to the argument made a while back on an NPR show by Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired Magazine: that tools never die. No matter what tool you can think of, it is still in active use somewhere on Earth by someone: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/02/04/133188723/tools-never-die-waddaya-mean-never
and guess what, with very little expense (wire money to the author, paypal accepted), it could easily be applied to other areas:
- Dead technologies never die ! People are still riding horses, using manual looms, blowing glass, handcrafting watches...
- Dead languages never die ! People are still studying Greek, Latin, even shooting films in Aramaic !
- Dead ideas never die ! People still consider non-whites, women, gays... inferior !
- Dead OSes never die ! People are still using OS/2, BeOS, AmigaOS, Plan9, and Windows XP !
Film at 11, 11:30, 12; 12:30...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
apparently nowadays common knowledge = slashdot headline.
That's a DIY project that's been around for years now, the open-source Brian Machine by Mitch Altman. There's also lots of iOS and Android apps that simulate the same behavior with flashing colors on the LCDs while you lay your phone over your eyes.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Maybe some old media "failed" because they they required too much creative imagination to figure out usefulness. Or they were not technologically robust enough and still clumsy. Holograms are an example of the latter. Everyone expects "floating Princes Leah" dynamic holograms in the future. The first single-image holograms used lasers, camera, and a lot of expertise. But its expected you could compute the diffracted wavefield in real time without needing a laser or camera once computers were fast enough. The late MIT professor Steve Bennet had experimented with this in 1990s. And Disney Research was should clever things you could do with multiple pre-photographed or pre-computed holograms at the last SIGGRAPH. At some point we'll cross the feasability threshhold have have something clever.
Surmounting those barriers is as easy as having a computer with an internet connection.
True, if you own a PC, you can switch from consuming to creating by downloading and installing an application. But as people start buying tablet appliances instead of PCs, watch people not be able to switch so easily.
GIMP
...is available only for PCs, not tablets.
Programming? The tools for every major platform are free.
Do you mean "iOS is not a major platform"? The tools for that cost $600 for the Mac plus $99 per year.
as cheap as the price of a low-end desktop
Unless it becomes uncommon to buy a low-end desktop, after which point the major companies will stop making low-end desktops. Then the low-end desktop becomes "dead technology" by my definition.
Yet recordable CD and DVD media is readily obtainable.
In the early days of CD, CD-R media was not "readily obtainable". Nor was DVD-R media in the early days of DVD, as I understand it.
VHS (and Betamax) replaced nothing really
I agree that the VCR was a step forward in participatory media. So was CD to CD-R, and so was DVD to DVD-R, and so was DVD-R to YouTube. I was pointing out the steps backward to remind people that such steps backward have happened, where a medium becomes "dead technology" in favor of a less participatory medium.
I don't really see tablets as a replacement for laptops, which are still widely sold.
Apple has announced that iOS 5 will no longer need to be connected to iTunes. Instead, it will receive its updates over the air (don't know whether this means only Wi-Fi or also 3G). This means some people will own a tablet and no laptop, just as a lot of people bought a video game console and no PC.
Ok, it might be more difficult for me as an individual to produce a game for a console, but there's still PCs.
A PC doesn't* display on a television. This makes it more difficult for two to four players to fit around the monitor of the family's gaming PC to play a multiplayer game. This is why most notable PC multiplayer games tend to be online, requiring a separate PC for each player even if all players are in one household.
[Locked-down video game consoles] created a new market for people who didn't care about all potential uses for a general purpose computer.
And hurt the market for video games developed outside the mainstream video game industry, as console makers refused to deal with developers operating out of a home office.
As for DVDs replacing VHS, sure it is more complicated to burn a DVD
Was DVD-R available when DVD players first came out?
* I mean "doesn't", not "can't". A PC with a VGA or DVI video output can display on any HDTV with a VGA or HDMI input respectively, but in practice statistically nobody uses that feature. For one thing, few people that I've talked to appear to know it exists, and for another, people don't want to have to cart the family PC back and forth between the TV cabinet and the PC desk.
But arguably even those two [video game consoles and walled-garden tablets] are irrelevant because a) the vast majority of their users aren't creators anyway
They aren't creators because the devices' firmware doesn't allow them to be.
and b) neither of the things you claim to have been replaced have actually been replaced
As for consoles: What do you mean they haven't have replaced personal computers connected to televisions? Nowadays, statistically nobody has a home theater PC, and I can cite several comments by CronoCloud and others to back up this assertion. Shall I dig up links to these comments?
As for tablets: Low-end laptops haven't been replaced yet, but some analysts claim the proverbial writing is on the wall. Please see my other comment about iOS.
the vast majority of [console/tablet] users aren't creators anyway
because the devices' firmware doesn't allow them to be.
They weren't creators before either.
A walled-garden device may be ideal for people who are sure that they'll never decide one day to become creators before the device breaks. But when people who "weren't creators before" decide one day to become creators, it is a lot more expensive for them to do so if all they own is a walled-garden device than if they own a general-purpose PC.
Only devices attached to televisions count
As I understand it, only devices attached to monitors the size of televisions can be used for playing multiplayer games with multiple gamepads, as opposed to having to buy a separate PC and a separate copy of each program for each player.
And you'll just ignore the majority of laptops that aren't low end because their existence is inconvenient to your thesis.
No, I ignore them because I happen not to see them in my daily life.