Click This: From Analog Dreams to Digital Realities

In the rush to divine the contours of the new mediascape of the emergent digital technologies, two notable thrusts of explication and articulation have developed. On the one hand, many academic and industry observers position the emergent digital media in binary opposition to traditional media, signified by the tropes of "old media" and "new media," with a distinct privileging of the latter. On the other hand, efforts to domesticate or deny a seeming threat posed by new media produce arguments claiming that insignificant differences exist between the two.

Considering these polarities, I have become fascinated with two particular gaps that exist between these hyperbolic discourses and the everyday facts about the impact of analog and digital technologies. It is in the interstices between our nostalgic analog dreams and discomfiting digital realities that I find productive ideas worth pondering at this pivotal moment in our congealing technocracy.

Digital media technologies are distinguished from their analog counterparts through a sort of phenomenological "click fetish" and concomitant "lure of sensory plenitude" effect, presumably available simply, instantaneously, and pleasurably with any one of several clicking apparatuses.¹ Newer apparatuses of click pleasure, such as the computer mouse, video game joystick, wireless cell phone with Internet connectivity, personal digital assistant, personal video recorder (e.g., MSN TV Services, formerly Web TV; Replay; and TiVo) combined with the more familiar click apparatuses, including the TV remote-control device and even the telephone, produce a consumer-driven on-demand media services environment few could have predicted even five years ago.

Perhaps the most surprising development in our ascendant digital new mediascape is the phenomenal and unanticipated success of the reinvented telephone, as a result of its convergence with cellular mobile technologies and wireless services that provide global positioning systems, e-mail and text messaging, Internet surfing, built-in cameras, games and streaming video, and even hours of MP3 music.² With the escalating trend toward exhibiting or displaying bigger and higher-resolution media images in IMAX theaters, on projection, liquid crystal, and plasma (high-definition and HD-ready) TVs, and on flat-screen computer monitors, the allure of the cell phone's miniature screen indicates something of significance at work.

Clearly, the elements of portability, mobility, and instantaneity are driving the public's embrace of the cell phone's increasingly sophisticated, convenient, and user-friendly screen technology. The remarkable on-demand services now integrated into cell phones include video games (built-ins and Java-enabled streaming role-playing games), group and networked e-mail, and text messaging with special characters, color screen savers, built-in charge couple device cameras, and even real-time crisis and catastrophe news.

Whereas TV, then cable, then the personal computer once dazzled us as powerfully efficient intermedia delivery systems, the telephone reigns supreme once again. Writing for P.C. World, Agam Shah reports that "Sprint PCS Vision customers can now see live news, catch up with the latest sports scores, or watch new music videos on their mobile phones through a new service called MobiTV, created by Idetic." Company executive officer Phillip Alvelda has said that "this is the first deployment of a whole new distribution medium for television."³

Despite the popularity and adequacy of portable DVD players, this development begs the question of whether feature films are next. Alvelda suggests this distinct possibility: "Everyone knows how to use a remote control. We have designed the [MobiTV] interface to use the cell phone like a remote control. . . . We are providing a whole new class of content that people wouldn't get when mobile. [People] would rather sit back and be entertained than surf."⁴ This brief detour through the amazing technological leaps in contemporary and next-generation wireless and cell phone apparatuses and services illustrates how fluid and dynamic our mediascapes remain.

However, I am not convinced by Alvelda's logic in anticipating which technology will ultimately predominate. This techno-body at rest or in motion conversation shifts the focus to another gap...