New media formats revealed by the Internet
Isn't it amazing that there's always exactly 60 minutes' worth of news everyday, and that, when transcribed, it fills exactly one newspaper?Don't Judge New Media by Old RulesHave you ever stopped to think how utterly fortuitous it is that every televisual story worth telling can be neatly broken into segments of exactly 22 minutes (plus commercials) or 48 minutes (ditto)? That every story that makes a good subject for a film takes somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours to tell? That all albums fit conveniently on one or sometimes two CDs, except for best-of compilations? That all books are exactly long enough to bind within a single set of covers and not so short as to allow those covers to touch in the middle?
These are all technological norms that represent technological hangovers: We now assume that certain distributors will carry a particular sort of carton, and its contents will go onto a certain kind of shelf; 10-foot-tall photography books don't fit in those cartons, and the trucks are already fitted for those cartons, and the shelves have been screwed into the walls of the bookstores.
the latest
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Yet even BBtv pieces (brilliant, btw) have commercial interruptions, just like network TV.
Commercials are fine.
Interruptions are very 20th century.
Or that every subject worth learning takes exactly 36 hours of lectures to learn?
The idea that all books are long enough to be bound between two covers is a tautology. You're just saying that all books are book-length.
Also, given the physical structure of a book, how on earth could the two covers of a book "touch in the middle"? That would require the absense of pages, and thus it not being a book at all.
When dealing with the public at large, it helps to have reliable, standard formats, so that it can fit into many different schedules. That's all it is.
@Daemon: I don't think he....
oh what's the use.
When it comes to media, sometimes I want my mind blown. but usually I just want to be informed and entertained. Phone numbers used to be just seven digits, cuz that's how many most people can easily remember. Standards are rarely arbitrary.
So, it's a reiteration of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and being liberated from the constraints of "shelf space" (or bandwidth)?
The only "portion size" that CDs imposed is the upper limit of about 76 minutes or so. Most CDs come in at around 60 minutes, and many back-catalog items that were once on vinyl are still below 47 minutes.
Even now, you get new albums coming out with only 30-35 minutes of music. Even worse is when I see multi-CD sets of 30-minute discs... what a stupid waste. For instance, I recently bought a Kinks 2CD set, and all the music could easily fit on one disc.
So CD durations, at least, are all over the place.
Movies are starting to move out of the "it's gotta be close to 90 minutes long" phase that was so prevalent 20-30 years ago. It's now perfectly acceptable for a blockbuster to go past 120 minutes (The Dark Knight) some even breaking the 180-minute barrier (any of the LotR movies, for instance.)
I'd actually like to see a return of short serials, like there were before the advent of TV. There was an experiment with the Animatrix, for instance, but that didn't lead to much more of that sort of thing.
They could show one episode for free before full movies, and then sell tickets for the subsequent episodes. They could even put a bunch of episodes from different series together and have special showings of that. I'm sure others could think of better ways of doing this.
"I'd actually like to see a return of short serials, like there were before the advent of TV."
...Hell, it's bad enough that the damn cheap-assed networks and the greedy unions have forced TV productions to start cutting back to 13-episode seasons on the grounds that it's too expensive to give us what used to be the norm: 31-32 epsiodes for a full hour program, and 36-39 for a half-hour show. Even then there were too damn many reruns, and that's even when there were shows on TV that were worth watching!
Templates and standards. Humans like patterns. Predictability. We strive to organize this way.
That's the neat part. We can come up with new templates and new patterns.
We progress and renew at an amazing pace because we can organize like this. Changing and yet not changing.
fun stuff to think about for sure. :)
Books don't do that, actually. One of Tad William's books had to be split into two volumes when they put it into trade paperback form. On the other end of the spectrum, some children's books have barely two dozen pages.
And there's a good reason there's no 10-foot-high photography books: you try picking one of those up, bringing it home in the car, and/or turning the pages. Or finding a place to look at it comfortably (one issue "new media" hasn't fixed). To say nothing of the cost - "normal", 2-3 foot by 2-3 foot art books cost a fortune already.
@9 I really don't think it's the "cheap-assed networks and the greedy unions"... considering that anime has 13-ep seasons most of the time as well, and our networks and unions certainly aren't behind those shows. I suspect the difference is that the definition of a TV "season" has changed to - *gasp!* - match the length of an actual season. That old 39 episode season - if you showed it once a week, you'd get less than two seasons a year. The only thing that might be greed is that we don't get 4 seasons a year - or even 3 much of the time.
#10 - Exactly. Though my example would have been Clive Barker's Imajica, but Green Angel Tower works too ;)
My original point, though I probably should have stated it more explicitly, was that books just don't belong on that list at all.
The only limits of a book's structure are those imposed by practical limitations such as printing and binding technologies, readability, etc.
Even the way books are read isn't set - the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy series are pretty well known. How about the Queen's Blade game artbooks currently popular in Japan, or the Principia Discordia.
Then there's notebooks, scrapbooks, binders (which are basicly re-arrangeable books), etc.
as Someone (the capital s is to show some respect, y'know) said, "the medium is the message"... in the same sense, the media is the message, and, obviously, the content is the message...
so any type of information will be "packaged" as how it can be absorbed by the human brain... (wonder about the correctness of this sentence hu)
just my 2 cents...
Years ago I put together a comic book intended to be used as a promotional piece for the commercial art studio I was working at. Naively, I printed pages at 8 1/2" x 11".*
A comic book store owner later commented that the art was interesting, and some collectors might have picked it up for that reason... but because of the non-standard dimension, it would not fit in the comic book bags, or the comic book boxes. Thus, difficult to actually add to a collection.
I didn't sell a lot.
* Measurements I've taken from a comic sitting beside my desk give me 6 5/8" x 10 3/16".
@MDH-
Commercial breaks used to be fine, however now that TV is going digital, it seems more likely that programs will have only one sponsor per episode (like they do for most legal online TV shows). I live in Prague at the moment, and I don't even own a TV anymore. I just get all of my television from the Internet.
You gain a different perspective if you imagine media as a physical product - #11 had it.
There is a reason why your mobile phone is roughly the shape it is - a reason why every chair and table have similar dimensions. Of course there are exceptions, just like there are exceptions with media - but I think a large factor that hasn't been mentioned here in the discussion (sorry, haven't read the linked article) is that placing limits or boundaries on creative pursuits fosters innovation. Figuring out how to make a unique looking chair that is still comfortable is still a respectable challenge, as is directing a film that tells a compelling story in a reasonable period of time.
PS - The demo scene is probably the limit case of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
> Isn't it amazing that there's always exactly 60 minutes' worth of news
I find it more amazing that the "human interest" news at the end of the hour usually takes up more time that the "top story" at the start of the hour. Whazzup with that?
I heard this great lecture once about an extinct musical genre of blues ballads, which were storytelling songs quite epic in their scope - and then what happened? The recording industry got going and those songs had to be edited to fit onto a disc with maybe 3 minutes of recording time on it. And after a generation no one really remembered how the original had gone.
I wonder how this relates to changes in attention span over time? If some sf writers are correct, it will only take a fraction of a second to upload the news into our wetware optimaliztion program. You won't have to read, you'll just have the data instantly placed in active memory. I would really like not having to read so much news, but I'd still like the data.
This seems like a lot of "the cart before the horse" to me-- Why is there always "exactly 60 minutes of the evening news", well. . . there usually isn't, they pad it out with "puff pieces" that aren't necessarily newsworthy. Although it is common for artists to try and fill up the full 70+ minutes of CD space, plenty of artists still release 35 - 45 minute cds and call them complete albums (not "EP"s or "maxi-singles"). In the vast panoply of films there are plenty of movie shorts and 3+ hour epics (to say nothing of extremely long experimental films like Warhol's "Empire"), Hollywood films generally run between 1.5 and 2.5 hours long, but even that is quite a bit of variation (a difference of an hour at the extremes, or pretty close to 50% of run time). And books, well, those have never been a standard length-- from epics to novellas.
Of course it is a good point that with the web one doesn't have to take into account norms of length that we usually (unconsciously) put creative works into.