When Will New Media Make Good On Its Various Promises!

Reflections on the New Media Meltdown on the occasion of the Rotterdam Film Festival 1999

Since Amazon.com's stock value began to drop steadily at the end of January this year, financial analysts around the world have been falling over themselves to spell out doom for the Internet's commercial dream in their various column inches. The resulting rash of Net.stock bubble-bursting pieces have pointed out, rightly enough, that online sales just aren't worth all that much: even if, for instance (and as Forrester's have predicted) online sales in the US would total over $100 billion in four or five years' time, that would still only account for 5% of America's overall retail sales - a puny proportion of the whole marketplace and one which can in no way support the preposterous worth being assigned to the Net's big corporate hitters.
Net.stocks have been trading on their online future for too long: the market, waking from its vainglorious dreams of a gilded tommorow, suddenly seems to want to know what those businesses are worth . Company stock prices based on blue-sky financial predictions for the Net as a whole no longer seem to be cutting the mustard, and it might well be time for Silicon Valley startups to forget the idea of raking in investment capital without a solid business plan - and a real way of making money - behind them.

There was thus something of an uneasy ambiguity in the title of the Melting Media programme at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam in January this year: in the midst of the hype which still has it that the Net will superheat conventional media practice into a borderless, interactive and fiscally supercharged goo, with win-win spin-offs for those investors who have been astute enough to invest their cash in the right places, there was also the palpable sensation that this was to be the year of Net media practice finally facing meltdown, having still failed to come up with the goods after years of flim-flamming that those goods were only a year away.

Yes, we've seen that it's possible to use the Net to sell computers, books, cars, and the American dream in general to ABC1s in its pleasantly competitve environment, but that's just the old mail-order game got up in flashy electric livery and writ large. And as pundits are beginning to point out, with their usual wolfish accuracy, the Net's most salient economic characteristic - disintermediation, or the ability to cut out the middleman - is going to spell difficulties for even the most solid of online sales brands in the years to come. Witness the worrying phenomenon of Buy.com (which undercuts manufacturer prices substantially and makes up the shortfall through advertising) to see how even relative giants of the Net, like Amazon, could be facing serious challenge from margin-scraping small fry in the not-too-distant future.

Where is the Nets next killer app?

No wonder, then, that the online content market is starting to show the strains of hype without end, amen. You would think that the new media industry would be racing to produce a killer app which could prove to the financers that the Net's still where its all @, and that it's still the right place for your smart investor's money: this should be the year when new media makes good on its various promises of an all singing, all dancing interactive content paradise - in full. But if the show-and-tell sessions at Melting Media were anything to go by, it won't be; and if there is any awareness amongst Net practitioners of the market pressures steadily bearing down on them, and of the assorted financial bubbles bursting all around, there was little evidence of it amongst the speakers here.

Saskia Sassen, perhaps betraying her London School of Economics provenance, did have something to say in passim about accessing those mythic, floating sources of capital not tied to direct corporate or governmental interests, and her talk of the end of romanticism on the Net made one think that she, at least, might not have been completely unaware of the investment troubles lurking around the corner; but beyond that it was the usual shenanigans.

Celluloid Business versus New Media frustration

In the Festival at large, boozy hordes of film makers, moguls, journalists and critics had gathered to work out who would buy, sell and write about what: every film was booked out; you couldn't get into a good movie for love or money. At the rather less heavily attended Melting Media, meanwhile, co-ordinator Femke Wolting had worked hard to create an event which acutely summed up the state of new media today. Its motley crew of Net practitioners, theorists, critics, artists, thinkers and (there's no polite way of putting it) corporate drones seemed blissfully unaware of (or perhaps just unconcerned about) the big boys outside ruminating about the demise of the Net and carving up the rights to the latest celluloid blockbusters, whilst they were still arguing the toss over the right way to get going, still stuck on the start line without a marketable product in sight.

So in the company of, as Andreas Broekmann happily put in from the audience, 'old friends' (the Royal College of Art's ubiquitous CAD course, the Mongrel collective, the Netherlands Design Institute, the ever-smug Razorfish posse, German arts collective ART + COM and Eastern European curatorial project art.teleportacia all had their representatives at the event, and in the sidelines, the bright sparks of net.criticism smouldered quietly away), Melting Media's panelists settled down for another weekend on the Net merry-go-round.

Suprisingly few efforts were made at disguising the ignoble failure of the new media industry to yet come up with anything worthy of its name. Moderator John Wyver, of the Illuminations group, seemed largely motivated by a thinly-masked obsession with the resounding failure of his own, awful, VR-based gameshow earlier last year (which failure, incidentally, he had already bemoaned to an audience of thousands at the Doors of Perception conference), and doggedly demanded that each panelist give up the embarrassing details of user responses to their various projects. What Wyver wanted, quite obviously, was for everyone else to admit that their own worthy projects were as poorly received as his. Fat chance. In the time honoured tradition of web-workers everywhere, people kept their server stats firmly under their belts. If there had been any resounding successes amongst the various projects on display, no-one was admitting it; but no-one was confessing to downright failure either, which made Wyver look rather unfortunately like the fox that cut off its tail.

The incorporated user

What Melting Media provided, nonetheless, was a succinct and invaluable look at a new media industry which is still struggling to come to terms with the conditions of interactivity online, still assiduously attempting to work out the ways in which it will incorporate the user into the modern-day media experience. This is the Holy Grail of online content provision, and indeed the key component of the pre-written contract with the behemoths of Capitalism to which the industry has committed itself, in advance, and which have funded its ditherings to date. The importance of a thorough incorporation of this kind has never been lost on those behemoths, who always understood the value of shrinking the cleavage between production and consumption.

Closing the loop - so that consumers bring themselves to market's product and, ostensibly, define the terms of their own consumption - would not only assuage capital's residual guilt at still having, in this civilised century, to coerce its populace into being the good consumers they know they want to be, but would refine the Capitalist project into its deadliest, most efficient form yet: if Burroughs was right, once upon a time, to say that the merchant sells the consumer to the product, then here that merchant is sublated into the machine, and the consumer presents himself to the product, willingly. This agenda has become startlingly clear over the last year or so as the new media industry has grown more desperate to fulfill its contract, and has assumed a variety of mythic forms: children who will create their own educational tools, viewers who will choose their own programming and decide the way the narratives of their programmes develop, shoppers who will define their purchases to a 'T'; this was what capital's billions of dollars of investment were earmarked for, and it is this that the new media industry has utterly failed to deliver.

It is also not, I repeat not, a figment of this writer's imagination. Notice the slogan in Douglas Gayeton's web-based Waking Hours project: 'We Want Your Head', accompanied by the rather chilling silhouette of 'You', the yet-to-be-inserted subject. The project offered the young proletarians of Paolo Alto the chance to create their own web diaries, composed of photos, animation, video and sound, and Gayeton disingenuously described the way that he'd taught these illiterate teenagers to 'program', a blatant and insulting piece of spin which was deliberately intended to present the children as being in control of the terms of their own mediation, which of course they were not, nor ever will be. Pretty obviously they had produced precisely the kind of documentation expected of them, like good drones, but Gayeton and his kind know that if they can make it look as though the kids are in control, they will come out smelling of roses.

Incomepetence and flawed ambitions

That was a remarkable instance of the new media industry almost getting it right: Gayeton in fact showed himself to be very aware of the unscrupulous politics of his project, of which more at the end of this review. Others, meanwhile, were more typically incompetent. Ayelet Sena, producer of the online version of the contemptible American detective series Homicide showed - on video - a spectacular computer-generated intro for an online episode, Second Shift, which was patently so bandwidth-intensive as to be a joke. Sena was supposed to use her experience of Net media to show how such a series could be translated into a rich interactive experience online, but in fact showed the usual multilinear guff which, as almost everyone has worked out by now, is a complete waste of time. The actual content of the project, furthermore, was so thoroughly offensive that one suspects the audience refused to comment because of a general suspicion that there was some dark joke here that we weren't being let in on - see www.nbc.com/homicide for the gory details. Finally Sena, still blissfully riding the breaking wave of Net enthusiasm in corporate media land, casually let slip that Homicide producers had thrown bags of money at her project without really knowing what she was doing. That's a common situation right now, but one which will shortly be drawing to a close: Sena should probably spend less time gloating and more pausing to wonder how a project of such utter paucity and bad taste would survive an economic shake-down, if one should truly be imminent.

Elsewhere, one felt sympathy for developers who, as Gayeton had succinctly put it, were still trying in vain to force their elephants (read: flabby, megabit-hungry concepts) through straws (read: the Net's precious bandwidth). ART+COM produced precisely the kind of project which suited Wyver's personal agenda, a fantastic (in both senses of the word) mapping of Berlin in a 3-D environment which was fatally flawed. Having spent a 4 years developing an ingenious, if somewhat cranky, system for cataloguing 2-D film archive in a virtual space ART+COM had been forced to admit to themselves that the project could not run online since it was almost completely impractical. Thus, yet again, ART+COM's work was shown on video.

In fact, the only speaker I saw who didn't show her work on video, and who attempted to actually use the Internet in front of audiences was Oliana Lialina, of art.teleportacia, an online gallery which displays and auctions net.art. Oliana spoke sense a refreshingly jargon-free tone: she, like Sassen, noted that heroic romanticism was over on the net, and talked about online projects which pay attention to the medium's inherent qualities, and which chose for themselves other agendas that the myth of multilinear interactivity. Unfortunately for Oliana, so few presenters had attempted to use the Net connection which had been made available to them (irony of ironies) that no-one in the production team had realised how slow it was or thought to correct the problem. Thus Oliana's work (certainly the most interesting and exciting of the event) was shown to extremely poor effect.

All of this is not to criticise the programmers of Melting Media, or the Rotterdam Film Festival at large: organiser Femke Wolting, indeed, put on a memorable and well staged event which was enjoyed by many. Rather, it is to point out that the conference drew attention, in no uncertain terms, to the deadly lack at the centre of new media practice today. For any readers who consider that the fledgling Net developers' community is unable to protect itself from such a coruscating review as this, or that this community may not yet be truly aware of the political dimension of its efforts, I would refer you finally to the video shown by Douglas Gayeton at the close of the Transforming the Documentary seminar, to the audience's general mirth and approval.

Here, Gayeton parodied the critical ('Luddite') response to new media in an overblown Orwellian nightmare scenario in which television programmes were served individually to viewers: sitting down to watch, the television performed a retinal scan on the viewer and indexed the pattern to a database from which it made programming selections. Now this kind of 'pointcasting', whilst not by any means the whole story of the new media project, is indeed one of its chief components: and, clearly, Gayeton's video could serve quite forcibly to forestall a critical response to that project by playing for laughs - no-one, that is, wants to look stupid by making objections which have already been ridiculed. That's a sophisticated and insidious tactic, coming from an industry which has become very sophisticated at alternately selling and covering up its various lies; in the end, one came away from Melting Media feeling quite glad that this sophistication is accompanied by enough incompetence to keep it from fulfilling its Faustian pact with the body capital. Here's to a quick foreclosure on net.development; here's to the bursting bubble, and time out on the net frontier. Here's, with apologies to the organisers, to a new media meltdown.