Twelve Black Code Monkeys

It recently occurred to me how much time has become a factor in all things technological. It’s a bit obvious, given the fact that speed is something that has been constantly sought after with everything from transportation to computers. When people talk about “power” or performance what they are really talking about is time. How much can be accomplished in X amount of time.

Even when you start talking about simply using technology to view things like movies, or listen to music, etc., time is a critical variable. Make a movie too long and one’s attention starts to wonder. Make it too short and people feel ripped off. Attention span has of course gone down with the advent of music videos and today’s ads geared at the teenage to 20-something market are much more rapid fire. Heaven forbid having the camera “glued” to a particular scene for more than a couple of seconds!

Part of the problem with this is that while time is contracting in many ways, there’s more to do, and even more to see, hear, and read. As production equipment costs shrink, and the Indie marketplace grows, so too does the number of films being produced each year. Similarly the Internet and the popularity of digital audio files has made it possible for virtually anyone with a couple of bucks to produce his own album. Finally, the Internet in general, and the Blogosphere in particular, has caused the amount of media content output on a daily basis to explode exponentially.

A big part of the file-sharing brouhaha with the media companies on one side and the advocates of a freer distribution of digital content on the other really also has a lot to do with time. A lot of the advocate’s argument is about being able to experience media in the way one wants to. For example, instead of just being able to watch a movie on my TV at home, why can’t I take that piece of digital information and put it on any device I choose (that is capable of playing it), like a phone, or a portable media player, etc.? Or even send it to a friend so we can watch it at his place? So sure it’s partly about the freedom in the way you get to watch something, but part of that has to do with when you gets to watch. Tivo is the really big obvious example here. It lets you “time shift” TV programming so that you can watch the things you want to watch when you want to watch them. No more having to wait for commercials in between segments of a show, or even to rush home so that you can catch the beginning of some program or game. You’re no longer constricted by time.

The big media companies are still somehow scared of giving people this flexibility. XM Satellite Radio recently removed a version of their tuner that you plug directly into your computer and which some companies figured out a way to create a time-shifting mechanism similar to Tivo. Already there are companies out there that are making these imposed limits meaningless. Tivo had to fight for its customers to be able to take their recorded programming and make it easily transferable to a PC, which can then be either taken on the road via laptop or some other portable device. Of course it’s all about money, or the perception of losing it. These companies are mortally afraid that giving consumers too much control could mean decreased or eliminated ad revenue, since it becomes harder and harder to determine who your audience is at any given time, or even if ads are being watched at all. Likewise, allowing people to copy things willy-nilly ads to the fear of piracy, even with DRM. As I mentioned, part of the problem is the amount of content becoming available. It is so large that no longer can anyone conceive of buying a majority of the content one might want to watch or listen to ala carte at previously standard prices. So it’s no wonder that subscription services like Netflix and Audible.com have taken off. This is also why Apple’s online digital music store iTunes, which sells individual songs for $.99 a pop, has also had a lot of success. This shows that most people (or enough, anyway) will buy a lot of their content legally instead of pirating it if they feel that the price is fair. That “fair price” just happens to be getting lower because of the overabundance of content and outlets for that content.

Of course, ultimately, you still need time to actually watch or read or listen to the content, but even here, we’ve have found ways to speed things up. One of the aspects of blogs that I’ve come to appreciate is their utility as a kind of filtering mechanism for the web and the news media as a whole. Many of them distill content that’s of interest to their particular audience and give brief synopses with a link. If the reader wants more, they can click on that link. Or they can move on. But it makes the endless web and the vast array of daily news at least slightly less intimidating. The most recent generation of Apple’s iPod has created a very blatant feature for saving time – a facility to speed up audio books which allows one to listen to a book in only 80% the time it would take normally, albeit with some caveats.

The documentary movie Cinemaniacs which came out last year is about a group of New York eccentrics whose lives are comprised of sleeping, eating, and watching one movie after another every single day from morning till night. While sad and screwed up in many ways, the ambition to watch everything out there, or at least everything of quality, was something to which I could relate. One of the people they followed said that he was “a bit of a completist.” I don’t know how many others out there share this goal (or obsession), even if on a very minimal level. Maybe it’s the exponentially growing amount of media available. For myself, maybe it has to do with my slow reading speed making absorbing written material as slow as listening to someone reading it. I don’t pretend that everyone has such wishes, or even a majority of people, but I do think that even if you don’t want to see, hear, or read “everything” or even just the vast majority of “high-quality” content, many people do have a lot more in the column of things that they haven’t yet experienced but want to, as in the column of stuff they already have.

The issue that underlies all of this which is not one I like to think about, of course, is that our time here is finite. The amount of content we can experience, or really the number of possible different experiences that we can have in general, is if not infinite, at least much more plentiful even than any one person can experience in, lets say, 100 long-lived life-times. Speculative fiction has brought us the idea, and its now even been made into serious predicutions by futurists, that at some point we will be able to transfer information much more directly and instantaneously both into and out of our brains. I’m not sure if we will ever be able to, like Neo in The Matrix, download an entire training program of jujitsu in an instant. But one can always hope!