Beef
The great majority of intellectuals—particularly in the arts—are in a desperate plight. The fault lies, however, not with their character, pride, or inaccessibility. Journalists, novelists, and literati are for the most part ready for every compromise. It’s just that they do not realize it. And this is the reason for their failures. Because they do not know, or want to know, that they are venal, they do not understand that they should separate out those aspects of their opinions, experiences, modes of behavior that might be of interest to the market. Instead they make it a point of honor to be wholly themselves on every issue. Because they want to be sold, so to speak, only “in one piece,” they are as unsalable as a calf that the butcher will sell only to the housewife only as an undivided whole.
Walter Benjamin, “Venal but Unusable” fragment published April 1934
Guilty as charged.
Casting
Thinking of metaphors for future use. Transmission is a capability that seems amplified by the Internet, as it was amplified in the past by the near simultaneous inventions of photography and the telegraph. Is transmission always coincident with broadcast? The adoption of the term narrowcast to describe low power radio and some forms of Internet delivery seems important. The former is limited geographically, the latter by the bandwidth limitations of the server providing content.
Looking at the OED, it seems that the term “narrowcast” has been around since 1932. The OED quotes H. Angus in Broadcasting 7/2: “By ‘narrow-casting’ I mean any type of education or entertainment or information that isn’t of interest to the general public.” This indeed describes the network I find myself surfing, like many others I have long since lost interest in what the mainstream media, or the mainstream of “blogdom” has to say about anything.
What triggered my thinking about this was Patrick Maynard’s definition of photography as “a branching family of technologies, with different uses, whose common stem is simply the physical marking of surfaces through the agency of light and similar radiations” (Engine of Visualization 3). In the case of both cinema and Internet technologies, these markings are evanescent transmissions.
People and their marks appear and disappear on the Internet, and we partake of their communications through an entirely different surface. It is a surface composed of light transmitted from a screen. As any student of photographic technologies could tell you, surfaces reliant on transmitted light (such as slides) have a higher potential dynamic range (from light to dark) than reflective surfaces. But the price we pay for exhibiting transparencies is a reliance on other technologies to provide the light needed to see them; prints can be viewed without constant upkeep. Bulbs burn out.
