Beneath my Television, in the cabinet of the entertainment center, are stacked just about every Clamshell and gem case I've ever bought. And their former contents? In the storage devices mentioned in the title.
I own 69 DVD titles at current count, with the total number of disks way over a hundred. It is about four cubic feet of packaging. I store the actual disks in a space about a third of a cubic foot, and I can carry these thing without the risk of scattering packages all around if I move wrong. I do the same with all the CDs and PC gamegame discs I get. There's a similar disparity.
I recall a time in which your average game package usually measured about the size of a thick textbook. Now, such games come in packages about the size of a thick trade paperback, if they don't come in gemboxes.
But the disks themselves? 4.75 inches apiece, typically. But size is a deceptive measure with Digital media. A regular DVD measures around 9 GBs on average. The latest RAID hard drive storage can put the information of about 277 DVDs in a machine that could fit inside my monitor.
Even that proportion fails to get to the scale of things if you realize that all the data we're talking about is imprinted or encoded on extraordinarily thin surfaces, that much of the machinery is purposed towards supporting. Your CD or DVD is merely a stable plastic surface on which is glued the actual material carrying the information, whether that's some polymer or the ultra-thin aluminum of a professionally pressed digital media disc. Hard Drives take it even further. The information is encoded on thin layers of a special material that stores information in incredibly small spaces. New internal harddrives carry 500 GBs of information apiece.
That's if you don't compress. Compress with something like the DiVX codec, and the storage of thousands of DVDs worth of visual information, tens of thousands of CDs, is available in that space (or more appropriately, that surface)
And surface is right. New technologies may take information storage for consumers into the third dimension, adding the advantages of cubic space to a field where information density is measure in squared units.
More and more, physical packaging becomes irrelevant to getting what we're looking for in the midst of all that: the meaning.
People tend to throw away packaging They see a bunch of it all over the place, and anybody who's seen disks stacked on one another directly (a great sin in my book), or laying around (don't even go there) knows that people can't always be bothered to put it back. The packaging after purchase is at most a convenient place to put things before and after they've been used.
Oh, but it's to be expected. This is an artistic business, and there are standards to be maintained, of course. I think it helps to understand how much the balance has changed. With film, then and now, the film occupies much physical space. Place all the canisters necessary to show 69 movies in a row- well you need a library. that many tapes would occupy a shelf. that many disks, I carry around in two thick wallets. I could toss them in a backpack and easily carry them. I guess, in a time where what contains the media is bigger and bulkier than the media itself, the packaging's got to have something nice to do.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Sunday, October 02, 2005
The Binding Problem And Storytelling
The binding problem is a problem in Neuroscience regarding how we bind together the disparate senses and mental processes that we have into the conscious experience we all live our lives through.
It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.
The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.
This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.
Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.
Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.
It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.
However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.
No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.
We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.
It comes across in the stories we tell in the difference between how we live a story, and how our telling of that story comes across. Language is an approximation, and our memories are a distilling and reconstruction of what we experience.
The consequences of this come into play as Hollywood remakes films, and makes formula pictures for the benefit of perceived audiences. Heck, this comes into play when you got bad movies and movies that almost made it. We're subjective creatures, and what's more, our brains throw away from our conscious notice much of the information we use to flesh out the feel and understand we have of the world.
This is particularly troublesome for those portraying real life events, as the sense of events changes with the adaptation from real life to one media or another. With any "true" story on film, even in documentary form, there is always something left out.
Human beings dwell in a rich sea of information, interpreting and experiencing it in real time as billions of neurons work in parallel. As we interpret it, we too throw away information. As a result, though there is much potentially discoverable in front of us, our minds take a certain course through life, and ignore the rest of the riches.
Effective storytellers, to create the desired effects, must do two things: discover those riches and make them accessible and desirable to those who haven't thought to seek or wanted to seek these things out, and translate them effectively from the author's experience and understanding to that of the audience. It's a dance, a high-wire act. It's no easy task.
It's this, not any lack of cultural high-mindedness or business savvy that makes storytelling so difficult a business to get right. This is the real challenge of show business, and the reason that financial success is not deterministically predictable from the basis of a high culture, big business, or even the putative quality of the work. The landscape of mind and heart in this country is constantly shifting, so the fitness of a story in the scheme of things (to borrow evolutionary terminology) is not a stable or predictable thing.
However, as long as we're not looking for deterministic predictability (That is, I do A, therefore B will happen), then the more successful stories, in whatever medium you might chose, are those that relay a great deal of unexpected meaning in the given period of time. Does that mean packing things to the gills with details? Not necessarily. In the case of a TV show, it might be to the storyteller advantage not to force the audience to remember too much from the last show, or if so, make the recall easier by inserting the proper cues in the episode as needed. Even that can be problematic, as anybody who's had to watch the "on the last episode of ______" montage can attest. Information always takes time to move between author and audience, and the less spent telling parts of the story you've already covered, the better.
No, what we're looking for is content organized in such a way that it expands people's sense of the world as they can know it and as they can imagine it. We're looking to give people an intense experience makes enough sense, whether it's that of the real world or that of a fictional one, that people lose focus on the prepared, artificial nature of the medium, and lose themselves in the story. To do that, we must understand better how the subjectivity that defines our existence and our conscious experience can shape our world, and how we interpret sensory cues, and assign meaning to different objects.
We don't have learn this explicitly, but we must have some intuition, some process of working out practical storytelling beats that do their job in such a way that it's not merely trial and error. Otherwise, we will tend to stick to what's already been done, and will continue down a path of formula and replication of earlier works. To get new life into new stories, we must be willing to confront what it is that gives life to our ordinary normal experiences.
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