WITH NO books, no tv, no internet, just how did our forebears exercise their
minds around the campfire back in Palaeolithic times? One pastime seems to have
been bone-notching. Across Europe and the Middle East, early humans took to
etching parallel lines and crosses into pieces of bone. Why they did this is
still a mystery, though present thinking is that the bones served as tally
sticks or even a form of lunar calendar. Whatever their purpose, the bones were
clearly important or they would not have been used for so long—about 90
000 years. “I doubt very much that any form of media we have today will survive
anything like as long,” declares Bruce Sterling with heartfelt admiration.
Sterling, a Texas-based science fiction writer, is a man who should know
about such matters. He has spent much of the past five years sifting through the
dustbins of human history in search of defunct media. He and fellow writer Bruce
Kadrey are assembling an archive of the dead and dying—everything from
notched bones to Betamax video tape. Their only criteria are that a device must
have been used to create, store or communicate information, and that it be
deceased—or at least down to its last gasp.
Why go to all this trouble? In the mid-1990s, Sterling realised that in this
digital age of PCs, palmtops, the Internet, chat rooms and virtual reality he
had lost touch with what “media” actually means. Media can be many things, he
argues: an extension of the senses, a mode of consciousness, extra-somatic
memory and a means of social interaction, to name but a few. “To treat this
matter seriously, I need a far better understanding than I have,” he wrote at
the time.
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There exists, Sterling says, the idea that media technologies have evolved in
a serial fashion, with each generation superseded by something better. He sees
this “Whig” version of history as a fallacy. “Some forms of media are rendered
obsolete but others are murdered. Some innovations are pushed very hard by
clever and powerful people with lots of money, and yet they still fail.” The
only way to appreciate what’s really going on—where we are today and which
media will fail and which survive—is to study the “fossil record”.
Kadrey has another reason for searching. “To understand a culture, you have
to understand its tools,” he says. Media are vital tools in most civilisations,
particularly ours. “If you think of technology as a human dream made external
and concrete, then what does our technology say about us over time?” And what
does it say about us and our dreams when our technologies are abandoned?
So began the Dead Media Project.
Self-professed obsessives
Appropriately, for a project about the transience of media, the Dead Media
Project is housed on the Internet. Sterling and Kadrey set the ball rolling, but
ultimately it is a communal effort, relying on a cadre of selfless workers
around the globe who scour historical sources for arcane, obscure, forgotten and
abandoned media. Most of these “necronauts” are not academic historians, just
self-professed obsessives.
At present, the official archive, known as the Dead Media Working Notes,
contains more than 400 listings. Take, for example, the inuksuit
—huge stone relics that dot the Arctic landscape of North America. Their
builders, the Inuit, used them as travel guides. By learning the shapes of
individual sculptures and the sequence in which they appeared, the Inuit could
travel vast distances over unfamiliar ground without getting lost.
Then there are the lukasa, used by the Luba people of Zaire. These
handheld wooden objects, which were studded with beads or pins or incised with
ideograms, were used to teach lore about cultural heroes, clan migrations and
sacred matters. Yet the symbols they carried were not direct representations of
information, but mnemonics designed to jog the user’s memory.
Many entries in the project’s working notes group together a whole genre of
media, such as “Information Technologies of Ancient Greece” or “Dead Physical
Transfer Systems”. In this last category, one group stands out—the
multifarious systems designed to deliver mail. Compared to some of these
Münchhausian schemes, e-mail seems positively tame.
When Paris was besieged during Napoleon III’s war with Prussia in 1870, the
French resorted to delivering the mail by balloon. The Prussians set up a
battery of guns with telescopic sights to shoot them out of the sky. Even so, of
64 attempts, 57 balloons managed to deliver some 3 million letters. Pigeon posts
have been around for about 4000 years, starting with the Sumerians. More
recently, at the end of the 19th century, many cities boasted pneumatic mail
systems made up of underground pipes. Telegrams and letters shot through the
tubes in canisters propelled by compressed air.
But perhaps the most bizarre postal innovation was missile mail. On 8 June
1959, at the behest of the US Post Office Department, the submarine USS Barbero
fired a missile containing 3000 letters at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in
Mayport, Florida. The postal service’s website
(www.usps.gov/history/his1.htm) quotes an official at the time saying:
“Before man reaches the Moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York
to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missile.” Sadly, the
trial did not spark off a postal revolution.
As with so many other areas of technology, the pace of innovation in media
has increased with time. Nowhere is this clearer than with audiovisual media.
The Victorian era arrived on a wave of machines, now dead, designed to reproduce
moving images, from the phenakistiscope and zoetrope to the viviscope and
filoscope. At the turn of the 19th century, cinema emerged from a host of
wannabe technologies, including the zoogyroscope, electro-tachyscope,
biophantascope and vitamotograph. Then, in the 1920s, as talking pictures became
popular, phonofilm and the photophone disappeared from sight (and hearing). So
it goes on, right up to eight-track audio tapes, Betamax videos and Laservision
videodiscs. “There’s an awful lot of bodies buried out there,” says Sterling,
deadpan.
One of the most recent working notes is devoted to the demise in June of the
DIVX home video system, an enhancement for DVD players. Indeed, the digital
revolution has generated a mountain of obsolete paraphernalia, and not only
audiovisual equipment but also PCs, mainframes and computer languages. The
mountain is still growing. “There’s lots of digital velociraptors out there,”
says Kadrey. “Then suddenly they’re gone, wiped out by a new breed.”
With his knowledge of media fossils and what has lived on, has Sterling
noticed any qualities that select for survival? “It really depends on the
society that gave birth to it,” he says. “It helps a lot if it is the nerve
system of how government information is transmitted.” At the very least, he
argues, successful media need a close association with some form of power in a
society. The Inca quipu illustrates the point. The Inca did not write,
but kept records on complex arrangements of coloured, knotted strings, some
weighing up to 20 kilograms and carrying tens of thousands of knots. These knots
were tied by an official class—the Inca equivalents of historians, scribes
and accountants.
Unfortunately, the quipu did not survive long, but were burnt by the
Spanish invaders. This demonstrates, as Sterling puts it, that media can be
murdered. He believes that but for the Spanish, quipu could have been
taken a great deal further. They are his favourite dead media. “One of the
things that really fascinates me is that they were nets,” he says. “They had
directories and even sub-directories, and all this just with strings and
Դdzٲ.”
Foolproof beauty
Kadrey has noted another feature of long-lasting media: they tend to be
simple. Take analogue systems, he says, “they are so simple that often they have
their own foolproof beauty”. Then there are systems for sending messages with
light, which have been invented time and again, starting with the Babylonians,
Romans and the Imperial Chinese, who operated a network of fires along the Great
Wall. Before the invention of electrical telegraphy, the Russians, Czechs,
British and Australians all experimented with optical telegraphy. These attempts
may vary in their levels of sophistication, but they’re all based on the same,
simple idea. “It’s so dumb, all a person needs is a shiny thing and the Sun,”
says Kadrey.
Another shining example that draws the admiration of both Sterling and Kadrey
is that old standby, the book. “I have this argument all the time,” Kadrey says.
So many people today claim that the book is dead. “I don’t believe it for a
minute,” he says. “It’s a very powerful technology. Books are so dumb, just ink
on a page, but they’ve lasted so long!”
One mistake that proves to be the undoing of many promising media, Kadrey
says, is when their inventors get dazzled by the arc lights of their own genius
and ignore the world around them. Thomas Edison was a prime example. He invented
a device to record sound on wax cylinders and then insisted on selecting all the
music for the cylinders himself. But he had lousy taste, according to Kadrey,
and was almost totally deaf. He couldn’t expect to control what happened with
his technology, but he thought he could.
A truly operatic example of the same mistake is the case of the telharmonium,
Kadrey’s dead media favourite. Built around the turn of the century by Thaddeus
Cahill and his brothers, the telharmonium was a 200-tonne electric music
synthesiser the size of a railway carriage and was designed to send music to the
masses over telephone lines. For a brief period before the First World War,
Cahill housed his gargantuan machine in a purpose-built theatre in New York and
piped his music into Manhattan restaurants. But he utterly failed to appreciate
the burgeoning power of radio. As soon as radio caught on, no one wanted to hear
music over the phone any more, and the telharmonium died a swift death. The
irony is that with the Internet and MP3, the phone network is once again a
popular music delivery system.
Up to now, collecting dead media has been “like trainspotting”, says
Sterling. But the project is moving into a theoretical phase. He and Kadrey hope
that it will eventually generate an overarching theory of media. “What we need
is a Darwin,” Sterling says. “We’ve got all the pieces of evidence—we have
the Galápagos finches, as it were, we have the tortoises—but we
don’t have a grand synthesis yet.” That synthesis, they hope, will be put to use
when designing media for the future.
One perennial debate among necronauts is just what “dead” and “media” mean?
Is it really fair to say that pigeon post is dead when the French Army and the
Indian police still have living, working pigeon services? Is it right to call
pneumatic mail dead when Prague still has a city-wide system and many small
versions operate in buildings all over the world?
And what about COBOL, which is catalogued under “Dead Computer Languages”?
There are still mainframes chewing through ruddy great blocks of the stuff.
COBOL programmers (once thought to be a dying breed) are having a renaissance,
what with all the Y2K fears. Speaking of COBOL, is a computer language really a
“medium”? And if it is, then what about human languages, are they also “media”?
All these and other topics are discussed in detail on the project’s website.
Radically unstable
Prediction is always a risky business, but how could an article like this
finish without asking for a few tips? Which, if any, of today’s media do
Sterling and Kadrey think will survive? What about the PC? “It isn’t even in the
running,” Sterling snorts. Because PCs contain silicon chips which are
continually changing, growing more powerful, he says, “they are a radically
unstable technology”.
Kadrey, however, thinks that the PC’s smaller cousins, “personal digital
assistants”, will be an immensely powerful medium. They haven’t really taken off
yet, he says, because the technology is not yet in place, but once you can get
text, images, voice and e-mail all funnelling through a small handheld device,
he believes they will be “mega”. Another medium for which he has high hopes for
long-term survival is “video”, not necessarily in any of its present
incarnations, but as a general concept. “Something that lets people produce
images creatively is going to be around for a long time,” he reckons.
Which all sounds rather like drawing or painting: we’re back again to
simplicity. Humans after all have only five senses and one pair of hands to take
in and give out information, and only so much time. Perhaps the inventors of the
cat piano, programmable tattoos and the fire harmonica were just trying too
hard.
-
Further reading:
The Dead Media website can be found at
www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/ dm.html -
If you know of any dead media not on the list, contact
Bruce Sterling on bruces@well.com or
Richard Kadrey on Kadrey@well.com
