Faster than the speed of ice
The other day, I went for a walk along the Hudson with my wife. We've moved from Brooklyn, and now we reside in washington Heights, a neighborhood that sits up high along the northwestern edge of Manhattan. We've had snow and ice the last couple of weeks, and the path leading up to the cliffs was a hard climb, covered with a heavy coat of melted snow that had refrozen.
At one point where the path turned, a heavy grade of exposed bedrock lifted itself into the side of the bluff. Hanging from its stone face were hundreds of icicles. Taking one of the larger ones from the rock, I ran my hand along its cold and perfectly smooth surface. Then, after making my dog look as though it were one of the Unicorns that resided in the Cloysters on top of the hill, I launched the icicle into the naked wood that climbed up the embankment.
I haven't been able to lose that image of the icicle these past couple of days. Part of me feels full of guilt after taking something so beautiful from its natural place and simply discarding it into the icy snow. But then there is the part of me that knows it's life would be short lived anyways, as soon as the sun crested the hill and melted the ice. Nevertheless, there seemed a beauty that was lost. Not so much a beauty of looks, or one of reason, or one of idea. But rather, I've been fixed on the beauty of patience.
Have you ever seen an icicle form? I can say that I never have. Yet somehow they seem to give birth in a moment of time that happens in the blink of an eye. How long it must take to take a drop of water that hangs delicately to the surface, refuses to let go, and is then frozen in time--the result of its stubbornness And after that drop of water has frozen, another comes, and the cycle is repeated until a perfect cone defies the laws of reason.
The icicle has made me acutely aware of how difficult it must be for media practitioners to move at the speed by which information had traveled only a decade or two ago. I can remember when I first started writing for newspapers, sixteen years ago, and how we would receive our wire copy over a Telex machine. We could dial up to it at an amazing 300 baud, translating to 300 characters per second. That's the blink of an eye amidst a waterfall of information that flows freely in the air around us. We didn't have templates that we could plug in information at the click of a mouse. Instead, we relied on type-setters, heavy glass plates that burned in the image once the presses started to roll, or when we didn't have presses (like with our college weekly), we had to keep re-gluing our copy onto the broad sheets that would be sent to the presses.
Once I left newspapers and moved into broadcasting, everything had to be done on analog tape, audio being spliced and taped, film being developed and spliced up on old Moviolas, transfered to video, then punched in on heavy analog switchers that took up a whole console. Recording audio for post-production would take two people on the mixing board, trying to move the faders in time with the fast moving numbers that ascended in the bottom corner of the screen. And all this moved at the speed of what seemed like rockets launching into space.
Technology has changed so dramatically over the past fifteen years, that such technologies then seems to have moved at the speed of ice. What took ten crew members now takes a slick lap-top and one person. And even then, the job is done now a hundred times faster. It's the one person that is slowing down the transmission of information, no longer the technology. But in this age of hyper-communications, I can't help but wonder what has been lost. It's a question that anyone who still clings to her or his LP records can
understand. If McLuhan argued forty years ago that the medium has become the message, than how much depth can be in a message that moves at the speed of light? Maybe it was because we had time to think about content while waiting for the presses to warm up, listening to the message over and over again as we tried to perfectly line up the heads of the tape machine with the tape before making that final cut. Maybe taking time to make the message gave us time to truly listen to the message.
I can't say that the new media which surrounds us affords us such time for analysis. We live in an age where information is judged by who gets it out there first, rather than who is the first to be moved by that message. Take this blog, for instance, which usually has its share of typos. Yet, that's no longer the end of end alls as it was in the days when five editors would have reviewed the message before it was finally approved for publication. The mind-set is that it is ok to have structure that lacks, in place of a message that is fresher than the air it permeates. I think the You Tube debates this election season is a testament to my arguement.
What I would argue the media needs is not to slow down the medium, but to at least try to return to some sense of aesthetics. Art takes time, and creating words or images that tell a story is an art, regardless of how mcuh some might try to make it a science. The science can enhance the message, can change how the message could impact behavior or cognition. But, without the words, sounds and images, there is no message, no idea, no need to inform.
Take the art out of the message, and content greatly suffers. Who would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art if it were full of only brushes and stretcher bars? Who would visit the Louvre if it were full of computer keyboards and fiber-optic cable? what would the world be like if we had only the wheel, and no place to go, no desire to travel?
