film – Page 6 – A Piece, of the Sky

a good rocket for space a bad rocket for world destruction

There is a market value, pressure or a share for having all our media – film, video games and even books – start to look the same, like they all came out of a shared internet or digital machine. A valid point on the digitalization (and I would argue game-itization) of almost every aspect of our culture – ATMs, phone games – can be made. Almost every social network, from Facebook, to LinkedIn or Steam, edges you along with “achievements,” goals taken straight out of the world of gaming.

Web pages in Web 3.0 are starting to look alike, with the same slick interface straight out of the latest blog templates – just check out Tumblr, Blogger, Gmail (anything made by Google – search, etc.), Twitter, Pinterest, Storify, Instagram, Bing and the latest victim – LinkedIn.

There is talk of a technological singularity – which is very well possible. Instead of having a separate phone, tablet, music player, computer, game console and TV to sync every day, to the cloud (or worse, with cables) why not just have one portable, convenient gadget that does everything? There’s a market for that.

Consumers will pay for the convenience, the same way today people pay for the convenience of ready-made food (fast food) and ready-made computers and operating systems, that come with all the programs you want built-in, already installed.

It’s all about convenience – why do it yourself when you can just pay someone with the specialized knowledge or you can pay for a ready-made device or software that does it for you? I’m not making a right or wrong judgment here, just an observation on the way things seem to be going or the way they are.

Before that technological singularity, a media singularity will come first. Movies are adapted from books. Comic books and video games are made for and from movies. A video game can spawn comics, books and movies, in a media circularity that never ends. Through this process, all media forms will begin to look alike and borrow from each other, such that you no longer really have a piece of entertainment anymore – an individual film, book, video game, etc. – you have a franchise, a brand. This brand system already exists and has existed for centuries now (remember those advertising Mad Men in the 1950s?). It is simply exponentially faster with the new distribution pipes of the digital age.

You can deploy a brand into almost any kind of entertainment or medium and get the maximum amount of market share and the maximum amount of profit – so long as there is a desire for those products. It’s convenient. There’s a market share for that. Why have fans of a certain franchise or brand – say Star Trek, Taylor Swift (individual celebrities are brands too – hence why many artists go by one name, like Madonna) or Twilight – fantasize and write fan fictions about a movie when the movie/book/film/video game/soundtrack can be made for them and be available on their iPad/Smart TV/Xbox/Steam Big Screen/etc.?

The technological and media singularities reinforce each other and make for maximum convenience and therefore maximum profit. It just comes down to what people want. If people want convenience, products, goods and services are going to be made for that desire for convenience and they will be profitable because people want that convenience. If people don’t want those products, they won’t exist.

It’s a bit circular and chicken-and-egg, but this is how the “industries” – the film industry, the video game industry, the toy industry, the computer industry (Apple), the high-end “gamer” video card industry – all work: give the people what they want and make a profit off it. This is like the profit structure of World of Warcraft (although I disagree on whether video games can be used to ‘train’ people)

The moral, ethical and political questions then arise of “well should it work this way,” “could it work another way,” “would it work better another way” etc. or statements like “perhaps it works fine this way” and “it is morally and ethically right for it to work this way (people have the freedom to choose)”, etc. The better ethical, moral and political and economic questions should be concerning what people want and why they want it, and can people freely choose what they want.

That’s what’s at the heart of it, that’s what’s at stake. That’s how these products, services and trends are made. We can’t turn around and think that they appeared out of thin air. They weren’t made and foisted on us – at least not theoretically. No, what we’re getting – from the 1950s, the 1800s and perhaps longer than that – is what we want.

sony

Wotan, Odin

The mist came down from the wooded mountains, hugging the gnarled slopes. Once over the lake, the hoary cloud ghosted the glass-like surface. Ran and Alli rode their mountain bikes through twists and turns in the Maine woods. As the sun set and the first stars came out, they braked on the gravel beach of the lake.

The body of water lay behind Kaan’s cabin. Kaan and Beth were in the city for the weekend, for a book signing Beth was doing for the second edition of her novel.

They built a small fire on the beachfront. “Why don’t you release another edition of your book?” Alli asked, “It has been five years, hasn’t it?”

Ran snapped a handful of small twigs in half, to better feed them to the flames, “I just never thought about it. I didn’t feel like I had anything new to say.”

“That’s alright,” Alli said, hanging a pot of water over the fire, “I probably won’t make it out to my five-year college reunion. Sometimes, even a half decade later, you haven’t really taken everything in.”

Ran nodded. They brought wooden chairs from the porch over to the water’s edge. The forest grew darker. The moon rose, like an ice crystal hanging in the hard, unyielding cobalt sky.

Alli went into the cabin for some ingredients. She cooked the tagliatelle al dente, strained it and placed it in two bowls. Ran added some prepared foie gras and shaved a few large flakes of black truffle on top of the mounds of pasta.

They sat watching the clouds float through the blue-violet milieu, eating their supper and listening to the lull between the lapping of the waves.

“Do you ever think of Dallas?” Ran wondered, “Sorry to ask about exes, but you mentioned she had come back to New York?”

Alli shook her head, “No, it’s OK. Kaan never saw her again after that. Yes, I think of her sometimes but really not that much.”

“Were you ever really that close?” Ran opened a bottle of wine.

Alli sighed, “I felt we were – but of course, I was wrong.”

Ran handed her a glass, “Do you think she’s sorry for what she did to you?”

The fruity notes in the merlot were sweet and dry, “No, she doesn’t think about me.”

The first trills of the nightingale sounded through the wood. A group of crows on the other shore rose up, and flew off, in the direction of the mountains.

Ran poured herself another glass, “If I met her, what would you want me to say to her?”

Alli was leaning deep into her chair. She blanched, balancing the wine glass on her belly, over the flannel shirt she was wearing, “Nothing. It’s over. I don’t think about it anymore.”

Another crow cawed in the distance, across the water. An otter slipped into the waves, not far from them, crawling off a log, its serpentine body leaving nary a ripple in the water.

“There must be something you want to say to her. Something that needs to get out.”

Alli closed her eyes, sinking deeper into the cushions, “Not a thing. I’ve moved on. I have you.”

Ran drained her glass, “You know that I care for you, right?”

Alli didn’t open her eyes, “Always.”

The shadows joined the night. The bulbous moon, threw the two figures into sharp relief. The otter slunk back out of the water, sleek as a feline, hair slicked back against its minute skull.

jotun-frost Titans