[Back]

Technological Evolution of Media Experience
© 2006 Neils Clark

From music, to movies, to video games, hundreds of millions of humans consume media every day. Media experience is meant to capture the discord between living in one experience, yet simultaneously consuming another’s experience. The following paper will explore whether the result is the delineation of a primary world, one whose only “hardware” or medium is the corporeal, and one which is secondary, experienced only by virtue of a chosen media. To attempt this, the paper will build up criteria for, then very briefly look at the evolution of relevant media, those which recreate human experience, querying whether or not media use can found any degree of separation or discontinuity in human experience.

Media as experience evolves through the development of media by those interested in preserving human experience through technological development. Language itself is, arguably, the most central vehicle to the end of preserving the centrality of certain experience. Through the choice of words, and their relation to the surrounding world, language perceptually shapes the frame and direction of experience itself. A far cry from such base and foundational technologies, this section will wrap up with electronic, multiplayer gaming. To those two, and an insufficient sampling of the technologies in between, the focus will be on how their respective format either drives, or is driven by experience. The variety of content choices available dictates the ability for a consumer to tailor their regimen of media, or secondary, experience, to their own perceived needs. Does this progression of media technology reflect a desire to expand upon human ability for mediated experience?

Media is an essential condensation of experience. Making the choice to experience another, through their media, whether that is a story, photograph, or song, is making the choice to limit and constrain detail of unknowable intricacy, immeasurably confounding complexity, and uniqueness of that person. Before this dissonance even passes between two human beings, the person choosing to share their stories must condense them into words, frame their photograph (the number of meanings ascribed to this single word “frame”, itself illustrating certain concepts here), or play the song. Within these concepts, language or style of speaking can differ in any number of ways that change the story, for the teller, and the listener. Any numbers of instruments are available for the playing of a song, the number of sounds not represented by any known instrument being of an infinitesimal number. Any media, by nature, will limit ones ability to express the fullness of experience, which means that all media necessarily deprecate true experience. But this is speaking only of media which are meant to express.

Our perception of the world itself is a media, offering intense, vivid detail, yet intensely robust physical and societal limitations. Such limitations are by no means the primary motivation to entering into the fantastical experience of others. Perhaps we tell stories, simply because we can recall only so much experience. The fact remains that before humans had use of the writing, we had visceral, vivid stories. The Illiad, the Odyssey, the oral legends of India, and even the invisible stories that doubtlessly preceded Homer illustrate, in a manner of speaking, the power of secondary experience to be held in our hearts, in this case, for centuries. To speak of limitations, perhaps these stories continue as a testament to our desire to engage in swordfights, without the fear of death. Perhaps they stand out, only because they are slightly more interesting than how greasy yesterday’s sandwich was.

There are two important, even if somewhat arbitrary and interconnected, ways in which we might code the following media; to what degree the format of the media melds experience, and our ability to do the experiential melding once immersed in a media. Our choice of media – pulp mystery novels, the SciFi channel, single-player videogames, will dictate the experience we take in. That is to say, each media type will frame the experience we glean, and despite that some are secondary, each will become our experience. As we read the book, the experience of reading about Bill Gates will become a part of our life. Watching an epic battle over a distant planet, part of our experience becomes that of sitting in front of our television for the last half hour. So in reviewing these technologies, the way in which the media is interacted with becomes key. Fused to this is the degree to which we have a say in the way the narrative itself plays out. Imagination is central to a novel, whereas television presents us with a very lifelike depiction of events. The opaque give and take is then between the medium of the media, whether its format dictates a very particular type of experience, or whether we are able to draw from our own faculty in order to shape a completely unique experience from the media’s framework.

This distinction is helpful in that it seems reasonable to envision that the level of engagement in a non-primary world experience may be related to the amount one is engaged, absorbed, or convinced by their media experience. Certain types of television could additionally be divergent within the media type. Reality television, or more localized productions, for instance, may actually capture experiences that users can relate more directly to. Books are unique in this way. Though they consist only of words, the imagination required in the construction of the narrative can lead two individuals to two wholly different visualizations. While the user does not directly choose when and where the main characters engage in wacky adventure, they paint the pictures that animate the words. There is a level of variation between dictation of experience between massively multiplayer games, some being so combat-centric as to render the media the major controller. Still others afford such a variety of actions, combatitive or not, that allow a user to choose how, and often why, a story progresses.

The second way in which these media might be coded, is by their realism relative to the primary world experience felt by an individual. Whether or not it looks, sounds, and smells like the real world (Despite the obvious humanitarian good that could be done by those specializing in olfactory sciences, Emeril and others will likely one day realize their vain dream of “smellovision”). In any case, realism may account for a portion of cinema’s popularity relative to books, or theatre. Rather than watching a play founded on Achilles, or reading the Iliad, why not pop in Warner Bros.’ “Troy”? You don’t need to build your own mental imagery, or overlook scene changes, you can just sit back and watch Brad Pitt swing his sword around, with a relatively high level of realism, as accepted by culturally popular norms for realistic gore, sensuality, agony, and pride. The main thrust of this particular criteria is whether the visual media examined resembles precisely the primary world. It can, in some cases however, refer to other elements of our experienced reality.

The humble beginnings of language itself are largely thought to be synonymous with the humble beginnings of human civilization, at whatever stage of penitence it may have been. That is to say that as develops a civilization, so develops their communication systems. The development of oral communication allows the most basic transmission of experience, both likely developing alongside oral reciting of narrative legend. In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong establishes the prevalence of rich narrative among pre-literate societies. The exact development of such epic narrative, in relation to the development of oral language as a technology, or civilized society for that matter, is unknowable. Oral narrative is very linear for the listener, though largely becomes morphed over a storyteller’s lifetime. Choosing to hear the repetitive, visceral oral tale is to subject oneself to the story of the teller. And while the face-to-face nature necessarily lends itself to realism, to hearing acts, and perhaps seeing them acted out, it still requires a large suspension of disbelief. So by our criteria, the user has a very minimal degree of control over the outcome, and must actively conjure realism.

Music may have predated Orality. While the world has recently seen numerous media purposed to store and replay musical sound, she has likely forgotten more instruments used in music’s creation than exist currently. What seems most interesting with music, is that it isn’t just an intuitive or holistic method for expressing our feelings. Sound and music hold immense power when relational to a consumer’s experience. While one song can allow us to create their own experience, another can introduce, through a certain composition of sounds, feelings unfamiliar to a consumer of auditory media. While a form of media that strongly lacks in visual realism, and therefore requires a large degree of perceptual construction, music is necessarily frequently absent, though increasingly added to the primary reality, thus essentially modifying our experience of reality. It is used to mask, augment, and recreate past experiences, in addition to creating illusory experience, and of course, framing other media.

Plato criticized the early word as detrimental to human thought. It was not long before oral drama, here to this point preserved entirely in countless human minds, was transcribed. While Greek drama, at a certain point, expanded from single orators to full casts of actors, it would be more difficult to locate the written word as the source of theatre. Orations had likely been acted out for quite some time. Nonetheless, at the point of theatre, we see the act of experiential transmission reach a new height of realism. At the same time, the standard consumer here loses a greater degree of control over the progression of the experience.

Gilgamesh, believed to be the world’s earliest novel, was purportedly carved by the Mesopotamian King Gilgamesh four to five thousand years ago. Writing has since developed immensely. Experiences in this format are largely dictated to the user, by virtue of the linear narrative format taken by most books. And while there is a lack of exact realism, books provide a unique degree of imaginative realism. Similar to music, yet unique, both allow a consumer to amalgamate and synthesize from a larger gestalt. The major difference in the written narrative is far more definitive in its use of words.

Writing, especially writing which concerns worlds which have not been directly experienced, achieves a wholly new level of penetration with the advent of the printing press. Radio is to orality and music what the printing press is to the written word, television being the synthesis of orality and theatre, with elements of writing and music. And while fewer images increasingly reach greater audiences, we can start to see the bigger picture of our two major criteria.

For one, media of experience come closer and closer to mimicking an expected perceptual reality. From the spoken Iliad, to any number of her visceral renditions, to this point we are primarily looking in on stories, looking in on technologically-mediated experience. Regardless of the medium, few celebrate, or encourage celebration of the mundane self. Yet with the advent of massively media technologies – the printing press, radio, television, the options of available media increased. So here we see less and less control over how the story is told, even the pervasiveness of such stories, yet more and more options as to which story we would like to hear. In this way, though media are collectively pervasive, we have some degree of choice over which to engage ourselves in, therefore shaping our experience through media.

The quiet machinations seen beginning with Babbage, the unplanned, nonetheless earthshaking child of Tim Berners-Lee, and the leisure formulae long-crafted by Gary Gygax, all seem to culminate at the world’s most recent pervasive reality: Video Games. To attribute the computer solely to Babbage, or the World Wide Web to Berners-Lee, necessarily ignores the incredibly deep and impactful developments before and after, giving each their ability to function as the computer and internet which we use today. These condensations however have been the center of wide, detailed work. Paper and dice gaming, on the other hand, has not. Dungeons and Dragons made its debut in the 1970s, and grew in popularity as a medium using oral storytelling, written rules, and sometimes even musical or theatrical elements in order to add depth to fantasy. Players use published rulebooks in order to create characters. A “dungeon master” or “game master” then uses published rulebooks in order to create detailed, responsive world, populated with monsters, items to gain, and characters as charismatic or as deep as the “dungeon master” can conjure. For our purposes, in paper and dice gaming, we begin to see consumers as actively using media to experience a secondary world. Furthermore, when the lovechild of such creativity is born into the sophisticated computer, the custom-crafted worlds of paper and dice games meet their proverbial printing press. They are available to all.

To stop for a moment, beyond the notion of a secondary world, or secondary experience, which may or may not eventually persuade the reader, it seems that media enjoys replicating or refocusing itself in this way. From the printing press, to radio, television, and more lately, to our current barrage of variegated websites, videogames, and other online media, we seem compelled to create these attempts at “capstone” media forms. Should we continue much longer as a race, even a decade more, the internet may be replaced in this regard, though perhaps by a heretofore unimagined, computer-based application. This is not entirely dissimilar from the notion of “convergence”, promoted by a number of scholars (Kawamoto, 2003). And yet, it seems that we move from naturalistic, imprecise uses of media; handwritten books, variable oral legend, theatre, paper and dice gaming, to media that are precise, yet perhaps too plastic. The internet is very much a naturalistic, imprecise arena. What is the technology that will refine it, sending it to a mass audience? If this pattern indeed follows, let alone if it is accurate to begin with, would the internet even be open to such a converging process, or is it a reflection the process itself?

Regardless the direction that the internet shall take, as early as the 1970s, paper and dice gaming, computing, and the internet were grafted together to create the MUD. MUDs, multiple user dungeons, were large text-based worlds that allowed tens to thousands of players to simultaneously adventure in a limited, yet pre-programmed paper and dice setting. The trend would only continue, as realism; graphical, auditory, and cultural (storyline), and the user’s self determination in-game would increase exponentially over time. Today, Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, are worlds with sophisticated graphics, sound, physics, and story. Players have huge levels of self-determination, depending on which game they play. These media could possibly be the area where the Internet will converge in this process of forging secondary worlds.

If realism and media determination seem suspiciously more apt at describing the culmination of MMO games as the height of secondary experience, it is not by happy accident. Though these games do not depict worlds with the level of pictorial realism of humans filmed for television, they nonetheless feature dynamic, three dimensional, moving virtual realities. And rather than engaging in a particular type of media, for a particular type of response (for instance, watching “The Exorcist”, in order to experience horror), players may choose to traipse into a skeleton-filled cemetery, filled with invisible apparitions. This is a huge shift, and the role of the consumer has changed. Gamers no longer watch, they act. This shift is essentially in media experience, meaning that while humans have been consuming the experience of others, they are now entering a nonreal world, one necessarily created from media experiences, and creating experiences in this comprehensive, non-real world.

Part 2: Is it really possible to create a discontinuity in human experience? Of course not. No matter how immersive, in non-damaged, non-abnormal minds will recognize their own suspension of disbelief, collectively constructing lines that signify when it is decent to think oneself in real, or game life (McGonigal, 2003). Someone might get angry with you, should you consistently distract them from “critical” videogame goals, they may extricate you from the TV room should you interrupt their favorite show, but they know the difference between secondary experience, even their second lives, and real life. Secondary experience, then, refers to the process of immersion, unique in each media form, and on some levels unique to each individual, that occurs when someone uses media. While someone can be distracted by the real world, they nonetheless enter an altered state while undergoing the experience of their chosen media. Again, media experience refers to the ways in which we, in a necessarily primary world, process and ourselves experience narrative within a necessarily secondary arena, especially when we become actors, as in MMO gaming.

Part 3: The moral role of media experience. The critical biases of Adorno and Benjamin were to be originally focused on cinema, mass production of image, and soul. The shape that MMO games have taken beg that the attempt to reexamine these theories, however insufficient to that of the original, be made. Despite what critical theories, what clear benefits are offered by worlds that allow a full range of experience, and perhaps most importantly, what is do these technologies suggest about society?

Between Benjamin’s decline of the aura in mass culture, and Adorno’s lament of mass culture’s use as simply for profit and political control, all historical refinements of technology might be considered deprecations of more soulful qualities. It does seem reasonable to think, if even on the whimsical, airy degree to which all concepts vaguely resembling religion must restrict themselves, that the single, handwritten letter, or the original musical composition, performed for a precious few other people, shares more of ones animus, or soul, or essence, than the top 40 song that reaches 60 million listeners, or even the bestselling novel, selling over 2 million copies. It may not matter that we watch a show that millions of other humans also enjoy. In fact, it could be a testament to the animus and creativity poured into such. It remains that we make the choice to experience the narrative of that show, and that affects our experience. It is not simply the content of the media, but more importantly how that changes us as humans. It seems that as a few key messages become unavoidably pervasive, the overall level of variety decreases. As this happens, creativity of those watching is restricted, restricting, in turn, creativity required to create truly compelling daytime soaps.

It cannot be forgotten that such worlds are made to be fun. To dismiss creativity, variety, and the soul poured into any media experience, especially MMO games, is to miss the point. Oral epics, novels, cinema, and video games are the media playgrounds available to both children and adults. They difference between media playgrounds, and bars, nightclubs, hiking, and other common leisure activities are numerous. They may highlight a human preference toward secondary experience, but they may also draw attention to the lack of socially responsible real world leisure. Where forging contacts in localized community is not simple, convenient, or brief enough for humans, we may tend to turn to alternatives that are these things, using the height of technology to do so. But this is just a theory, one without extensive evidence, or even rational backing. It is conjectural.

What seems clear is that as technology advances, so advances use of such for evermore sophisticated narrative, secondary experience, even secondary worlds. For what, if any, historically unified purpose is anyone’s guess. What does seem clear is that sophisticated pervasive virtual reality worlds will exist, when technology can support them. It may then be worth asking which world we will choose, and why?

[Back]