Pit Schultz on 23 Sep 2000 06:47:06 -0000 |
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<nettime> Michael Nash: Notes towards an analysis of the temporal dynamics of virtuality |
[ found this as an interesting interlude before continuing the place/space thread, to untangle dialectical immaterialisms from astro-physicalism and ask around what the word *cyber* actually meant. there is this impression that the disappearence of the notion of cyberspace has more to offer then which is handable in one paragraph. while the nasty kovoso trauma thread might interestingly unfold as a travel through 'our' own discoursive minefields, with all the dead textes still to be digged up and disected out of the nettime archive. anyone remember the one about the need for mass symbols? want to follow the pornographic exitements about partisan journalism and direct testimony? or, the way dissident voices (garrin, stahlman, madre, treanor) disappeared rather calmly ? sure, many of us did just their best duty within a larger choreography of confusion ... so, let's have some fun first with straight forward streaming media theory out of the multimedia bootstrap labs of california .p ] -- NOTES TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF THE TEMPORAL DYNAMICS OF VIRTUALITY This collection of thoughts recasts and recontextualizes some ideas and writings from several areas of inquiry including cultural criticism and media industry analysis in an effort to develop a preliminary framework for a re-assessment of the temporal dynamics of virtual communities, particularly as impacted by the evolving convergence of television and the Internet. "For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role." ----- Marshall McLuhan I am newly acquainted with the arena of Transarchitectures, but it seems that much has already been discussed and written regarding the "time and space discontinuum" emerging in digital environments. The postulation of an "aesthetics of heterogeneity" seems to have embraced new concepts about the relationships between time and space as discussions about form and structure give way to notions of "process, field and agency." Nevertheless, in the discussions about transcending the "bits vs. bricks" conceptualization of virtual space, and such possibilities as distributing space and transmitting architecture, the weighting of spatial conceptualizations is clear. The discourse of Transarchitectures-though theoretically open to new orientations- seems to unwittingly perpetuate the subordination of time to space, a practice which has characterized Western intellectual history for over 3,000 years. History was said to have been invented by the Mesopotamians when they initiated the practice of setting down successive records of royalty around 1300 BC. From this point forward, our conceptualization of time has evolved into a spatialization of temporal relationships. The transubstantiation of time into space is now so complete that it is virtually impossible for us to think of time or a time without mentally manipulating our datebooks, without envisioning a chained link of events that assumes metaphoric space in our minds. We speak of distances between dates, the length of a vacation, dividing up our time, our life spans. We wonder where the time goes. Our identity, our consciousness of self, is elaborated as a life story, a narratization of past, present and future within a three-dimensional mental landscape where intertwined and cross-referenced events are reviewed or previewed, where experience is calendar-ized. (This can be seen as part of the larger process of organizing knowledge, as elaborated by Michel Foucault, and as a key component of the emergence of consciousness, as articulated by Julian Jaynes.) By 1300 AD, the mechanical clock began to extend the calendar's spatial framing of time to new levels of arithmetical quantification. As Lewis Mumford noted, "The clock is a piece of power-machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences....When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character on an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments. Abstract time became the new medium of existence." As we prepare to cross the spatially framed threshold of a new millennium, a combination of forces seems poised to fundamentally transform the scientific, cultural and psychological relativities of time and space. On one end of the spectrum, our astronomical technology records little big bangs perhaps 12 billion light years away, enabling us to "see" 85% of the way back to the theoretical beginning of time, in a burst of cosmic energy that exploded scientific paradigms a few months ago. (Obviously a variety of considerations, including the "dark matter" problem and measurements paradoxically suggesting that certain stars may be older than the Universe itself, makes such quantifications highly speculative). Meanwhile, back on the planet and at the other end of the spectrum, our networked communications technology has advanced to the point where the interconnected virtual experience of nearly 6 billion people's living human history completely overshadows all memory of the histories that led up to the present moment. Theoretical physics has taken the project of spatializing time almost as far as it can possibly go, projecting time into a expanse so vast we can almost observe its beginning, thereby entrenching the concept of abstract, quantifiable time as a cosmic absolute. Space has swallowed time, in theory. The near completion of this intellectual project has extended its reach to celestial significance, leaving terrestrial matters to practical consumer technology, which has secured the triumph of the present over historical time in one of the most important cultural evolutions of this century. As the scientific, cultural and psychological relativities of time and space become realigned, I believe that thinking of virtuality as an amplified present may yield some important insights that will be overlooked if we focus exclusively on the idea of virtual space without acknowledging the biases inherent to underlying conceptual frameworks of tributary discourses. This is my point of departure for advancing some preliminary ideas regarding the impact of media and technology in redefining the experience of time, and the role temporality may play in galvanizing virtual communities, with particular attention paid to the impending convergence of TV and the Internet. Television as Cultural Clock It's hard to think of a social problem that hasn't been attributed to television. Reduction of attention spans, erosion of family rituals, escalation of violence. Fast food, illiterate students, the suburbs. Centralization of media power, the end of history, the death of context. The breadth of the charges against television is matched only by the depth of its penetration into American culture. When the members of the first TV generation die, they will have accumulated nine total years of television exposure. While there's a general perception that the influence of television is waning at the beginning of the digital era, recent Neilsen Media Research data indicates television is being watched in American homes more than ever, an average of over seven hours a day in the most recently completed broadcast year (1996-97). But it's possible that the previous indictments and assessments, even those bordering on the hysterical and hyperbolic, have underestimated television's fundamental impact. This is because social scientists and commentators theorize almost exclusively about how the duration of TV exposure affects people, while ignoring how TV exposure affects duration itself. Television may have transformed our sense of time as much as any social construction since the invention of the clock. How is television accomplishing this alteration? Like everything else on TV, the work is being done by the commercials. In the first public demonstration of TV inventor Philo T. Farnsworth's television apparatus in 1927, a dollar sign was presented for sixty-seconds. This transmission proved to be an incredibly prescient iconograph, anticipating how television spots would restructure collective temporality. On TV, as Farnsworth "predicted," time is not only money, but money is time. Buying time on TV is a simple enough proposition, but how can TV "buy" time? To understand this we must consider how time is experienced. Any conception of time passing conjures up a calendar of events, a log of moments, in our minds. But, as we have discussed, such concepts treat time as a spatial expanse. We experience time passing as duration. And what does the passing of a minute or an hour or an evening feel like, as we pass another decade and enter a new millennium? With TV sets programming our environments for nearly one-eighth of our lives and one-fourth of our childhoods, more people get their sense of duration from the sequence of presentations on television than from anywhere else. It is the predominant "moving time" experience in our culture, the one with a scheduling continuum that runs like "clock work," 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. TV is the ultimate pastime. In this way, television is advancing the role of the clock as described by Mumford, that of synchronizing belief in a common human experience. Underlying the need for connection to collective culture, when we go home to empty houses and turn on our TV sets to keep us company, we feel less lonely because we believe we exist in the same time frame as everyone else. The clock secured belief in an autonomous sphere of mathematical time, separate from organic life cycles, which governed human events. TV is entrenching a companion realm of autonomous moving time, which drives collective culture. Commercials establish the time structure of television, with ten, fifteen, thirty and sixty-second spots serving as the basic units of TV temporality. As several theorists including David Antin have noted, everything on television is segmented according to this meter, which divides television's continuous flow into salable quantities. It's not just that the commercials regulate the segmentation of the programming, the time signature of its pacing and apportionments. The programming itself is made up of sub-units that echo the temporal structure of the commercials by which it is bracketed. Spots and related promotionals constitute nearly one-fourth of what is broadcast, more than any other single "genre," and exert tremendous pressure on the timing of television by attenuating viewers to abbreviated exposition. There are, of course, more than just formal reasons explaining why programs and ads are constructed from the same syntax. TV exists to present advertisements, and television has always advertised commercials in every sense--TV shows depict the world view that makes consumption of goods advertised not only desirable, but inevitable. Many commentators believe that viewer "recontextualization" of television mollifies its effects. But anti-ad maneuvers like zapping commercials, muting advertisement audio, and fast-forwarding through spots on videotaped programs, don't counter television programs' disruption by, or mimesis of, commercial time signatures. And, they may even heighten the effect ads have on our sense of duration, in some cases, because these strategies tend to rivet attention on when the commercial slots begin and end, on the ad interval. Finally, the "grazing" behavior of channel-hopping really only manifests what television has taught us: how to increase consumption of "programming" by escalating the pace of its relentless montage. TV entrenches its leverage in driving preference formation by making duration a product of consumer culture. In order to increase opportunities to sell consumers demand-driving the rate by which the whole goddamn country sells hot dogs to each other, as James M. Cain once put it-the experience of time is being systematically expanded through an ever escalating rate of subdivision. Corporations can't put more minutes in a day to produce or sell products, but they can increase the payload of each minute by accelerating the delivery of images. In so doing, they have reduced the interval between discrete recognitions to the point where there is no interruption by experiences like reflection, an effect these corporations probably don't view with alarm. Duration is thus becoming indistinguishable from the audio-visual flow of television, and in a Faustian bargain available for a limited time only, the duration of our lives will seem to last longer if we will only give more of our time and attention to TV. As the pace of the montage accelerates, comprehension is reduced to pattern recognition-the consumer then fills in the blanks. To the flash-card procession of emptied surfaces we bring genre expectations, narrative implications, and, of course, status-by-association fantasies. This is the hidden success formula of television advertising. The more TV you see, the more blanks there are to be filled in, blanks that expose lacks and absences within us: possessions we don't have, successes we haven't attained, emotions we've never realized. What better condition could consumers be in than full of synthetic emptiness, which they attribute to a lack of artificial goods? Television prompts us to abandon isolated intervals of subjective perception for the comforting constancy of its collective meter, all in order to sell us things we don't have time to use, in part because we watch so much TV. But, in an increasingly fragmented world with fewer and fewer sources of commonality, the immersion in a collective temporal framework is one of the most powerful socialization mechanisms in contemporary life. TV's Collective Temporality and Community Constructs Historian Edmund Carpenter said in 1972 that "Electricity has made angels of us all, spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere." He was talking about various technologies, but his focus was on television. (He would no doubt be delighted to have known that 25 years later, his statement would be paraphrased for a Motorola TV ad.) Television fundamentally transformed society when we discovered how live broadcast brought audiences together; the JFK assassination coverage was probably the watershed event in this transformation, but the Apollo Moon Landing remains its defining example. Just as important as the fact that we were watching a human walk on the Moon was the fact that the world was watching together. It made collective culture a palpable present-not an idea, but an experience. For the first time, everyone understood in their hearts that we truly lived in a Global Village. Anyone over the age of 35 remembers where they were when they saw this happen on television. We were all there, and we were all there together. We shared a moment. In a far more mundane way, entertainment events like Super Bowls or the final episodes of hit TV series like M*A*S*H and Seinfeld , news events such as the death of Princess Diana and the O.J. Simpson trial, and made-for-TV spectacles like the Gulf War, continue to demonstrate how powerful the reach of the medium can be in creating a collective present. (A subdivision of this effect can even be seen in the narrowcasting world of smaller cable networks as evidenced by the recent South Park phenomenon.) In this way, the social structure of television has become triangulated. There are single points from which broadcast signals are transmitted out to broad audiences, and these audiences complete the triangle's third side by connecting to each other through the experiential and psychological ground of collective temporality. TV programming is altered to exploit this dynamic, stemming from the cathexis of live broadcast, its psychic charge. Season finales, TV news entertainment tie-ins, cross-promotional marketing, demographic targeting, home shopping, 900 number polling and laugh tracks all embrace, amplify and refract, in various ways, the very specific and powerful feeling that we participate in a collective "now" when we watch a television program. In this dimension of social structure, the Internet represents a double quantum leap. The audience receives and sends information in a more circular arrangement, and they simultaneously use the new connectivity to directly link to each other, in a construction that is perhaps best thought of as a three- dimensional sphere. [space metaphor here/p] Now audiences can elaborate upon the feeling that they occupy the same temporality and behave as a connected culture. They can receive information and entertainment from many sources and are themselves a source. Without reducing it to a mere amplification of television, its easy to see how, in this respect, the Internet is television to the third power. Digital Television and TV/Internet Convergence Here I shift voices and speak as an analyst of the new media industry... Digital Television has been called "the most important innovation in US broadcasting since the introduction of color TV" (LA Times). HBO's chief technologist Bob Zitter goes further: "The shift from analog TV to digital TV will be the most significant development in the digital transition to date." It's been my experience that we have too often in this decade framed up prospective developments in the new media field in a very general way and, as a result, we have frequently obtained very general results. Three words: Full Service Network. I'd like to ground this section in some detailed observations. The coming convergence of the Internet and TV appears to hold great promise for digital entertainment content development because of the combination of a number of factors: ? The open-ended structure of the convergence through tributary developments on multiple fronts including digital broadcast television, broadband cable, satellite TV competition and innovation, streaming media over the Internet, push Internet programming and data broadcasting ? The enormous creative potential inherent in linking interactivity and connectivity paradigms with high-resolution media delivery ? The content and platform investment positions assumed by computer industry giants like Microsoft and Intel, and finally... ? The April 1997 FCC digital television mandate in the US, dictating an adoption schedule and establishing the possibility of platform standardization. After almost a decade of wrestling with PC platform schizophrenia this last component seems especially promising: a government mandated standard for a cornerstone of digital entertainment with the solidity of NTSC (though, one hopes, without its inferiority). What is happening to implement DTV? ? Pursuant to provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, on April 3, 1997, the FCC formally initiated the transition to DTV, approving licenses for broadcasters that grant free parallel access to analog and digital spectrum during the transition, what Common Cause called "a $70 billion corporate welfare bonanza." ? In exchange, the major broadcasters pledged to launch digital service at 23 of their stations in the top 10 markets within 18 months, with network- owned stations in the top 30 markets all going digital in 24 months. Based on this pledge, FCC Chair Reed Hundt estimated that by the end of 1999, 53% of US households will be able to receive at least three digital stations. Broadcasters must give up their analog stations in the year 2006. ? Well, of course, having been granted the $70 billion welfare program, broadcasters have been quick to hedge on the timetable, appealing to Congress in June to delay introduction of Digital TV and extend the deadline for giving up analog stations. Still, according to a survey in January 1998 of US broadcasters (Harris Corp.), 90% of almost 500 stations surveyed believe they will meet the FCC-mandated timetable and expect to have a digital signal on the air by the year 2002. ? At first, claims were made that technology would not be refined fast enough to implement the mandate, but all the key technology now exists and new breakthroughs are being announced every week. ? Will the installed base be there? DTV sets will be available this fall starting at around $3,000 to $4,000, and second generation designs are already in the works that will dramatically cut costs, leading to forecasts of one million units sold by the end of 2000. Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Assoc., which projects 31% TV household market penetration for digital television sets by 2006. Digital-to-analog converter boxes will also be available for a few hundred dollars so existing TVs can display digital transmissions, although they won't enjoy the resolution and all the interactivity of digital TV sets. Computers can also receive the digital signal, and it's estimated that 20 million PCs may be DTV reception-ready by the year 2000 (New Media). Cable digital delivery technology is coming on-line very quickly. (Cable is far and away the fastest distribution channel for two-way interactive content and reaches over two-thirds of American homes, so expect this to be a critical front for this stage of the digital transition.) ? TCI recently announcing an order of five to ten million digital set-top boxes made by General Instruments, featuring Microsoft's Windows CE software and maybe also Sun's Java programming applications (it's unclear how both will fit into the box). GI expects to sell at least 15 million such boxes to cable companies in the next three to five years. ? The top five cable companies are on "a broadband spending spree" (Upside), shelling out around $5 billion a year on two-way digital network and related upgrades. ? The roll-out of cable broadband Internet access has begun. 200,000 customers have signed up, and the installed base is currently growing at the rate of 1,000 homes per day. (Three to four million cable homes can now access the service.) Microsoft's WebTV (purchased for $425 million) and Comcast Cable deals ($1 billion invested) have initiated a wave of related convergence-targeted platform investment by strategic partners and others vying for a piece of the platform. ? Paul Allen's $2.8 billion acquisition of Marcus Cable may prove almost as significant as Microsoft's moves. ? Microsoft and Intel have kissed and made up over Intercasting and are moving jointly to deploy enhanced broadcast through analog TV's Vertical Blanking Interval for the present and through some kind of DTV back channel in the future. ? Phone company hats are back in the ring, with Microsoft, Compaq and Intel's blessing. Baby Bells are pursuing what could become a vigorous DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) strategy. DSL and some new wireless initiatives are targeted at the Internet for the present, but could compete with cable and offer video programming, as US West is already doing with the Intertainer broadband service. What do the DTV mandate and related infrastructural changes mean? High- quality digital video and audio can be combined with data streams-and two-way interaction can be enabled via phone lines or cable-marrying the broadcast paradigm with the multimedia and connectivity paradigms. ? High Definition Television, the rationale for the FCC bandwidth give- away, and the impetus for the development of DTV, will become a reality. ? Broadcasters will be able to multi-cast, increasing output of Standard Definition TV up to five times with the same bandwidth, significantly increasing programming choice. ? Data transmission can be integrated into broadcasts, providing a synchronous multimedia experience or asynchronous data broadcasting and information publishing. ? Two-way communication-via phone lines or cable-will enable a full-range of on-line capabilities such as on-demand programming, e-mail, advanced voice and visual communications, digital commerce, mixed mode interaction between Internet and TV programming, and other possibilities to be invented. Many obstacles, of course, stand in the way of achieving this potential. On top of preoccupation with technological and infrastructural issues at the expense of program development, DTV is currently plagued by platform confusion and conflict. The FCC has granted broadcasters the latitude to choose their technical standards, formats and business strategy. The result has been described as a "semi-disaster" by Sony's Howard Stringer. The four major broadcast networks have chosen different formats. CBS and NBC are going with 1080 line interlace, ABC is going with 720 progressive scan, and Fox, ever the renegade, is going with an Interlace format to be announced, but suspected to be only 480p, which is not even considered HDTV. (Progressive is heavily favored by the computer industry because it is compatible with existing PC standards.) All will use different formats for SDTV presentation, and only CBS has committed to a specific block of HDTV programming, 5 hours a week beginning in November. How their strategy for the use of enhanced TV functionality will unfold is anyone's guess, and it's not even clear if Congress will let broadcasters do this without paying to license the bandwidth. In addition to the network's decisions, a major layer of local choice comes into play. Local broadcast stations will probably mix modes-HDTV, SDTV, with some datacasting and two-way networking-but there's great uncertainty. According to the Harris survey cited earlier, 23% of broadcasters said they expect to primarily provide HDTV, 33% said they expect to primarily multi-cast SDTV, and 44% of said they have yet to define the mix. On the cable TV front, uncertainty also reigns. First, there is the vexing issue of "must carry." Although some cable companies such as Time Warner and MediaOne say their systems are ready to carry broadcasters' HDTV programs, most of the cable industry is passionately opposed to enforcement of the FCC's "must carry" rule with new digital signals, claiming they lack capacity and will be forced to drop channels. The cable companies are agitating for voluntary carriage, a scenario the broadcasters have dubbed, "Can't See TV." In five to ten years this issue will be long-forgotten, but in 1998, at the dawn of the new DTV age, it could substantially delay the impact of the DTV roll-out, since most homes get their signal through cable. Then there is the emerging battle to control the deployment of set-top boxes that will provide cable with its interactivity feature set. There are about a dozen major players vying to grab a piece of this critical market and each one is advancing different technology with different program development implications. Everywhere we turn in this burgeoning new front in the digital revolution-whether it's broadcasting, cablecasting, datacasting or netcasting-we wind up with a proliferation of competing and conflicting technologies and industry practices, and that's not taking into consideration the huge issue of competition and conflict between these platforms. Perhaps all this fuss about standards, technology and competing delivery platforms is just distracting us from the big picture. Do consumers really want DTV, and if so, what do they want it for? Forget that it cost a fortune, the last Interactive Television paradigm failed the "if you build it they will come" test, largely because it was developed without any clear ideas regarding its essential content. The research here is in conflict. ? Studies suggest there is a lot of simultaneous use of the Internet and TV, with as many as 40% of on-line users saying they regularly watch TV while they are on-line. From this, researchers extrapolate a universe of 8- 9 million people already primed for a convergent interactive TV experience. Maybe. ? But, a recent Odyssey study argues that while many people do simultaneously experience multiple entertainment platforms, and are hungry for new entertainment options, their dissatisfaction with TV stems from a lack of choice and control, and not the actual format of the programming. ? Another study argued that with respect to HDTV, the public was just as interested in the overall quality of the program content as they were with its technical content, with Verity Group research suggesting that all demographic profiles except technology enthusiasts agree that overall quality of programming would have to improve in order for them to justify the purchase of a widescreen digital TV set. ? Does the Internet + TV = Interactive TV? Will demand for high-speed Internet access alone be enough to drive consumer acceptance of digital interactive television? PC-centric players cite studies like the A.T. Kearney survey, which found that 63% of households expressed interest in accessing the Internet through their digital TVs. But others cite the Cable Industry's probable failure to come close to its goal of 1 million customers by the end of 1998, with a current growth rate of under 10% of market per year, as indication that Internet content is not compelling enough to drive the broadband roll-out by itself. (Yet another study demonstrated that the public can't be fully trusted to convey meaningful opinions about DTV because it is so poorly understood. According to the Verity Group, when asked to define digital television, only 12% knew it was a digital signal, and 58% had no idea what it was.) Where does all this research and analysis leave us? After much promising prognostication fueled by the launch of DTV, TV/Internet convergence has turned into a fragmented free-for-all of conflicting standards and competing platforms that threatens to forestall the development of interesting interactive entertainment content. Nevertheless, it seems equally clear that the lines of force propelling the convergence of the Internet and television have irresistible momentum, even if the timetables projected by industry and the government have been overly optimistic. >From the standpoint of the technological determinism, which the technology sector likes to employ to tell the stories of the digital age, DTV is posited as the inevitable result of technological progress directed at cultural needs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joel Brinkley details in "Defining Vision," DTV is the serendipitous result of a series of opportunistic maneuvers and political machinations. US Broadcasters in the mid- '80s latched onto the idea of HDTV in its obscure infancy because they had to come up with some new use of the airwaves as a scheme to prevent mobile communications companies from getting some of their spectrum from the FCC. Congress backed HDTV because of anti-Japanese sentiments-they were afraid that the Japanese would dominate yet another video market. Cheating, payoffs, political extortion and other chicanery paved the way toward the development of the technology as major corporations and consortia jockeyed for position in the race to create the new standard. Despite this sordid history, what emerged was truly groundbreaking, digital television. Broadcasters have been trying to qualify their commitment to HDTV ever since and determine how to exploit this happy accident, and best profit from the convergence with the Internet that DTV will make inevitable. Seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy, the logic of a DTV-driven TV/Internet convergence becomes irresistible, even if its fitfully incremental steps of evolution will make it hard to measure and project. Narrativity and Decision; Preference and Choice; Audience and Community When the characteristics of virtual space are discussed, the emphasis tends to be on ways in which the structure of physical space is re-created and manipulated through digital technology into an immersive environment in which we project ourselves, a mental landscape. Marcos Novak talks of TransArchitectures in terms of "transmitting the spaces of consciousness." I have to admit that I've also previously used this type of framework to discuss the possibilities of the new media, referring to the potential to create "virtual Plato's Caves." It seems, upon reconsideration, that one key element missing from these concepts is an assessment of the behavior of people within these environments. What do people actually do when they log on to the Internet? They read, watch and listen, but primarily, they make a series of decisions, choices about navigation, information processing and communications, and then wait for these choices to be realized as they download files. Let's revisit the dichotomy of abstract time vs. clock time which has been posited by this paper: abstract time has to do with the spatialization of temporal relationships, and encompasses the polarities of the calendar/clock and the light year/cosmic absolute. Experiential time has to do with the perceived duration of "the present" and in this analysis is seen as having become, through television, an arena of marketing-metered narrativity, now giving way to intervals of decision-making and data exchange on the Internet. The key is to think about how the Internet or any digital interactive networked technology produces immersion, a compelling and complete experience within a world with its own persuasive logic. The Internet produces an immersive experience by displacing the timelessness of virtual space with the dynamics of hyperlink-enabled decision intervals. While watching TV we are acutely aware of the half-hour increments-we can even tell time by assessing a TV program's state of narrative resolution-but on the Internet the clock slides into the background as we get lost in the links. Stereotypes of geeks dulled by the blue luster of monitor illumination who have allowed days on end to slip away come to mind, but we've all experienced this loss of place in time while surfing on the Net. The Internet draws us into a heightened decisional mode, as a chain of question-and-answer, call-and-response, want-and-satisfaction events transforms an abstract framework into the human realm of interactive behavior. Where do you want to go today? The development of consumer persuasion techniques on-line has advanced but still lags dramatically behind the accelerated growth of raw computing power. On-line marketing is in its infancy: TV techniques have adapted poorly, interactive strategies have just started to be incorporated, and banners do less than billboards did almost a century ago. We are therefore pushed into making decisions with this technology faster than new preferences can be formed through this technology, with the deficit often filled by random interactions offering the techno-fetishistic pleasures of machine play. Microsoft, followed by other technology companies, broke the cardinal rule of ad copywriting-never end with a question mark-because this is a realm with new rules and new dynamics. "Where do you want to go today?" they ask because computer processing power, doubling every 18 months according to Moore's law, is increasing faster than the evolution of demand for computing power, so consumers are being asked to reconsider their needs and to please come up with new ones. Intel is engaged in a major effort to stimulate demand for processing speed by funding development of memory hogging applications, because Moore's law has placed computer chip companies far ahead of the curve of consumer demand. In the computer world, then, there is more capability to (inter)act than causality. This is the opposite of television, which attempts to drive consumer behavior by overwhelming the preference formation processes with marketing stimulus, giving great cause to choose, but forced to rely on actions outside its immediate sphere of influence (with a few exceptions, like ordering pizza, which employ phone response). The combination of these two modalities in a TV/Internet convergence scenario would seem to be a corporate wet dream, wherein consumers can act out their media-motivated fantasies inspired by the established marketing dynamics of TV through nearly instantaneous e-commerce interactions and on-demand programming consumption capabilities of the Internet. For the purposes of the present discussion, I'd like to explore what this means with respect to collective temporality and virtual communities. Much has been made of the distinction between audiences and communities in the new media discourse, as the Young Turks of the digital interactive future seek to define the unique inherent properties of the new media and imbue them with special attributes. (Each generation seems destined to repeat their predecessors mistakes and look to media platforms for their formal secrets as though this is where we'll find the hidden instructions telling us what to do with them. The answers come instead from looking at the relational issues: how new technology combines with the dynamics of existing media and social patterns to yield opportunities shaped by corporate interest, but defined by artistic vision and cultural purpose.) It is said that while TV has huge audiences, these collections of physically isolated viewers do not a community make because they cannot express their participation in a collective identity, except by association, and they cannot influence the directions and outcomes of the presentations they witness. The Internet offers almost limitless potential for the expression of identity, and possibilities to participate in the patterns and outcomes of presentations limited only by creative issues. It's very easy to see how the spherical networking, as we earlier defined it, is becoming a major cultural force through the interconnection of audiences. But, right now the Internet is organized more as a loose confederation of solitary souls in solipsistic isolation within self-referential decision-making behavior patterns. The Internet defines time as a series of decision intervals, which tends to take people out of any collective temporal context and into their own personal routines and idiosyncrasies. For that reason-and despite all the heightened rhetoric about the potent new political constituency of Cyberspace-it feels more like a personalized information and communications utility that a public domain. Chat is the major exception and its significance as an Internet phenomenon supports the general point. In its present manifestation, Chat is an awkward, cumbersome and limited method of communication and yet its ability to create a connected present for groups of otherwise unrelated people at a given time has made it among the most common uses of Internet services like AOL, more than all AOL's proprietary content combined. In a scenario similar to television, the Internet will truly transform society when it comes to terms with the fact that just as significant as what resides on any remote server is the relationship between the people who have logged onto that server in order to share an experience, a palpable present. Bringing audiences together is the first step in building communities, and it's a step that can't be skipped. TV's ability to produce a collective present is perhaps the most important audience- and community-building dynamic of any contemporary medium and it is this property upon which the Internet must build. Engineering collective time constructs on-line thus becomes one of the most promising opportunities of the coming Internet/TV convergence. As quoted at the outset of this discussion, the great visionary of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan, wrote, "For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role." We long for connection and communion, and creating a present in which common experience is palpable is one powerful way in which we connect through culture and ritualize our participation in collective consciousness. This sense of community doesn't come from sharing a space nearly as much as from sharing a time, a cultural moment. Any viable construct of digital community must consider the implications of the coming convergence of the Internet and television, and specifically must embrace these issues of temporality as critical cultural premises, or risk relegation to the realm of merely academic exercise. --- Michael Nash Michael Nash has extensive experience in the creative, business and cultural aspects of new media through his work as entrepreneur, publisher, producer and curator. Atlantic Unbound noted in June 1997, "Michael Nash has held industry- shaping positions in digital media almost as long as there has been such a thing as digital media." Nash recently served as President and CEO of Inscape, a new media entertainment company he formed in 1994 through a general partnership with Home Box Office and the Warner Music Group. Recognized as a leading publisher and developer of cutting-edge titles -- distinguished by innovative content, graphics and design -- Inscape received acclaim for its track record and vision under Nash's leadership. In addition to critical praise (highest ratings were awarded by publications such as Computer Life, Multimedia World and New Media), Inscape's products garnered numerous awards: The Resident's Bad Day on the Midway received the 1996 Rommie for "Title of the Year" and The Dark Eye was named the 1996 International Digital Media Awards' Winner in the "Games/Entertainment" category. Prior to founding Inscape, Nash oversaw the Voyager Company's award-winning Criterion Collection of interactive laserdiscs from 1991 to 1994, working with leading film directors such as Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam, Louis Malle and Nicolas Roeg. From 1989 through 1991, Nash served as Media Arts Curator of the Long Beach Museum of Art. There he organized critically acclaimed exhibitions that toured major museums throughout the US including the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Walker Art Center and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, and he developed an innovative series of exhibitions devoted to digital interactive media. Nash has authored over 100 essays, articles and reviews about the media arts, contemporary culture, and the digital revolution. He has made presentations at some of the new media industry's leading business conferences, and lectures at cultural institutions such as the American Film Institute, the Lincoln Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego) and the Sundance Film Festival. For more information: http://www.concentric.net/~Mnash/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net