Just Data

Today's blog is brought to you by the letter Q for "My, my... isn't that interesting"... and these two articles:

The Legacy Of The CD: Innovation That Ate Itself


Phonograph Disks Run Crewless War Tank



Remember when CDs were introduced? In 1982, it was a high-tech wowfest: Hi-Fi music on a shiny disk just begging to be slotted into one of those damn flying cars we still don't have. For Joe Bagadonuts and Moms alike, it was something of an impenetrable mystery what music, a little rainbow mirror, and lasers had to do with one another, but it worked. Dire Straits played with crystal clarity off the little buggers while the How was tossed into the Arthur C. Clark "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" blackbox in the attic of the mind. For the technorati of the time, the idea of music encoded in streams of binary data may have been a bit less opaque but - and this is rather important - not even the bulk of the technorati intuited the long-range consequences of shoving a content-type like music into the binary Lingua Franca of computers. Music industry pundits looked at the physical media itself as some kind of penultimate concatenation of quality+portability (++buckets of mad loot as folks replaced old favs on old media with shiny disks); good old wall-garden bizModel salivation. And actually, it was smart thinking since all the tech at that time was tightly coupled packages of (tech+content+use)to-purpose biz/industryModels with no reason to think otherwise.

History, however, shows us that the real magic wasn't in the physical aluminized-polycarbonate media or the playback tech but in the binary encoding itself. Binary is about as portable as it gets these days. Have codec, will travel. Ok... a gross over-simplification but not untrue.

In 1992 and 1993, I was friends with a computer science genius who had a Sun Sparc workstation in his home that acted as an email and UseNet-mirror server for his little cabal of techie friends via this Internet thingy and a dial-up pipe. I knew a little bit about the Internet (a very little bit) which was about 100% more than anyone else I knew outside of this mad wizard and his crew. AOL and BBSs were still a big-ish deal. Tim Berners-Lee's WWW was just a cute widdle thing. Among the things that Mad Wizard and Krew were doing with their slice of Internet was... sharing music; ugly, overly-compressed clips but still music. I have no idea how they were doing what they were doing. They were also sharing pictures (but we won't go into that). The point? Like most everyone else at that time, my little brain hadn't closed the loop on the idea that what lived on those shiny CD disks was merely data until I saw Wiz and Krew sharing music over the 'Net. Before you think I'm breaking my arm patting myself on the back, know that the dime didn't drop all the way. No, it happened in stages: several years later when software began to be distributed on CD-ROM; Napster; DVDs; rich-media web pages; the embodied experience of ripping my large CD collection down for playback in Windows Media Player (a year after buying a 400-CD disk changer); Netflix online; my father replacing some of his smaller flatscreen monitors with a huge flatscreen TV; Kindle; smartphones. What a remarkable failure of my imagination, really.

Just data.

In the last few years, I've had some curiosity about when folks might have started finding themselves in this "just data" frame of mind. A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon the "Phonograph Disks" article originally published in November of 1934. Rather startling to think that 85 years ago, a "French scientist" looked at a phonograph record as a data storage medium for controlling tanks on the battlefield. Didn't work worth a damn but who cares because, in the end, it was a remarkable leap. A convergent leap. A bit ironic, too, when you consider the relationship between the analog photograph record and its usurper, the digital CD. Le petite bon mot.

Those of you in-the-know will be saying, "Yeah, I might not have known about the LP Tank thing but a phonograph-as-data-medium isn't much of a stretch from the pattern cards used many years earlier in Jacquard Looms (an example that's a staple in history-of-computer-science content) which Charles Babbage adapted for use in his Analytic Engine, and which became computer punch-cards, etc., etc." And you'd be right. But there is a big point that a great many people I know do not get: anything can be "represented" in some form or fashion by anything else, and anything can be encoded/decoded from This to That. Controlled movement of a tank can be encoded in/decoded from an analog signal represented as scratches in the surface of a photograph disk. Music can be encoded in/decoded from a string of binary numbers represented as reflectivity changes in the surface of a mirrored disk. A representation of the flow of goods across an empire can be encoded in knots in a string (the Incan quipu). And all that content whizzing around netspace is just (binary) data.

We've had many decades - and even centuries or millennia - to work up good, rigid cultural ideas about the importance of media and its interrelationship with technology. This rigidity is reflected in our language: TV is a medium, radio is a medium, newspapers are a medium, telephone is a medium... the new-ish stuff out on the Internet constitute "new media". These categories-of-media are privileged with ideas about their uniqueness (and that's not entirely incorrect) but at the price of also considering important, underlying "sameness". I know the medium/technology relationship is non-trivial but it is not the whole story because, right now, in the Post-Convergence Age, previously technologically-isolated mediums are converged, or converging, into the binary-encoded flow of netspace. The degree of convergence in netspace today rubs my face in the realization that everything from cave paintings in Lascaux and the invention of the alphabet to streaming video on smartphones and our social lives represented in social network sites share something profound in common. In this context, the medium/technology coupling seems less... deterministic... more like envelopes on a flow between This and That.

And what's flowing? Well, it's a lot of things but, down deep at the nubbins of it all, it's "just data". And that's as non-trivial as medium/tech uniqueness. This is one reason why I use "netspace" instead of "Internet". One day, we'll innovate away from a TCP/IP-based "network of networks"; WWW will disappear; words like "television" and "radio" will be challenging answers in whatever passes for Trivial Pursuit. Everything that is so very, very cool now will be as quaint as a steam-powered car or green text on a CRT monitor. But whatever it is we are doing right now with cable and Internet and smartphones and... - and have done for a long time with all the tech that came before - will remain, enveloped by new tech in ways we can hardly imagine. Netspace is not about specific technologies but about the flow between This and That that technology in all its guises has facilitated. Well, that's part of it...

"Just data"... another Double-Rainbow moment.

++vn