It is easy to become a bit of a neophiliac when discussing digital trends. Every new site seems to be a march forwards, and consequently the death of the old way of doing things. Facebook is the death of myspace, Twitter is the death of Facebook, Foursquare is the death of Twitter. This "Video killed the Radio Star" thinking ignores the behaviour which has remained unchanged. Recently I have noticed a number of parallels between seemingly digital behaviours and much older expressions.
Take Mashups- the remixing of two different sources has been used in music for years, but only recently did I discover the first video mashup was supposedly done in 1987.
"Apocalypse Pooh" has since achieved cult status, and the end product is indistinguishable from a lot of modern mashups, even though its production was done on VHS.
Another might be multi-layered, interactive story-telling. Television shows are more complex than ever before, from the multi-layered narratives of 24 or The Wire to immersive videogames such as the forthcoming
Heavy Rain. However, though modern media has made this easier to accomplish, and therefore more prevalent, there were attempts to make older media more interactive. There were interactive books- you may remember those
"choose your own adventure" books where you rolled a dice to determine how the story would progress. Massive online multiplayer games have their spiritual origin in the hugely popular boardgame ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, where pixels and controllers were replaced by cards and plastic.
Lastly there is
Chat-roulette (link to a video)- the digital discussion topic of the hour, seemingly representative of everything that is unique and unusual about the internet. However it is essentially an updated version of a
party line, an open telephone line where callers are all connected to each other. That too became used largely by college kids at parties to tap into surreal and anarchic conversations.
In each case the internet has not created new behaviour, but made easier already existent behaviour. Whereas making a book interactive was difficult because the media was never meant to be, the internet was constructed with this in mind. As a final, interesting aside, the interactivity we have become used to with the web, seems to be pushing us to create more interaction in other forms of media and offline: the
post-digital trend identified by Russel Davies.
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