The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media.
Right now, I’m legally streaming music online through the new music programme called Spotify. I can listen to any song I want, free, out of millions available on the site – as long as I sign in with my Facebook account. Spotify isn’t the only one. Gradually, more and more apps and sites appear which require you to log in with your Facebook credentials. Countless more sites give you the option of logging in via Facebook – making sure everything is connected in a neat little package with your most favourite social networking site.
Sound and image, voice and text, are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface.
I only have one or two friends that I would phone up now to catch up and ask how they are. Everyone else beams their news to me through Facebook. It all comes to me on the flat, static/non-static screen of my laptop (the same way I’m seeing what I’m currently writing). News about relationships, break-ups, marriages, babies, new jobs, new grades, parking fines, farts, deaths. All of these things appear to me on a white screen in black Lucida Sans, with touches of that comforting Facebook Blue (Hex Code #3B5998).
…one medium’s content is always other media…
Facebook is my photo album, my home video player, my community noticeboard, my Yellow Pages, my email, my MSN Messenger, my calendar, my birthday diary.
What phonographs and cinematographs, whose names not coincidentally derive from writing, were able to store was time: time as a mixture of audio frequencies in the acoustic realm and as the movement of single-image sequences in the optical.
Facebook’s new profile layout is called Timeline. Facebook wants you to store time within it, in the form of photos and videos and ‘Milestones’. You can quickly flick back to 2007 and see how much of a dick you were then.
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