When I was pretty young I was usually interested in owning things. Especially I’d look forward to owning Nintendo games, books, VHS cassettes, and DAT cassettes and eventually CDs and things like that. Then one day the internet became a pretty common part of my daily life, and everybody else’s. Not much happened back then, except that information was passed around on the web, UseNet, and Gofer to a lesser extent. Eventually and sometimes people would pass around porn this way. This was when storage and graphical capacities had developed to the point where porn was interesting on a computer. This was the first example of not owning something. Previously people had owned porn on VHS cassette and most commonly magazine format. However now that it was being transmitted as information which a computer could decipher it no longer really existed. But people still wanted to own a lot of it.
Several years later audio and video compression and a whole host of other funny ways of shrinking information and removing ideas from their physical concepts of storage started to happen. Suddenly it was simple to transmit music, movies, or even NES ROMs around the world as ideas. So people started collecting these too, trying to own more of them. But the problem here is that none of these objects actually existed. They’re simply ideas ripped free of the only thing that gave them any objective real world presence and concept of possessability: their distribution media.
While it was once certainly possible to own a record that contained a physical representation of a song, now the song was amorphous in its sense of tangibility. While this is not much of a problem with music, as songs are temporary broadcastings of information encoded in pressure waves produced by sounding instruments, it’s more troubling regarding photographs and optical data. Photographs are recordings of the travel of paths of light in a very simple and narrow path. Once a photograph is scanned into a computer it’s deconstructed in a sense, and the image created and hurried along on electron streams to various email addresses is an entirely different image. This is somehow more troubling to me than the concept of dot printing in a newspaper or magazine or comic book, which is fundamentally altered from the image it maintains likeness to.
The grand effect of all this information being removed of its earthly shell is probably a decrease of the understanding of copyright laws, particularly among the youth of today (in the parts of the world that have electricity and computer network access). It becomes difficult to attach a sense of ownership to something that doesn’t tangibly exist and is freely and easily cloned and passed along or otherwise shared and/or deconstructed partially or fully. While the progenitors of these sources of information could be imagined to be the ultimate authority on the needs and necessities of copyright laws and how they should function, the former group composes the audiences of these “artists,” if you will. This gets harder when you consider that information is only completely of value when it is transferred – when it has an audience. Information is integral to one’s survival and daily life. So I haven’t got an answer here.
So is this information even finding anybody? What the fuck is an audience?
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.