Hovagimyan Response "On Media"

It is impossible to take any class on media nowadays without discussing the advent of user-generated media in the 21st century. Hovagimyan describes this trend interestingly, coining this new era the "Post Media" era, which followed the "Playback Culture" of previous decades. As Hovagimyan details, this has been the result of the long process of inventing "new" media, and retooling and combining them with other media. Through this process, audio recording combined with silent film to create talking pictures. Similarly, the principles of broadcasting explored by radio combined with film to create TV. Thus, TV and film are multi-media inventions themselves. Given the arrival of the Internet, the principles of film and TV have been put closer into the populous' control than ever before. People can now make their own multimedia projects and share them on YouTube, perhaps the greatest triumph of the Post Media era.

I found it interesting how Hovagimyan's notion of a Post Media era similar articles I've read in other classes about Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of the culture industry. To put their complicated theory simply, Adorno and Horkheimer dismiss popular culture as a byproduct of mass ignorance and corporate corruption. According to them, we do not truly have control over what TV, films, and music we digest, we simply submit to and choose from a pre-determined variety of commodified arts dispersed by the so-called "Culture Industry." While Adorno and Horkheimer linger on the verge of extremism, I do agree with their point to an extent, and welcome in a new era of media in which multimedia is not only chosen, but created by the average citizen.

That probably got a bit off the main focus of Hovagimyan's thoughts on multimedia, yet when I read about a "new era" of media I can never help but bring up A & H. All in all I found Hovagimyan's description of the evolution of multimedia interesting. Alexander Graham Bell's combination of telephony and performance art (whether he meant to combine them, or considered it performance art) displays just how long this evolutionary process of media takes. In a way, what Bell was doing was an early example of film, combining audio, narrative, and visual into a coherent performance. Then again, the same could be said of most live theater.

For my artist inspiration I posted the first several tracks of Pink Floyd's "The Wall." The wall is a masterpiece, not only because of its musical beauty, and intelligence, but also because of its multimedia prperties. "The Wall" is not just an album. It is a cinematic and all-encompassing soundscape that drags listeners into a compelling narrative where they can not only see the characters, but feel them too. Pink Floyd pulled out all the stops on this album, incorporating both sound effects and dialogue into their work. Without a doubt, this album displays the type of hybridization and innovation seen in multimedia throughout the years, as discussed by Hovagimyan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU2-r_0CtIo