Every era is defined to a pretty significant degree by its information distribution technologies. Writing moved words outside of human mouths. The printing press made books affordable. Telegraph eliminated the need for people to deliver things by hand. Telephone eliminated the need to know Morse code to communicate across a continent. Vinyl records let people buy whole symphonies. Radio freed voices from wires and distributed music as far as the ionosphere would carry it. Television did the same for video. Cassette tapes made music portable.
Thence came the compact disc. It was a physical medium that carried digital information. Bits are bits regardless of the form they are stored in. Translations between formats may hurt fidelity but the original file can be copied an infinite number of times across an infinite number of substrates and should remain unchanged. Information is purer in bits; less restrained by the circumstances of its publication. This mess led to the whole fiasco with Napster and the eternally raging argument about what theft is but that couldn't stop the tide of history. Digital retained its edge over analog and new disc technologies kept appearing to supplant the older. By the time we were having to consider what the shortest wavelengths we could shoot at a disc was the paradigm had already shifted once more. Internet speeds climbed just high enough to make video streaming practical. Netflix showed up early and dominated the movies on demand market for a while. Eventually the big studios got it together and put out there own streaming services.
That's the world I'm writing in. A somewhat balkanized streaming landscape with an excess of cheap DVD and Bluray options if you want to own media. All of this is legacy media of the studio produced variety. The real power house in the new millennium is the content creators. While the vast majority are doomed to obscurity with the rest of us schmucks; over three hundred thousand channels have more than one hundred thousand subscribers. It's an open question whether the democratization of media output is a good thing. Certainly there is a plethora of hyper productive narcissists pumping out content that makes reality television look restrained and sophisticated. On the other hand good and sober channels are also plentiful if less visible and while I think some would say we live in a petri dish no thinking person will argue it's a monoculture. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on where you valuate the trade offs between chaos and conformity. One thing that no one will deny is that digital distribution is the major driver of both producer and consumer behavior in the present media landscape.
IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON