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Subject: BANDWIDTH AND CONTENT
From: marleen <marleen@waag.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 20:20:05 METDST

* * * * *

BANDWIDTH AND CONTENT

In the context of the 'We Want Bandwidth!' public research by the
Society for Old and New Media
@ Hybrid Workspace, documenta x - Kassel, July 12, 1997.

On the threshold of the era of high-capacity connectivity we (our
group in Kassel) is investigating the demand for more bandwidth. That
demand of corporate, state, individual and activist players in the Net
game, which in a collective form we have called 'The Push for more
Bandwidth'. At this moment we are still very much immersed in the
questions of the distribution of bandwidth, geophysically and within a
given society, the question who owns the bandwidth, and who will be
the virtual stakeholders in the bandwidth of the future, the ratio
between the bandwidth of institutional and private connectivity, and
so forth.
All these questions point out important, if not crucial, problems in
the present as much as in the future. One question that we have not
yet addressed is that of the relationship between bandwidth and
content, i.e. the kind of communications the digital infrastructure
can carry and will be able to carry in the not so distant future.
There is a significant relation between the availability of bandwidth
and the kind of content that the information infrastructure allows
for. There also is, however, an even more important but less obvious
relationship between the increasing bandwidth of mainstream
connections and the marginalisation of certain types of content
production for the networking structures.

First of all this problem cannot be reduced to a simple position in
favour or against the expansion of bandwidth. High bandwidth
connections will enable certain empowering practices, while at the
same time they threaten to marginalise others.

The special PUSH Media bulletin in Wired Magazine outlined a future of
networked media that relies very much on a further development of
high-bandwidth connectivity. The outdated future of the web was over,
the future of hybrid communications was what the new future was all
about, at least it was that month, according to Wired. Leaving the
sales-rhetorics of Wired aside for a moment, quite an interesting
model was presented in the bulletin; a hybrid interconnected
networking structure that offers familiar services such as e-mail, the
web, news groups, etc., combined with a highly diverse set of
broad/narrow/point cast information and entertainment services,
generically coined as PUSH Media (media that push content towards the
consumer, rather than the consumer 'pulling' it in themselves). The
hybrid nature of the structure is constituted by the combination of
familiar models from the old broadcasting systems (such as radio and
television), where a pre-fabricated info-product is offered to a
periphery of consumers, and an interconnected digital support
structure which exploits the potential of digital networking to create
much more diversified models of distribution.

Broadcast inherited much of the rigid 'phalanx' like structure of
industrial production. Bulk produced in a linear fashion, marketed
according to the traditional production / sale / consumption split,
distributed via standardised channels that allow for profitable
economies of scale. Digital networking instead offered a model of
ultimate flexibility, where any conceivable model of distribution
could theoretically be made feasible, but which offered only extremely
constrained possibilities for the transfer of image and sound, and
consequently only functioned well as a (written) text medium. With
rapidly evolving high-bandwidth connections the fusion of the two
offers itself as a new perspective. The idea is not simply to create a
broad- or narrow cast system that will enable consumers to react to
the offerings. Rather, endless new forms of tailored, made to measure,
special interest tele-casting can be conceived of.

Broadcast implies a large homogenous group of consumers, mostly in a
localised geophysical region (a country, a city or an area). The need
to meet the demand of a greater audience implies the need to tune the
program to the lowest common denominator in terms of complexity and
content. Narrow casting more subtly tries to address specific
audiences, but was almost necessarily a marginal practice given the
limited availability of bandwidth for tele-communications in general.
Pointcasting was economically not viable, because of the costs of
infrastructure and production. High-bandwidth digital networks
eradicate these old categories:
- programs can be produced for specialised audiences, which because
they may be distributed world wide can still be of substantial
economic interest.
- High value added services can be offered on subscription to a finite
number of users and thereby become commercially interesting.
- Social and cultural information for marginal groups can exploit the
possibilities of digital narrow-casting models to send out their
messages, potentially world wide.
- Pointcasting can be made viable by the fact that individual users
can access the information, service or program in their own time,
while access no longer needs to be limited to a certain time or place,
much like the traditional web operates right now, but the type of
content can be different (i.e. video and audio footage, music,
interactive multimedia programs and services, etcetera), while the
means of production of content have become dramatically cheaper.
- The potential of broadcasting to bind a large group into a process
of simultaneous cognitive processing (as McLuhan has described
television) can still be maintained, as broadcasting of live and/or
recorded programs can still be supported by this digital
infrastructure.
The overall picture of PUSH media just means that the digital
networking structure becomes a hybrid of interactive and tele-casted
forms of content distribution. As radio and television are slowly
turning digital, the Net is moving closer to the classical models of
mass media.

The idea of PUSH media has been criticised heavily as a threat to the
horizontal and open structure of the Net as it has existed in the 90s
so far. This is not all obvious, as it is easy and to some extent
justified to maintain that the new fusion of mass tele-casting and
networking can be exploited as an empowering practice for marginalised
expression of culture and society, which it could do. Yet another
dangerous effect could be the marginalisation of existing and
flourishing forms of content production and distribution on the Net.
The problem is threefold. Within those regions of the earth where
bandwidth is expanding rapidly the big players in the media and
entertainment industry are much better equipped to seize the larger
part of the audience, with well designed, engaging programs and
services. In the current low-bandwidth structure of the Net, the focus
is directed at content and interest. Rather than providing content
for a wide general audience, the Net producers try to address special
interests of Net users, as the interest is what spurs the users into
action, not so much the design of the structure. In the world of
high-bandwidth connections the design of the service, program or
content provided will determine much stronger whether or not that
offering will reach its audience. Marginal groups in culture and
society are generally not well equipped to deal with this new
situation and they are certainly no match for the highly professional
commercial media conglomerates.
A second aspect is the communicative dimension of the Net. Aside from
its function as a content distribution medium, the Net is primarily a
communications medium. The Net supports personal communications such
as e-mail, but also offers more public forms of interaction and
communication, such as MUDs and MOOs, virtual environments shared by
multiple users simultaneously, and chat lines offering virtual text
conversations between two or more persons. Low bandwidth connections
focused attention very strongly on this communicative dimension of the
Net. Because of what the Net had to offer for itself was not so much
(in the classic form ASCII text exchange) the interest had to be found
outside the Net, in the people communicating on-line. With the advent
of multimedia on-line the passive role of the entertainment consumer
is given precedence over that of the active communicator, on-line
cultures may be directly under threat because of this.
The third, and undoubtedly still the most important problem is that of
bandwidth distribution. Because bandwidth was low, content,
communication, special interest and access could be high. As more and
more content migrates to higher bandwidths, less and less will be
available to low bandwidth regions and users. The equal distribution
therefore directly interferes with the quality of content distribution
and interaction across the social and geo-physical divides, and only
a more equal distribution of available bandwidth can ensure the
long-term quality improvement of content, which relies on access for
all.