Since the beginning of media and cultural industries, the scope of possible content has often – nearly always – been configured by the technical limitations of corresponding containers. In the digital age, though this coupling is no longer an imperative, most content companies are still prisoners of their containers.
Digitization and the multiplication of media platform capacities finally enable artists and content creators to concentrate on creation, regardless of container constraints. A drastic revolution which breaks with over 300 centuries of history.
Since the inception of culture and of its material transmission, content possibilities have been configured by container constraints, message possibilities by those of their messengers, and work by tool constraints. Cave artists did not see the world in ochre and black, they made do with the tools of their era. Pre-Impressionist painters might no doubt have enjoyed taking to the great outdoors with their easels as well, but chemistry was not sufficiently advanced to produce fast-drying paint, making studio work an imperative. In the same vein of ideas, Truffaut and Godard’s Nouvelle Vague, or Lars Von Trier’s “dogma,” alongside the invention of the first over-the-shoulder cameras, and later DV camcorders, also demonstrate how technological innovations promote narrative evolution, thereby increasing the creative freedom of artists.
Digital technology and the digital age have completely freed content from the constraints of its containers, all the while making every possible tool accessible. The difficulty in finding or inventing them has instead been replaced by learning how to use them, and the impossible task of tackling everything at once.
All digital media are able to transmit all possible content – documents of any length, video or photo files, interactive tools, data of all kinds. On this type of media, container constraints (be they iPhones, Web sites or IPTV) require variable interfaces and specific navigation processes, rather than a given quantity or type of possible content.
With regards to tools, all media and culture stakeholders – be they talented or not, or whether or not they have a budget – are now able to produce, modify and stock all types of content, from text to HD video, from databases to music. Limiting factors are now the complexity of tools and the time needed to master them, further entailing that creators become specialists in their respective fields.
Music stands out as the field in which such transformations have had the most impact. Over the last 30 years or so, home studios have enabled new generations of musicians mastering “neither instrument nor music theory” to electrify crowds. Containers (from vinyl to CDs to MP3s) and business models (from Napster to iTunes) have deeply transformed their content (music).
The advent of this media and communications revolution will most likely be a key element in terms of the capacity for these industries to stay at the heart of the public’s habits. As with music, sectors paralyzed by a fear of change will not prevent people from moving forward. They will simply keep moving without them. Change is in our own hands.