In today’s media landscape, digital technologies have propelled us into a completely new age of media production, distribution and consumption. We now have incredible levels of access to a broad range of new mediums and technologies which in many ways have made the processes of media production and consumption far more accessible, convenient, reliable and efficient.
With the ongoing development of new media technologies which will continue to alter out existing media landscape, it’s interesting and important to discuss, analyse and investigate whether or not older analogue mediums are still useful to us in any way. Have digital technologies fully replaced the functions and affordances of analogue systems? Or would there be significant disadvantages to fully abandoning old analogue mediums?
Shin suggests that analogue mediums can often provide artists with “very attractive and creative limitation[s]” (2011), allowing creatives to experiment with older practices in their workflow and production processes. This continued interest in analogue systems suggests that while analogue media may not have a widespread following anymore, it still holds pockets of niche audiences that highly benefit from it’s continued presence in media society.
In creating this series of photographs I wanted to engage with these questions of analogue media’s usefulness and develop a piece of work which attempts to visualise the ways in which analogue mediums have been (for the most part) made redundant by today’s various digital media technologies.
I wanted to emphasise the multi-purpose nature of today’s digital media by contrasting digital technologies with their analogue counterparts and ancestors. I chose to focus on the SD card as my digital subject, primarily because as a digital storage device it has ties with a range of old media formats – from tape recorders to analogue film cameras. I think it’s interesting that we’ve migrated towards a more universal storage device, and now we can see SD cards being used to store essentially all types of media content.
Media items such as the SD card (and even older digital systems like CD-Rs) provide a range of incredible benefits, including a convenient size, reusable nature, more durable form factor, etc. They have enabled us to create, and engage with media culture in unprecedented ways – providing speed, efficiency and consistent quality.
However “forgetting convenience [and] passionately diving into a real and sometimes challenging experience is only human” asserts (Goodyer 2013), and he claims that the presence of analogue media in society is something that is inherently part of the human experience. It is sometimes beneficial to return to analogue mediums, to enjoy a less easy, and more physical media experience. This ties in with other suggestions from Keightley & Pickering who claim that as humans, we often prefer the tangible form of analogue mediums – their physical presence and “venerable age” (2014) providing a greater overall experience of the media at hand.
REFERENCES:
Goodyer, J 2013, ‘Instant Gratification [instant analogue photography]’, Engineering & Technology, vol. 8, no. 3, pp.73-75. Available from: IEEE/IET Electronic Library Journals [23 March 2017].
Keightley, E & Pickering, M 2014, ‘Technologies of Memory: Practices of Remembering in Analogue and Digital Photography’, New Media & Society, vol. 16, no. 4, pp.576-593. Available from: SAGE Communication Studies [21 March 2017].
Shin, S 2011, ‘The Sound of Old Media’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, pp.251-254. Available from: SAGE Premiere 2007 [21 March 2017].