The Wiki man

Most writers of science fiction have foreseen human communication becoming more sophisticated and realistic. Brave New World has the feelies; 1984 has telescreens; every spaceship seems to have a colossal video wall on which the Emperor Zorquon can appear in Dolby surround sound to threaten the crew with unspeakable things. But more interesting than the media everybody predicted are those nobody did: the text message, twitter.com, the Facebook status update, YouTube. All these are the opposite of the High-Definition experience. They are low-bandwidth, low-effort media — what Malcolm McLaren calls Lo-Fi. And that’s precisely why people like them — for they combine low demands of the message creator with low expectations in the recipient.

Old forms of communication have pre-existing standards attached. Take the phone call, for instance. I cannot call a friend and simply ask ‘free this evening? No?’ without first spending five minutes discursively chatting about their bloody trip to Marrakech. A text message imposes no such expectations: being limited to 160 characters, it is a glorious excuse to be slightly rude. In this way, the text message stands in the same relation to a phone call as a postcard does to a letter. The format demands — and hence excuses — brevity.

With no history, these Lo-Fi media allow for great inventiveness. New York teenagers, irritated to find the word ‘cool’ rendered as ‘book’ by their handset’s predictive text, simply reassigned the meaning of the word. If a young New Yorker says ‘book’, it means ‘that’s cool’.

The limited reproductive quality of YouTube is similarly liberating. If I try to make a 30-minute film on a camcorder, it will stand in stark contrast to the quality I expect on television. On YouTube three minutes of Zapruder-style camera-shake looks fine.