Humanities, University of Western Sydney
In a recent edition of 21C magazine, Bruce Sterling, cyber-punk novelist and journalist, observed that there were 8,784 books on the topic of multimedia 'even though no one has successfully defined the term' (Sterling 58). There is no doubt that multimedia is difficult to define. Once the essential link between multimedia and the CD-ROM is questioned and severed (as it can be from the viewpoint of developments in web-based multimedia, or authoring software, or textual theory) the area becomes extremely complex. Yet this doesn't stop most of us craving for definitions. To satisfy this craving, I'm going to present ten definitions of multimedia of my own concoction. Some that I've read; others that I've made up. Some fictional, some non-fictional. The main concern of this list of definitions is not to decide on the best one, or the most exact. Rather, the aim is to bounce the definitions off one another, to observe the different spaces and possibilities they invoke or disguise, open or close. The discussion presented here is by no means exhaustive either, but hopefully suggests some interesting lines of debate and intervention.
As an initial starting point, let's define multimedia in quite a general and vague way as 'multiple media': the combination of image, text, sound, video, animation, and so on in the one abstract space. As a further starting point, let's assume that multimedia and computing are intertwined in some way. This intertwining is confirmed in our very first definitions of multimedia. The Vulgar definition, 'doing movies on a computer'. And the Mixed Media definition, which talks about a computer controlled system for working with different forms.
Now these are quite cautious starting points. But already, they risk locking us into directions that take us where we may not want to go. Or narrow the area of multimedia too much. The fact is that, depending how you look at it, multimedia has a long history prior to the advent of personal computing.
Example One: In the '70s and '80s, it was quite common in performance art to find 'multimedia' used to describe installations made up of films, video, slides, music, and actors. The work of New York performance artist Laurie Anderson comes to mind here, and even U2 in their Zoo TV phase. It is increasingly the case that this kind of performance work is referred to as 'Mixed Media'. A legacy of this experimentation is that today you still find definitions of multimedia that refuse to exclude this work. This is why I also call the Mixed Media definition the Hybrid Definition. Because the Hybrid definition does not sit totally at ease in the realm of computing. Not all computer controlled systems are computers. Some are programmable slide machines, or programmable lighting desks. Another legacy of this experimentation is that there are contemporary artists and theorists who bemoan the loss of the alchemical aspects of this mixing of forms, and are reluctant to give this terrain over to multimedia, with its technologically over-determined material.1 The fact that multimedia is generally a narrowcast form, in contrast to mixed media, with broadcast possibilities that extend into installation and live art, supplies another motive for dissent from the multimedia revolution for some art workers.
Example Two: We can also point to comics as a possible form, or precursor, of multimedia. Think of the way pictures and words and sound effects are used in comics (t-shirts, the poor person's multimedia, are another possible example here). The interesting thing about this example is that it illustrates that the urge to see different media pitted against each other is not recent, but well established.2 If we follow this line of inquiry, the contemporary re-thinking of the hieroglyphic, especially in Eisenstein's work, becomes significant (Eisenstein 30; Ulmer 16-18). As the example of montage illustrates, no cultural form develops in a vacuum. But the tendency for multimedia to present itself as an integration of different pre-formed media (of graphics, sound, etc.), or a meta-media, has diverted attention away from the way in which multimedia is caught up in the history of text, and especially hypertext. And yet the ways in which multimedia dramatises the history of text so as to pose as an 'natural' evolution point of painting, cinema, and photography, needs to be questioned.
While these examples -- performance art, and comics-- may be interesting, the criticism can easily be laid that they don't really capture the specificity of what is happening today with multimedia in a computing context. It is a long way from comics to computer software, you might be thinking. Many commentators speak of 'Interactive Multimedia' to make precisely this point, and preserve the specificity of their particular object. Specificity refers to the uniqueness of a thing, what makes an entity specifically that entity. What makes interactive multimedia interactive multimedia? The question of specificity can be asked of many things. What makes cinema cinema? What makes art art?
Specificity is a problem with many definitions of multimedia. Take the next two on our list. The Information definition and the 'Microsoft' definition. The former relates to 'the way we deal with information in all its forms: film, TV, etc.'. But what is the nature of this dealing -- isn't that important? Taking this definition at face value, we could say that the library card catalogue is a form of multimedia, since it allows us to deal with information in different ways. In the same way, the 'Microsoft' definition -- so named because it reveals that packaging of intellectual content and creativity so indicative of big corporations-- refers to the sharing of ideas. But I can hardly think of any creative work which doesn't or couldn't employ computer technology. Reading between the lines, the Information definition shares a tendency with the 'Microsoft' definition, in that both assume the personal computer as the main vehicle of communication. Yet not everything with a chip is a computer. There are computer chips in watches and cars. The latest BMW motorcar could be described as a computer controlled system for working with text, sound and graphics. Does that make it multimedia? Both of these definitions lack engagement with the specificity of multimedia.
This is an important point to the extent that some of the most megalomaniacal definitions of multimedia lack specificity. By arrogating the field of electronics and digitisation to multimedia alone-- just as the information definition limits information to the computer -- such definitions present an inaccurate picture of the technological and industrial contexts within which multimedia is emerging. So-called 'convergence' (which I discuss below) is happening at different speeds in different areas, with varying effects on the craft in question (desktop publishing, non-linear editing, pay TV).3
Now, the Content and Context definition, as well the Interface and Package definitions, are interesting because they go into the specificity of the way multimedia allows us to deal with material. They start to talk about the presentation of information within multimedia. Unlike the Information definition which isn't very specific about the means of interaction with different forms, the Content and context definition is a lot more specific.
Using the requisite jargon, the Content and context definition raises the issue of the kind of interface that makes multimedia possible. The Interface definition grapples with this issue directly. 'The capture, manipulation and integration of digital material onto the one user inter-face'. Notice that this definition pretty much excludes the definition of multimedia that relates to performance art or comic books. This is intentional. Performance art is not usually limited to one interface (although Virtual art may prove to be an exception4). And comics are not usually digital.
It is extremely important for the Interface definition that the integration happen on the 'one user interface', and that this integration is something specific to the understanding of multimedia as a form of computing. Now, I'm suggesting that because the Content and context definition and the Interface definition raise the issue of the presentation of information, they come closer to describing the specificity of multimedia. There are two points that need to be made about the issue of an interface. These two points relate to convergence and interactivity.
i) Convergence
The concept was formulated by Nicholas Negroponte in the '70s, and basically draws attention to the way that the computer screen is moving towards a hybrid existence somewhere between being a telephone, an ATM, a television, and a fax. This process of hybridisation is called convergence. Think of your lounge room, prior to the advent of 'home theatre': hi-fi, stereo, telephone, all in different places. What I am pointing to is the way the computer monitor is also a site for the convergence of all of these things.
We should remember, however, that the concept of convergence doesn't just refer to what's happening on the screen. It refers just as much to shifts on the level of industry. One of the reasons multimedia makes big news today is that it is an area of business that isn't owned by one industry yet. Further, it is an area that motivates industrial change, for monopolies in particular (see Wark). Multimedia spans Entertainment, Telephone companies, and Computer companies, as well as toys and games. These industries, which were once quite separate, are themselves beginning to converge. Once again, however, I think it would be a mistake to conclude from these developments that convergence is happening at the same speed in all areas, and that it is therefore a monolithic, uniform phenomenon.
ii) Interactivity
The second point I want to make about interface relates to the idea of interactivity. This idea can best be explained through the Content and context definition. This definition is interesting because it points to the way in which multimedia is about both information and the way that information is presented. That is, it is about the environment in which a user uses the information. This environment is often celebrated as allowing trial and error exploration, or intuition-friendly navigation.
Note that interface is not just the screen, but the broader contexts (both physical and intertextual) in which we receive information: the design of the software and the hardware. The window (as in 'Windows '95'), which we look through like a porthole. The fact that the monitor is similar in size and shape to a head, and is positioned relative to the head. The latest Apple operating system icon, which is a graphic example of two interlocked and smiling faces, demonstrates this well. We should include the hypertext system in this context, which allows the point and click navigation we associate with multimedia. Once, surfing the net was as much fun as browsing the library catalogue. Interactivity has changed that, and brought computing into the realm of public interest in ways previously unimaginable.
Interactivity is doubly important from the perspective of computing and the issue of 'digital' information. The question of how we relate to raw information material is an important one in computing, and is central to the question of interface. How we go from the blits and blots of computer interaction to an idea of human interaction, is of course a key communications issue.
Paul Brown summarises the situation nicely:
When you strike a key on a typewriter there is a direct transfer of energy (which is sometimes amplified by an electric system) to the hammer which moves to imprint the selected character via a pigment coated ribbon onto paper. When you touch a computer keyboard something very different happens. First, the keyboard generates a special code unique to the character selected and transmits this to an input port on the computer itself. The port generates what's called an interrupt, which informs the central processing unit (CPU) that the port needs attention. The CPU will suspend its current task to service the interrupt. É This process, which will have taken a few thousandths of a second is a very basic form of computer human interaction. If you were using a window-based computer with a mouse and pointing to icons, the process would, at least from the computer's point of view, be very similar. From the human perspective the window system is likely to appear very different--much more intuitive and friendlier to operate. (Brown 73-74)Without some kind of interface, interactivity is minimised, and the whole area of multimedia would be as pleasurable as surfing through the library card index.
We began with some definitions that helped us explore the link between multiple media and computing, and suggested some precursors to multimedia. We looked into some definitions of multimedia that weren't very specific. Then we turned to some definitions that started engaging with the specificity of multimedia by looking at the way information is presented. This raised the question of interface, with points regarding convergence, and interactivity. When I mentioned interactivity and interface, I mentioned that the environment in which interactivity takes place has a lot to do with software design and hardware design. This is an important point, which I want to take a little further.
When we suggest that there are links between multiple media and computing, what do we mean? What do we mean by 'the computer'? Many of our definitions of multimedia refer to the medium of computing. Take the Megamedium definition, 'the integration of different digitised media onto the one media'.
The reason I call this the Megamedium definition is because it takes lots of different media and puts it on one medium. It brings the many into the one. At the same time, however, it's quite unspecific about what that one medium might be, and its impact on these 'other' media. I've included the Software and Hypermedia definition on the list as a way of becoming more specific. After all, a computer is not just the hardware that you bring home in a box. A computer works because of interaction between both its hardware and software.
Consequently, when we talk about a computer as medium, we need to include both hardware and software components in the discussion. There was a time when computers lacked the software to support interactive multimedia, only alpha-numeric environments. This was a time before the 'user-friendly' age of computers. Today, we can interact with video and interlinking texts. But why is this so? In short, it is thanks to applications like 'Quicktime' and 'Hypercard' that computing can be interactive, and can even start to approach the category of multimedia. It is only recently, with browsers like 'Mosaic' and 'Netscape' (as opposed to Gopher) that the Internet has become a form of multimedia communication. It's important not to give up this reading of multimedia from the perspective of applications, because otherwise our discussion of multimedia will remain abstract, and lacking in historical grounding.
This awareness of the functionality of applications is important when considering our present situation. Many people hold the view that multimedia is what you find on CD-ROM disks. But currently there is equal interest in the idea of doing multimedia on-line, on the world wide web, over 'intranets' specific to corporations, schools, or universities. This will force a rethink of some ideas about multimedia. I've included the Package definition with this difference between on-line and CD-ROM multimedia in mind. CD-ROM multimedia needs to be pre-packaged; it's written once and then sent out to the user. On-line multimedia can be written and re-written, and in fact users themselves can add material to the interactive assemblage.
The Package definition as it is framed here intentionally excludes something like web-based multimedia. Web-based multimedia is not packaged or authored in the same way that a CD-ROM is. Its 'source language' is modifiable. Even with developments like Apple's 'CyberDog', which allows you to access the web from a CD-ROM source, and seemingly upsets a rigid disctinction between on-line and CD-ROM multimedia, the question of pre-packaging re-mains. A simple change in the Web address of one of the links can disturb this assemblage. Pre-packaging is also an aesthetic consideration, as it limits the way in which material can be performed and presented to an audience. It has an effect on what could be called the temporality of the piece: its representation and participation in time.
Many people don't consider the limitations of the package definition of multimedia because their views of multimedia are hardware based; limited to personal computers and CD-ROMs. But developments in web software design are disturbing this view and taking multimedia into new areas.
This new area starts to look a lot more like Ted Nelson's vision for 'Hypermedia': 'complexes of branching and responding graphics'. Incidentally, Nelson is absolutely sceptical of the idea of multimedia because of its links to 'slide shows with sound'. Back to our Hybrid definition.
What the shift towards on-line multimedia engenders is a need to view multimedia as much as a set of practices as a product. Too much multimedia criticism reads like a consumer guide to the latest releases. Multimedia criticism needs to question this positioning of the multimedia object as commodity, and find a new basis for its reading practice. 'Multimedia Communication' is one such possible heading, which would describe the field of practices in which an audience's encounter with multimedia is negotiated.
With this new heading in mind, we can start to look at the Internet as a kind of multimedia communication. Or again, we could conceive of multimedia as a set of practices that is not, in the last instance, limited to a product, but maybe some other logic of presentation, display or performance (the world wide web would provide a rich resource for such research). Such a focus could also allow us to look at the ways in which multimedia, as a developing formation, is different from, or challenges, traditional computing. Finally, this heading might facilitate an important questioning of the idea of 'pure information': that package of data that exists in a vacuum, independently of cultural meaning. Looking at multimedia communication might help us argue that our encounter with information is always negotiated through social practices, which have their own specificities and histories.
The last area I want to talk about is perhaps the most important. It takes us back into thinking about the specificity of multimedia and the nature of what we think the media to be. It also underlies some of my comments in other sections.
Let's go back to the Megamedium definition, where we see different media (plural) integrated, unified, or colonised onto one medium. Now weird things are happening with the concept of media here that are worth flagging. Many definitions of multimedia either tend to make the definition of medium very general, and thus place the term under a great deal of stress, or make it so narrow to be meaningless. 'Medium' refers to agency, instrument or vehicle. It is a very fluid concept, and there are various levels on which this idea can be examined. Is the medium simply the machine or instrument that brings you content? Or the set of techniques and experiences (soggy carpets and popcorn in a cinema), all the different pleasures, that go into the making and reception of the medium?
Think about the idea of multiple media, and think about the noisy box that you are sitting in front of at home, in the office, or in the computer lab. The fact is that there is only one channel of information here, the computing channel. The lab is not a lounge room or a movie theatre. There is a tension here between the idea of one medium and multi-media that is unresolved. The Vulgar definition expresses this tension quite well I think, since many users are disappointed to find the movies on multimedia to be little more than animations.
It may also be useful to refer to the Information definition here, since this brings home to us that perhaps we aren't dealing with many media but just one: information. Look at a Home page on the world wide web, and go to 'view source' in 'Netscape'. The graphic slippage between multiple media and information couldn't be more distinct.
What I am trying to bring out here is a tension between two conceptions of media. On the one hand, a very narrow conception of medium, derived from a transmission model of communication, and based on the idea of a channel. The idea of the information superhighway belongs here. On the other hand, a formalistic or craft view of communication which looks at the medium as a product of practices, techniques and devices that are always changing. On the latter view, cinema would not just be celluloid, but the devices and techniques that make up film art.
At the moment, I would want to suggest that multimedia is a field in which these two conceptions of media are in conflict, and doing battle. In the Megamedium definition itself, much of the rhetoric of integration and unification is premised on a very 'thin' notion of medium, or cultural form. When the Megamedium definition refers to video, for instance, it tends to see video as a kind of channel, and barely references the other disciplines (Cinema, Photography, Painting) which inform 'thicker' versions of video-making or craft. In this definition, video tends to be articulated in terms of its capture in a process of digitisation, rather than the devices and craft that form video. What I am suggesting then is that the rhetoric of integration or unification is premised on a hollowing out of the medium.5
In the battle between these two conceptions of medium, it's clear that multimedia has opened up new opportunities for re-connecting art and technology. However, multimedia itself risks being swallowed by a logic of global content provision, which is based on an understanding of media in terms of delivery and transmission. The title of the report Commerce in Content is itself suggestive of this trend. An important problem is being worked out in this battle: which is, How to maintain a playful, creative, locally connected and globally responsible sense of craft that questions rather than serves the culture industries?
Like Video, Multimedia provides valuable possibilities for disenfranchised groups to find expression in the media. It also bears the promise of allowing users to re-define their relationship to information, to media, to corporations, to spectacle. The fear is that craft, which has already been rationalised by vocational principles of training, co-opted by salesmen and technicians, and captured by industrial elites, will undergo further institutionalisation on two fronts. Firstly, within a model of information that is only interested in content, and the pipe that carries that content. And secondly, in a model of training that sees multimedia first and foremost as an object for manufacture and design, as a commodity, and not a cultural practice.
My thanks to David Sutton, Marion Benjamin, Jane Goodall, Ruth Barcan, and the students of VP202a Multimedia Communication, for their input into this paper. This paper is published in the Australian journal Metro, no. 108 (1996), pp. 9-13.
1 Thanks to Jane Goodall for these points.
2 I am indebted to David Sutton's research into comics and computer writing here.
3 Anthony Wilden's work in the philosophy of communication, while extremely complex, is an important reference point here in the way that he contests the tendency to place the digital in the space of the civilised, and the analogue in the space of the primitive. The digital is thus made out to supersede the analogue in an evolutionary sense. What he refers to as digitalisation, the binarisation of discrete quantities, occurs in so-called primitive cultures as much as in the space of computing (see Wilden 155-167).
4 Thanks to Marion Benjamin for this point.
5 This hollowing out dates back to the literary distinction between form and content. It has a long tradition in information theory, dating back to Shannon and Weaver's re-working of the medium as a channel. Marshall McLuhan's notion that 'the medium was the message' was a crucial step in overturning this limiting of the medium, problematising the form-content distinction, and extending our understanding of media. Recently, however, it can be argued that the space of the medium is being closed down once more. When Nicholas Negroponte re-writes McLuhan by celebrating mediumlessness, and stating the 'the medium is no longer the message in a digital world. It is an embodiment of it' (Negroponte 71), he is re-introducing the traditional form-content distinction that McLuhan sought to displace. The notion of mediumlessness arguably means nothing except from the viewpoint provided by the form-content couple (with the digital bit serving as the new form). Even to re-write McLuhan in this way implies the resurrection of the form-content distinction.
This article was first published as 'Convergence/Divergence: Ten Definitions of Multimedia', Metro no. 108 (1996): pp. 9-13.