Wendy Anson

 
 
The “10th Annual International Conference and Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM.” March, 1995. Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, CA.

 

The crowds, some like sheep, run here, run there. One man start, one thousand follow. Nobody can see anything, nobody can do anything. All rush, push, tear, shout, make plenty noise, say “damn great” many times, get very tired and go home.

 

–Japanese visitor, American Centennial Exposition, 1876 (qtd. in Allwood, 57)

 

Crowds in record numbers overflowed the Conference and Exhibit halls as the “10th Annual International Conference & Exposition on Multimedia and CD-ROM” got underway in San Francisco’s gargantuan Moscone Hall. Laser “sunrays” fanned out over the packed hall as keynote speaker Glenn Jones (CEO Jones International, Ltd.) heralded the dawning new age of a kind of harmonic convergence: “. . . .Technologies [will] drive us together”; there will be an “historic coming together” with “a kaleidoscope of new electronic tools” in a world where “boundaries of all kinds . . . are disappearing.”

 

No mistaking the millenial and apocalyptic tone: “It is intense. It is big. It roots through every marketplace, every vested interest–an environment leaving virtually nothing untouched, and it has a life of its own. In its path is turbulence, disruption, the mooing of sacred cows, destruction, opportunity and reformation. . . . It is after us all and none of us can hide. Convergence is nothing less than the process of reconfiguring civilization itself.”

 

Then Jones parted the digital rays to reveal Mr. Charlton Heston, who introduced Jones’ latest cd-rom product, “Charlton Heston Presents the Bible.”

 

Technically a trade show, the self-styled “largest dedicated multimedia event in the world” probably has enough bells, whistles, cannily crafted and elaborately staged product launches and disingenuous yokings of commerce and religion to land it squarely in the venerable tradition of the International Exhibitions.

 

According to John Allwood, the Exhibition Movement “goes back to the roots of our culture” as far as Old Testament notables including King Ahasuerus, who “spread his wealth and importance before his visiting nobles and princes.” Medieval fairs gave visitors and traders the chance to “exchange news and participate in the highly human activity of ‘one-upmanship'” (Allwood, 7)

 

England’s “Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations” at the Crystal Palace, completely dedicated to displaying industrial trade and “forwarding the upward progress of industrial civilization” (Allwood, 8) with its display of manufactured goods from various countries in sorted categories in one location was in 1851 the first International Exhibition (or Expo, World Fair, Exposition Universelle, Weltausstellung, Exposicion Internacional).

 

“Goods sent from America [to England’s Expo] included Colt revolvers, a case of ‘cheap American Newspapers,” a model of Niagara Falls, the goodyear vulcanised India Rubber Trophy, false teeth, and ‘an intolerable deal of starred-and-striped banners and pasteboard effigies of eagles with outspread wings'” (Allwood, 22), thereby perhaps launching the international kitsch movement.

 

The likely antecedents of the fetching young girls in their national costumes serving food in their native restaurants at the American Centennial Exposition (1876) are the attractive young women draped over machinery at today’s trade shows.

 

Latest products of industry and technology are on proud display at the Expositions and World Fairs: The American Centennial showcased the typewriter, the telephone, and Edison’s duplex telegraph which could send two messages over one wire at the same time; other world’s fairs introduced the phonograph and automobile, and left behind formidable souvenirs including the Eiffel Tower and Chicago’s Field Columbian Museum of Natural History.

 

Visitors oohed and aahed.

 

“What a sight is there!” enthused a Crystal Palace visitor. “Neither pen nor pencil can portray it” (Allwood, 22).

 

Thackeray raved: “Sheltered by crystal walls and roof, we view/ All Products of the earth, the air, and seas, . . . Extracting good from out the meanest sod; Rivalling Nature’s works, and making him a God” (Allwood, 21)

 

Victor Hugo on Paris’s 1867 Exposition Universelle: “To make a circuit of this place, . . . is literally to go around the world. All peoples are here, enemies live in peace . . . on the globe of waters, the divine spirit now floats on this globe of iron” (Allwood, 43).

 

Intermedia had its share of kitsch with logo-emblazoned t-shirt and plastic bag giveaways, visiting Virtual Valeries, technology announcements, and high-flown sentiments about comings-together. But it’s true that its attendees were more jaundiced.

 

Set up in 1986 by Bill Gates to introduced CD-ROM’s expanded storage technology, Intermedia annually highlights “the burgeoning new multimedia and cd-Rom industries” and celebrates the cd-rom as “leading the way in the multimedia technology revolution.”

 

But at the ’95 convention there was little reverence granted cd-rom technology or product; rather, people were possessed by a kind of nostalgia for the future, already hungry for the latest innovation. An audience member at the “Evolutionary Landscape” conference challenged the viability of the medium with the advent of full-service on-line. Voyager CEO and digital publishing eminence Bob Stein, sounding more beseiged than whimsical, described the on-going challenge of trying to launch a product within a nascent industry characterized by the incessant tweaking of its technology. He reminded that the printing press was invented in 1454, but the first novel, Pamela, didn’t show up until 300 years later. Yet he added somewhat plaintively apropos the product that had launched and still sustained his company, “We always considered it a transitional medium.”

 

The split between rhetoric and reality, what we can envision and what we’ve got at the moment, was jarringly apparent in the geography of the convention: In the Conference Halls, it was The Big Vision–or furtive dream–convergence, universal access. To be a latter day Walter Benjamin who could stroll cyberspace at will, with no bounds, a flanuer in Paris. To be able to move about “at random” in a “hypertext” universe where one could invent connections and spark new syntheses.

 

…And, on the Exhibit floor, the merchants feverishly plyed their wares, much of it “multi-purposed” content that had found its way onto cd-rom because the rights were cheap and available. Not so much hypertext links to the city of light; more like arbitrary catalogues leading to dead ends of data.

 

The 3-day conference progressively polarized as attendees shunted from the contemplative halls of “why not” and “why” to the rude stalls of buy, buy, buy.

 

Who or what could heal the radical schism, tie up the loose ends? Maybe it would be the same entity the AT&T exec was evoking in the “Evolutionary Landscape” conference: the one who’d wire the last 50 yards into the house. Whoever it was who’d supply the broadband and/or set top box and/or p.c. interface to deliver the eagerly awaited new world of content, services and link-ups where we get all the rich archives of cd romdom as well as every conceivable connection to the outside world and to each other. We’re all buying–or at least we’re ready to buy. But who’s building? So far nobody. Because who’s paying? The issue’s unclear. And will be until the technology shakes down. There’s a lot of money to be lost if you put your money on the wrong horse–set top box? P.C.? Fiberoptics, satellite?

 

(And once built, what would these last 150 feet look like? Given the profit-centered players, one attendee worried it would be “big pipes in, little pipes out” since all the contenders might be more concerned with “selling us things rather than hav[ing] us create them.”)

 

Despite its stated intention of celebrating the cd-rom, Intermedia ’95 ended with no clear notion about the technology. Still, the question was posed: whether or not as the press releases proclaimed, the cd-rom would “lead the way” in cyberspace developments, did it at least have a future?

 

Voyager’s Stein was confident. “It’s the nature of the human beast to collect. People want to own stuff, carry it around. They’ll want to own things as opposed to access things.”

 

The ubiquitous, user-friendly cost-effective cd-rom is ideally suited to storing vast amounts of data which can be accessed in any number of ways and can be (and usually is) enhanced by all kinds of visual, textual and sound effects. The latest in particular can claim good production values, with a look and content that oftentimes boast of sophisticated market-research. Yet the steady thud of shovelware digging its own grave signals that people are in fact particular about the cd roms they do seem to collect.

 

Walter Benjamin, collector par excellence, wrote his paean to collecting and ownership in “Unpacking My Library.” For Benjamin, the urge to collect an object was not tied to its functional or utilitarian value. Rather, the value lay in the thing in itself. The item’s patina opened entire worlds surrounding the object (including “period, region, craftsmanship, former ownership” [Benjamin, 60]) to its possessor.

 

Best-selling and critically praised game and leisure cd-roms outside the shoot-em-up “twitch game” category probably demonstrate that the fully realized cd-rom medium, too, can uniquely open worlds for the user/collector and ultimate flaneur to explore.

 

The cd-rom’s “archived adventure” is often counterposed to the freedom of access and movement available on-line. Yet, paradoxically, the best and most enduring products provide the user precisely that sense of freedom, of wandering at will. (It is true, after all, that one cannot wander randomly within a random world. Benjamin roamed Paris.)

 

As in a well-constructed play, choices narrow not in predictable, linear sequence, but in a necessary and probable logic leading to the fleshing out of the “object,” the final embodiment of the fully dimensional world that the user/protagonist has unfolded in “playing the game.”

 

“Myst” comes close to the ideal of a compelling, highly “roamable” world whose parameters (though implicit) are all the while reassuringly clear.

 

It may be true that the most successful adult cd-roms (“‘Myst’ has sold an estimated 750,000 units and is still topping many cd-rom monthly sales charts more than a year after its release” [Billboard, 68]) provide the user with Benjamin’s ideal (as per Arendt) of “inhabiting the city the way he lives in his own four walls” (Arendt, 21).

 

The cd-rom interactive medium seems up to now unique insofar as it offers the user a tightly demarcated world wherein anything is possible.

 

Whither Intermedia ’96? Its stated mission is “continuing the multimedia revolution and inventing the next decade.” With such a tall order, organizers might look to the Internet Multicasting Service of Washington, which just announced plans for the first “world’s fair in cybserspace” (Lewis).

 

This World Exposition will be designed to be accessible from personal computers linked to the Internet, and also from a network of public ‘Internet planetariums’ in cities throughout the world.

 

“Our Eiffel Tower is 1.2 terabytes of disk space,” explained Internet Multicasting Service president Carl Malamud (Lewis). The data base will serve as a “public park” which will feature displays of environmental technologies, a “future of media” pavilion, and linkups with museums’ information centers.

 

The annual Interop trade shows, attended by Internet developers and users, have already decided to make this first cyberspace World Exposition their key theme for next year’s gathering.

 

Works Cited

 

• Allwood,John. The Great Exhibitions. London: Macmillan, 1977.
• Arendt,Hannah. “Introduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.
• Billboard (February 18, 1995).
• Lewis,Peter H. The New York Times (March 14, 1995), C2.