Fluidity of the edition—A book’s material can be personalized. Your edition might explain new words if you are a student, or it could skip a recap of the previous books in the series if you’ve already read them. Customized “my books” are for me.
Fluidity of the container—A book can be kept in the cloud at such low cost that it is “free” to store in an unlimited library and can be delivered instantly anywhere on earth at any time to anyone.
Fluidity of growth—The book’s material can be corrected or improved incrementally. The never-done-ness of an ebook (at least in the ideal) resembles an animated creature more than a dead stone, and this living fluidity animates us as creators and readers.
We currently see these two sets of traits—fixity versus fluidity—as opposites, driven by the dominant technology of the era. Paper favors fixity; electrons favor fluidity. But there is nothing to prevent us from inventing a third way—electrons embedded into paper or any other material. Imagine a book of 100 pages, each page a thin flexible digital screen, bound into a spine—that is an ebook too. Almost anything that is solid can be made a little bit fluid, and anything fluid can be embedded into solidness.
What has happened to music, books, and movies is now happening to games, newspapers, and education. The pattern will spread to transportation, agriculture, health care. Fixities such as vehicles, land, and medicines will become flows. Tractors will become fast computers outfitted with treads, land will become a substrate for a network of sensors, and medicines will become molecular information capsules flowing from patient to doctor and back.
These are the Four Stages of Flowing:
1. Fixed. Rare. The starting norm is precious products that take much expertise to create. Each is an artisan work, complete and able to stand alone, sold in high-quality reproductions to compensate the creators.
2. Free. Ubiquitous. The first disruption is promiscuous copying of the product, duplicated so relentlessly that it becomes a commodity. Cheap, perfect copies are spent freely, dispersed anywhere there is demand. This extravagant dissemination of copies shatters the established economics.
3. Flowing. Sharing. The second disruption is an unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own new uses and to be remixed into new bundles. The product is now a stream of services issuing from the shared cloud. It becomes a platform for wealth and innovation.
4. Opening. Becoming. The third disruption is enabled by the previous two. Streams of powerful services and ready pieces, conveniently grabbed at little cost, enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products. The status of creation is inverted, so that the audience is now the artist. Output, selection, and quality skyrocket.
These four stages of flowing apply to all media. All genres will exhibit some fluidity. Yet fixity is not over. Most of the good fixed things in our civilization (roads, skyscrapers) are not going anywhere. We will continue to manufacture analog objects (chairs, plates, shoes), but they will acquire a digital essence as well, with embedded chips. (Except for a tiny minority of high-priced handmade artifacts.) The efflorescent blossoming of liquid streams is an additive process, rather than subtractive. The old media forms endure; the new are layered on top of them. The important difference is that fixity is not the only option anymore. Good things don’t have to be static, unchanging. Or, to put it a different way, the right kind of instability can now be good. The move from stocks to flows, from fixity to fluidity, is not about leaving behind stability. It is about harnessing a wide-open frontier where so many additional options based on mutability are possible. We are exploring all the ways to make things out of ceaseless change and shape-shifting processes.
Here is what a day in the near future looks like. I tap into the cloud to enter the library containing all music, movies, books, VR worlds, and games. I choose music. In addition to songs, I can get parts of the songs as small as a chord. A song’s assets are divvied up one channel at a time, which means I can get just the bass or drum track, or just the voices. Or the song with no voices—perfect for karaoke. Tools allow me to stretch or shrink the duration of a song without changing its pitch and melody. Professional tools let me swap instruments in the song I found. One of my favorite musicians releases alternative versions of her songs (for extra cost), and even offers a historical log of every version during its creation.
Movies are similar. The myriad components of each movie are released in pieces, not just the soundtrack. I can get the sound effects, the special effects (before and after) of each scene, alternative camera views, voice-overs, all in workable shape. Some studios release a whole set of outtakes that can be reedited. Using this wealth of unbundled assets, a subculture of amateur editors reedits released movies in the hopes of bettering the original director. I’ve done a few here and there in my media classes. Of course, not every director is interested in being reedited, but the demand is so high and the sales of these insider pieces so good that the studios bank on it. Mature-rated movies are reedited for squeaky-clean family versions, or, on the black net, illicit pornographic versions are made from G movies. Many of the hundreds of thousands of documentaries already released are kept updated with material added by viewers, enthusiasts, or the director, as their stories continue.
The streams of video produced and shared by my own mobile devices are born with channels so they can easily be reworked by my friends. Selecting out the background, they insert my buddies into exotic scenes and playfully manipulate the context in a very believable way. Each video posted demands a reply with another video based upon it. The natural response to receiving a clip, a song, a text—either from a friend or from a professional—is not just to consume it, but to act upon it. To add, subtract, reply, alter, bend, merge, translate, elevate to another level. To continue its flow. To maximize the flowing. My media diet may be thought of as streams of pieces, some of which I consume as is, and most of which I engage in to some degree.
• • •
We have only started flowing. We have begun the four stages of flowing for some types of digital media, but for most we are still at the first stage. So much more of our routines and infrastructure remains to be liquefied, but liquefied and streamed they will be. The steady titanic tilt toward dematerialization and decentralization means that further flows are inevitable. It seems a stretch right now that the most solid and fixed apparatus in our manufactured environment would be transformed into ethereal forces, but the soft will trump the hard. Knowledge will rule atoms. Generative intangibles will rise above the free. Think of the world flowing.
4 SCREENING
In ancient times culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation, and rhetoric instilled in oral societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate, and the subjective. We were People of the Word. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science, libraries, and law. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.