Today's reading: Film, television and new media

In today's readings, I tried to find out more about merging old media with new. For my test medium, I chose film. Thomas Elsaesser's essay Early Film History and Multi-Media, An archaeology of possible futures? (from the book New Media, Old Media), explains the typical attitudes among film scholars on the subject of the digital media.

A lot of these people are trapped in the past.

"To some," Elsaesser writes, "the electronic media do not belong to the history of cinema at all." The physical celluloid film is the be-all-end-all of technology for them. These are the scholarly types.

Some of these people are very successful. George Lucas (yes, that George Lucas) explains that it doesn't matter because it's all just tools. "Are you going to write with a pen or on your little laptop? It doesn't change anything," Lucas says.

But the real sticky business comes when you think about the multinational media conglomorates that own these companies and are invested in different media (companies that for example, have holdings in print newspapers, books, film and web), and how they'll use the future of digital filmmaking to further themselves. Elsaesser kind of glosses over this question, and straight into how it really doesn't matter, that cinema is cinema and the tools aren't what makes the product.

I didn't particularly get much out of this essay in a New Media sense. It felt like it was more about film technology than the cultural implications.

Next up, I read a selection from P. David Marshall's book New Media Cultures titled "Rejuvenation: Film in the Digital World." I liked this essay a lot better because I felt like he chose an argument and stuck with it. He basically says that film can benefit in some ways (special effects, interactivity, cheaper production costs, etc.) from technology. Again, though, I didn't feel like I got a whole lot of stuff on New Media and culture, but I did get a lot about special effects.

I found a great essay on Court TV, but I'm going to save it until I do another group of readings on television. And tomorrow, I'm going to read about race issues on the Internet. "Cybertyping" and stereotyping. Hopefully it'll be more interesting than today.