Terminal Units And The Rise Of The Next Screens ( 1/2)
Probably 15+ years ago I was in my bedroom at my parents place and I’d just discovered these things called TED talks on the internet. Bored and curious I clicked on one for fun, and it was prefaced by this ad. It was remarkable both because I think that was the first time I’d ever seen advertising on YouTube, but also because of what the ad was saying. It explored the progressive evolution of society’s relationship with media in the 1900’s through the lens of 4 screens: The theatre screen, the television screen, the computer screen, and then the cell phone screen. It was a powerful metaphor for thinking about the previous century. It also offered a sense of direction for the relationship between technology and society, as one innovation furnished the fitness landscape of its time and created the conditions for a the next. As I imagined the distant possibility of the things I now do with my phone routinely, the future of this fourth screen seemed to be an exciting place. More mobility, more connectivity. Now that the mobility part has been arrested, the logic and future of this technological progression deserves a review; both as a metaphor and in terms of how we’re actually connecting in these pandemic times, and the implied business model therein.
The metaphor part is built into the medium. As the commercial describes each screen it also implicates a necessary spatial affordance and relationship. Films happen in public theatres, televisions are placed in private rooms, computers (at one time) lived on desks in front of a single chair. The tacit promise of the cell phone in the advertisement is that through technology we can be leverage the socio-cultural benefits of being flexibly together in space while leveraging the socio-economic benefits of being connected to information and the rest of the world transpatially as well. With the cell phone screen we’ve achieved some kind of near symbiosis with our devices; a relationship that is somehow more intimate than one-to-one based on it’s ability to be with us everywhere we go, no matter how private the space.
But what happens when we have nowhere to go? Some internet use stats indicate that people have been changing their consumption behaviour, shifting from phones to larger screens like desktops or Smart TV’s. It was a noticeable shift when we started seeing the clips that people were sending us while doing our streams. And while it’s obvious now that you can access the internet from different devices, the relationship between the form a terminal unit takes and the way we interact with the network we’re being connected to matters. Particularly when we extend that idea off the screen.
In the prepandemic world, the terminal units for the live music industry were not objects, but rooms — music venues. It can feel technocratic to think about something as dynamic as a music venue as a “terminal unit” of a network, but that’s what they are. As points of live music consumption that are connected to either local, regional or international intermediary networks (agent / booking / presentation / promotional networks) that themselves are connected to the interests of the recorded music industry. The job of that intermediary network is to materialise as much of the regional community of interest around a performer + their material as possible in a physical location and charge fee for access. The music people leverage the crowd for the fee at the gate; The venue people leverage the crowd to sell drinks. The business model was based on maximising the crowd capacity of the terminal units.
That physical location is itself embedded within another hierarchical network — our streets. Patterns of land use have a strong relationship to the different measures of centrality when analysed at the neighbourhood and citywide scale. The intersection of centralities in these hard and soft networks in cities creates a metabolic dynamism — the urban “ecology effect” — where activity begets activity, systems interact transversally with other systems, and the phenotypical traits of a place’s social logic start scaling. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
What’s interesting here is the way that both the online and offline live music industry terminal units are adapting in the crisis. In both cases trending towards bigger screens. In the case of the online world we’re seeing the more people engaging with streams via computer screens and now smart TV’s. This trend partially explains why streaming music to Instagram seems forced in this moment; without some kind of workaround both the ingestion and terminal points of the IG network are cell phone exclusive. Great for making / consuming + interacting with content quickly in post-pandemic world where we’re all moving around but not so much now that we’re stuck in place. It’s hard to imagine watching something for an hour on your phone if you don’t have to. That’s why it was not surprise that the recent (incredible!) Beenie Man vs Bounty Killa verzus battle was being recast to YouTube by folks trying to get the feed to a different, more amenable terminal unit. That’s where I watched it!
In the offline, IRL live music world it seems that there is a move to reimagine infrastructure made ostensibly obsolete by the aforementioned more modern screens — drive in theatres — to bring back that somewhat familiar collective-but-socially-distanced vibe. Other more radical concepts skip screens all together, instead trying the concept of bringing performance activities directly into driveways. A different terminal unit paradigm for live music.
Following the metaphor of the commercial, is COVID welcoming us to the 5th or even 6th screen? As the industry and society pivots what do the shifting terminal units tell us about the emerging business model? And what about the networks themselves — let’s deal with them in the next part, shall we?
