In A Million Pieces
In this scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka presents Wonka Vision, his very latest and greatest invention. The difference in his Vision is actually taking a physical object and sort of using the idea of teleportation with one of his Wonka Bars onto a television sized stage. One of the interesting key points he makes about Wonka Vision is that the object, “has to be big, because whenever you transmit something by television it always ends up smaller on the other end.”
Nicholas Negroponte is founder of MIT’s Media Lab, which is a renowned research lab at MIT that is dedicated to research over the convergence between technology, media, and science. In his book, Being Digital, Negroponte focuses on some aspects regarding atoms to bits, and the resulting convergence of multimedia, virtual reality, and the internet.
Specifically relating to this topic made clear by the character Willy Wonka, and his Wonka Vision, it is a representation of the idea going digital and transforming from a life made up of atoms, to one of bits. Negroponte discusses the emergence of bits, “Nothing goes suddenly on or off, turns from black to white, or changes from one state to another without going through a transition” (Negroponte 16). He explains that it takes time to be able to accomplish this feat or transition as he calls it.
Through the past few hundred years however, society has progressively built upon itself knowledge of being able to capture an image out of time and space in a photograph or a video. Originally using variations of light, to a chemical reaction on film in an analog process, now, the same procedure of using light for an image in raw form to be transferred by a digital means into pixels which are small dots representing a digital imitation of a color from light emitted through the digital camera.
Pixels are generally made up to present one of the main complementary colors, red, green, yellow, and blue. The two most common ways these colors are captured and decided is through either a CCD chip or CMOS chip. A CCD is a Charged-Coupled Device, and a the CMOS is a Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor chip which is the more commonly used one of the two at the present time of writing this blog.
Negroponte explains from this discovery and ability with technology, all media presently and forth will be digital. “Because bits are bits”. He provides two reasons for why there is this certainty that multimedia is made up of commingled bits:
- Bits commingle effortlessly, because they can be recycled or re-used.
- A new bit is born, typically in relation to news as “headers” or in files they are “slugs” to identify the story.
As bits become transformable, and transferable, over the past few decades the process has slowly and yet rapidly formed to what it is today. In multimedia devices, and a part of our daily lives. Negroponte provides an overview of the connection between science and art. Expressing the development of television by Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin originally intended purely for technological reasons to improve sight of smaller postage-stamp-size images though the use of a television. When television mixed with story telling it became a vessel for presenting art, through films, movies, and TV shows.
The same goes with the original intent of the internet, built and perceived for use by the military for intercommunication across a large scale of distance. First known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANET. Now is used by everyone and their mother for multipurpose, from entertainment, gaming, business production, commerce, news, and education.
More presently with multimedia available on such a wide variety of platforms, Negroponte explains the future of digital media will be majority pay-per-view. Similarly to the original economic formula of the newspaper or magazine, where the cost is shared with advertisers. What he describes is the model in which similarly follows along with a company like NetFlix, or online subscriptions to books, for the Nook or iPad. However the NetFlix model being without advertising will be taking on more risks. Negroponte also mentions smaller players, throwing smaller dice and still getting a piece of the big audience. This goes right along with free services available presently like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, that allow anyone to gain attention worldwide to their abilities, or creativity.
