Thursday, December 27, 2007
The Web is a medium, not a platform
The first motion pictures, silent films, were based on the same elementary principle as Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzie or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Persistence of vision, the illusion of motion generated by the response of the human eye -- and mind -- to the rapid succession of related visual images is the single basic element that set cinema apart from still photography.
What is different about the very first movies is the approach to the medium taken by early directors. Realizing that it was now possible to capture a full scene of interactions, rather than a frozen vignette, the first film producers set a camera up in front of a stage and put on a play. The camera didn't pan or zoom; the actors moved before it. The first movies were used as a platform for recording and displaying a product of the theatre. Eventually Sergei Eisenstein and others began experimenting with montage, fragmenting and rearranging the images, creating motion with the camera as well as capturing motion, and film evolved from a platform into a new medium.
Making the most of Web publishing, even in the most prosaic, corporate context, requires a recognition of the medium at hand. It's easy to use the Web as a bulletin board, or vanity press. If you have information to distribute to an audience, just "put it on the Web." But, if you can imagine doing something else, the Web can
become something more.
What is different about the very first movies is the approach to the medium taken by early directors. Realizing that it was now possible to capture a full scene of interactions, rather than a frozen vignette, the first film producers set a camera up in front of a stage and put on a play. The camera didn't pan or zoom; the actors moved before it. The first movies were used as a platform for recording and displaying a product of the theatre. Eventually Sergei Eisenstein and others began experimenting with montage, fragmenting and rearranging the images, creating motion with the camera as well as capturing motion, and film evolved from a platform into a new medium.
Making the most of Web publishing, even in the most prosaic, corporate context, requires a recognition of the medium at hand. It's easy to use the Web as a bulletin board, or vanity press. If you have information to distribute to an audience, just "put it on the Web." But, if you can imagine doing something else, the Web can
become something more.
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