I like what I wrote about the liquidity of media yesterday night somewhere. Or maybe I just imagined writing that. No no, I think I really wrote it, in that meandering post about Tool. This idea, the liquid factor of media & information, is something I used to talk a lot about with my friend James.

I’ve never really heard anybody else talk about it before. I don’t know why. It seems like an important idea. It’s basically the idea that content, be it media like movies or music or I don’t know. That this content is just a liquid. Like it’s not a moviescreen, it’s not a tv, it’s not a dvd or a cd or any of that stuff. It’s just this smooth liquidy goop that gets shuffled and poured between different vessels as it changes formats.

It’s why I’m ready to sell all my cd’s now. I don’t need them anymore. It’s all liquid to me now. It’s all on my computer, or else otherwise accessible on the internet. Clever packaging and $20 price tags just try to freeze the liquid into one shape. That’s what people are doing right now with all this RIAA stuff. They are trying to say, “No, no! Media is NOT a liquid! The vessels are important! Only buy our brand of vessels!”

I’d like to hear somebody talk about the viscosity of different types of information and media. I think that would be really interesting. You could talk about high viscosity information which is kinda pasty and has to get squeezed out of a tube and smooshed into another vessel. And you could talk about medium and low viscosity media/content that you can just open up the lid and pour it right out into another vessel. Like ripping CD’s to MP3 on your computer, that’s such a smooth low viscosity transfer process. It’s fantastic.

Another example in that line of thinking is when a band covers a song by another band. There, the viscosity is higher, because it’s not at all an exact duplicate of the original contents. It’s a smooshy messy affair usually, which changes the original shape of the content to some degree, and adds new components both intentionally and inadvertently. OR! Another great example is when a book is made into a movie! Some books flow quite smoothly onto a screen adaptation, and other’s are completely messy and fucked up. That movie Adaptation is a spectacular analysis of this whole idea I think. Another random reference I like here is at the end of Fahrenheit 451, where Montag finds all those other outcasts and stuff, and each one of them has a bunch of different books and stuff which they have memorized. I think that’s a really important metaphor for something that is starting to happen in our culture. But I need to think about it more.

Anyway, I’ll look around and see if anybody is talking about this sort of shit. Cause its super cool. I think this is part of what some people mean when they are talking about the transmission of memes and shit. But I still don’t like all that memetics crap. There’s something people are missing there. I’ll come back to this though.