Story Codecs

A while back, I posted about a wonderful little utility I found, called AVIcodec. This program solves one of the number one problems I always seem to have when I download new video files off the internet. I’m sure you’ve run into it too. Where you will play what looks like an ordinary file-type in the appropriate media player, and either it won’t play at all, or it will only play audio or only video. If you’re lucky, it might try to connect to some server somewhere and download the appropriate codec (media translation files, essentially) to play your file. But more often than not, this fails, and you’re left with a useless unplayable media file.

What this AVIcodec program does is very simple. You drag and drop a media file into its interface. It scans the file immediately, and tells you the following vital bits of information: (1) which codec(s) this file requires, (2) whether or not you have that codec installed, and (3) a link to a site where you can download any codecs you don’t have installed. Plugging in these holes is immensely helpful, and makes the computer media experience a lot more pleasurable.

Pleased with the success of this simple program, I started exploring it as a model for certain types of thinking. The main one that I applied it to was the study of mythology and stories, because this is my area of interest. I started thinking about how a great many people who become interested in this topic basically approach it from the point of view of this AVIcodec program. They learn how to play the matching game. You’ll see this all the time online where people put together a chart with two columns, which shows you correlations between two sets of gods. Here is an example which takes the Greek gods and shows their Roman equivalents.

Learning to play this syncretic matching game is especially important in a field like mythology, where you are constantly cross-referencing things across a wide variety of cultures. And it’s very interesting. But it seems like a lot of people in the field end up getting stuck in the game. The equals sign becomes the banner of their crusade, and they just end up circling back and forth among webs of connections without ever actually touching any deeper content contained within them.

The whole point of what I’m trying to say here is that even though this AVIcodec program is useful, it really only serves one purpose. And that purpose is connective. From there, you need to take your file into a media player, and then let it rip. I think this same analogy applies very accurately not only to the study of mythology, but to a variety of other fields of thought. There are people who are like media players, and there are people who can only point you metaphorically in the direction of which codec you need in order to “play your media”.

  1. Loosely related to this, since we’re talking about ideas and software analogies, I also want to check out in more detail the website of a book by J.M. Balkin, titled Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology.

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This entry was written by Tim Boucher, posted on October 13, 2004 at 1:16 am.

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