1 Introduction
Communication and recording did not wait for the digital age to bump into each other. It all began when we started to want to communicate remotely, and to preserve the contents of a communication through time. Communication through time refers to the problematic of memory : the possibility of retaining contents from time evanescence is at stake. Communication through space refers to the problematic of journeys, transport, and movement. These two issues mobilize the same instrument for their solution: the document , that is to say, the registration of an event that is required to be remembered or communicated.
Recording is the tool and the technology that make communication possible even when the latter does no longer occurs in the co-presence of the interlocutors. For a long time, we lived according to this obvious rule: when the communication happens in co-presence, recording is not useful; as soon as one wishes to cross space and/or time, recording becomes the necessary mediation.
This evidence has been valid for a long time. When radio and television were invented, we learned to communicate remotely, yet within the same temporal framework shared by the sender and the receiver. Recording was still useless; the goal was rather to carry the message from one person to another, from one place to another. We learned to do it through the propagation of a signal that did not need to be fixed on a medium in order to be repeatable and transmissible. It was necessary, instead, that the transmission and reception contexts were simultaneous so that they could be shared, on the one hand, and allow interaction on the other (only in principle, however, as shown by the first age of radio and television, when listeners and viewers could not interact with the sender). In other words, as long as the transmission was in real time, registration was useless, because we remained in a situation of telecommunication .
An inversion occurred when technologies based on the Internet Protocol (IP) introduced packet switching. Indeed, the paradigm was reversed: whereas, until then, we used to communicate without recording , and the issue of recording was eventually raised after the communication , the IP imposed recording in the form of packets first, in order to communicate these same packets in a second stage . Instead of a wave propagation routing a signal without having to record it, we now have a registration that we want to carry from one place to another.
At the beginning of the Internet age, this paradigm shift was not noticeable because the Internet was mostly dedicated to data communication , rather than to that of contents like voice, television, radio and cinema, for which reception must be assured in real time, in quasi-simultaneity with the emission. But we know what happened next: the network improvements allowed real-time transmission, and hence this type of transmission was implemented for telecommunications, in particular for radio and television. This has been the technological paradox of the 1990s: a protocol such as the IP is not adapted for telecommunications at all, but this same protocol’s technical progress has assisted a general transition of telecommunications into the digital.
If we now register to communicate, this implies that communication is conditioned by the technical choices of the recording : in addition to the format of the signal encoding, it is also necessary to take into account the formats of recording and those of the manipulation involved in these technologies.
The recording techniques and technologies have two sorts of effects on communication . First, they impact the contents’ formatting . Second, they contribute to the progressive reduction of documents to data . Indeed, the digital is above all a binary coding which ensures the manipulability of contents. But the binary code in itself does not refer to any particular semantics; it is purely arbitrary. Everything depends on the way it is decoded. The role of the formats consists precisely in disciplining the expressiveness of the binary code in order to give it a meaning. For example, it ensures that a particular binary file encodes a video and not a text or a sound. The format is therefore the key aspect enabling contents to be digital. Moreover, since we are dealing with registrations , that is to say with objects that can be manipulated, copied, fragmented, etc., one will try to bring back the contents to a type of basic records, facilitating as much as possible their management , transmission, processing, and transformation. This is done by considering contents as data ; that is, as elementary records.
Contents are analyzed and broken down into data , and these data express themselves through formats that prescribe feasible operations and the possible structuration of information . Communication is therefore subordinated to what formats allow, and transformed by the data manipulation.
In this chapter, my aim is to consider this twofold movement (from bits to formats , and from contents to data ) to account for some of the theoretical and technical consequences it implies. But before I expand on this movement, I would like to clarify some terminology and concepts, in order to define what I mean by content, document , communication, and recording.
2 Communication and Recording
Although communication and recording have been interacting strongly for a long time, these two notions refer to different concerns. Communication , at least in its ideal-typical form, evokes a situation where people share the same place and the same moment for exchanging signals that they interpret in order understand each other. Speech is the privileged medium, but not the only one. The sharing of a meaning can also happen through non-verbal registers characterizing a specific situation and interaction. Communication is therefore in principle an inter-comprehension in co-presence.
Recording is a palliative. It is required in order to mitigate the absence of what is not anymore, of what has changed, and the absence of what is not there. Recording has a double function. First, as far as it is produced by an event of which it is the trace, it represents a proof and a testimony of it. It has an indexical relation with this event. As such, it can inform about this event and it can constitute a memory of it, since it is permanent . Its own existence attests to that of the past event; moreover, its content can inform us about the nature of that event, especially when this trace is produced voluntarily, as with administrative records, the archives , which collect information about the event to be remembered. Second, being permanent, records allow multiple consultations, distributed in space and time: their existence does not coincide with the evanescence of the event; they are static and out of time, allowing multiple events of consultation. As long as it is material, a record can also be reproduced and copied for multiplying the possible consultations. Allowing the free repetition of reading and the reproduction of the recorded object, registrations exceed the singularity of the event and its spatiotemporal uniqueness.
2.1 Content, Inscription, Document
If a registration is the trace of an event (that is, a proof of its happening), then it also has a content. It conveys a message informing about the nature of the event . As such, it must be interpreted. It is therefore necessary to consider the nature of recording as a content and to consider its conditions of interpretability .
Human beings, beings of flesh and blood, communicate with each other. According to Aristotle, the human becomes human only insofar as it becomes political, and interacts and exchanges within the city. It is on this condition that the humanity expresses and accomplishes itself: the city as political space is the space in which the human animal becomes rational (that is to say, human), at least if one follows the classic definition zoon logon echon (Manent 2010).
Communication is based on the contents’ exchange. A content can be defined as a semiotic form of expression associated with a material medium of manifestation; through its physical materiality, the medium makes a content perceptible, while the semiotic form makes it interpretable. As a meeting point between a materiality and a semiotic code, a content is addressed to our senses to speak to our spirit (Bachimont 2017).
Contents are therefore material and have the physical properties of their medium : intangible contents do not exist. But a content cannot be reduced to its material medium : what makes it a content and not just a thing, an object, is that it carries a signification that is addressed to an interpreter. Surprisingly, what renders an object a content is not so much the fact that it is produced to be a content, but that it is understood as such, as the bearer of a meaning or a message ...