Three-Dimensional Media

By Mark Shainblum

Originally published in Enrage magazine, 1994

            Remember that scene in Star Trek II where Captain Kirk managed to defeat the villainous Khan beacuse the dirty groundpounder couldn't properly visualize movement in three dimensional space? Well, that seems to be an appropriate metaphor for the CD-ROM magazine.

            If traditional print or visual media are two dimensional, then the CD-ROMs is a multi-dimensional media-space. You can go forward and backward, up and down. You have the personal nature of books, the interactivity of computers, and the flashy audio and video of radio and television. You're not forced to follow in a linear progression from beginnning to end, opening to closing credits.

            At least, that's the theory. The reality has been something very different.

            Clik is a Montreal-based CD-ROM magazine, edited by Peter Bowering, which retails for $30. Medio originates in Seattle and sells for $6.99. Aside from the staggering price differential (which can be explained in part by the relative sizes of the two enterprises), the two publications are as different as night and day.

            (Before I continue I should point out that I collaborated on a short piece published in Clik, but I was otherwise uninvolved in the CD-ROM's production in any way).

            Clik's features are really just pretty good magazine articles which could have been enjoyed on paper just as easily. The graphics, though often cool, are just that: cool graphics that don't really interact with the text. The audio tracks, where they exist, generally parrot the existing text, adding nothing and forcing you to read along at someone else's speed.

            The non-literary features in Clik, such as an interactive interview with British alternative band Lush, are embarassingly weak. You can view a herky-jerky little video of their music in a postage-stamp sized insert-window, you can choose to hear excerpts of their music from a brief list, or you can watch a documentary style interview with camcorder quality video and an inaudible audio track.

            Medio, on the other hand, is very slick and very interactive. Almost too much so. Many of the audio tracks sound like infomercials, and a good portion of the contents are obviously p.r. materials supplied free to Medio by companies flogging their wares.

            That being said, it is clear that Medio has been produced by a software company with a clear idea of the new medium's potential. Scanning and clicking through this entire issue of Medio would take hours, and there is sufficient wheat among the chaff to make it worthwhile. The technological gee-whiz will keep you going for a while all on its own, although there is little of substance to really back it up.

            Clik, on the other hand, though head and shoulders above Medio in a literary sense, is kind of ponderous technologically. You can spend minutes waiting for the interface to take you where you want to go, and often you must cycle back through everything you've just viewed to get back to the main menu. Clik has clearly been produced by well-read literary people who have just beefed up the paradigm of the magazine with a few pretty graphics and an audio track or two.

            One flaw shared by both publications is a tendency to break ideas up into digestible bits, based largely on the availability of audio and video clips.

            Great. Magazine sound bites.

            What will they think of next?

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