CD-ROM's Identity Crisis

Abstract

CD-ROM multimedia is a media-hyped technology that has fallen conspicuously short of its proponents' aspirations. The industry is not profitable, and the works are largely disappointing. Engineered for audio, CDs were adapted for data. Their limited capacity, transfer rates and access speeds were never suited to multimedia. These put a straitjacket on the emerging aesthetics of interactive media. Where cinema evokes an audience's emotions and memories, interactive media let users invoke change: calling up images, virtual places or texts. Narratives use space rather than time. But the real innovators are computer games and the Internet. Slow acceptance is also grounded in culture, since invocational media creates a new form of subjectivity - the user - quite different to audiences, listeners, or readers.