There’s a certain character of media that makes it both temporary and permanent, simultaneously. A grainy video, downloaded, ripped, encoded, uploaded, displayed, downloaded, encoded, uploaded; viewed over and over again by hundreds of people. Set down once and then found again in someone’s downloads folder. A fresh set of eyes, a younger generation, the same joke. Fifty dollars in ad revenues pulls it back out to the surface from the depths.

Media is so slippery like that. Now that we never have to delete; now that the internet itself never has to be periodically purged and renewed; now that we don’t have to forget; there’s a new vision, a new paradigm. The tumultuous meniscus of the pop culture media dialog is constantly frothing at the surface, the tension buoying the flavors of the minute and the hour; a start contrast to the days of yore, the golden age of cinema and network news anchors. All at once we can sustain the career of a pock marked teenager, racy pictures and crass dialog slipping through the fabric like a coffee filter starting its brew, the dim stain the only remainder when a new batch is pumped into the machine, its dilution behest at the hands of a hundred million pairs of hungry eyes.

A golden God stamped out in silicon chips and liquid crystal; a hydra of figures, ideas, genres, smashing and biting one another, impregnating and combining, struggling to gain relevance in a sickening, self-perpetuating dance.

We’ve crossed a threshold for which there is no forgetting. There is no Pantheon no singular archives, no Pergamon or Acropolis that can be destroyed to undo the progress we’ve made. There was an age where tales were spun between peoples, between generations and thus forgotten, spoiled, twisted, legends usurped. Then there came print and it was harder to take things from their context, to strip the dark indigo inks from the parchment. A permanence in the creation of media itself that was destined to be what it is today, and what it will emerge as through its next catharsis. Digital. Data wants to be free. Like a greased pig released in a shopping mall, you just can’t pin it down no matter how hard you try. So ephemeral and ghastly that the simple act of trying to control it leads to less control, and inverse of entropy.

It is also intelligent in its own way. With youtube and blogs and cell phone cameras in every hand, at every experience, media is becoming self aware. It knows you are watching. Like Kathy Torrance in Idoru, like a quanta in a vacuum, it is permanently and significantly different when observed. Forever bearing the marks of the audience as reports, reviews, suggestions, like like like and added to the fan page myspace. The history is carved out in a malleable clay where each passing hand wears the iron down, the best ideas smooth and rusty with years of attention.