anachronauts by stefan gagne - witchipedia

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The Fae Encyclopedia
(For Curious Humans)

Media

I'm not much of a media hound, despite my constant references to old movies.

My contact with media came in the form of a portable television and video player, with a solar powered battery, sold at an amazing cost to the elders of my home village. That thing was the centerpiece of our cultural experience. Movie nights became regular things, especially for the kiddies -- there was a vast library of media stored in the machine, hundreds and hundreds of TV shows, cartoons, films, and more. The funny thing is, each time we watched one, there'd be some dire FBI warning telling us we shouldn't be doing exactly what we were doing -- enjoying pirated content.

If my memory serves me correctly, a short while after the Pandora Event, the government of Eastusa (having lost all communications with Westusa) decided to declare a moratorium on copyright for all media created prior to the Event. The idea was that with hard drives and optical media set to croak some 20-30 years after creation, if digital archivists didn't swing into action now and start making backup copies of everything under the sun, mankind stood a good chance of losing a lot of its cultural legacy.

Even with the legal barriers removed, with that legacy often in the ruins of cities long since abandoned, media archivists had a rough road. Trading for rare and hard to find media was intense in the early days; it still is, although less so, now that we've had centuries to build up a common base of free media. When you bump into the rare stuff now, things nobody has seen yet, you horde that and trade it very, very carefully at media focused conventions and the like.

Anyway, there's a downside to all this -- people have gotten so used to free media, that the "New Media" movement has had trouble getting launched. Why should someone pay for a movie filmed after the Pandora Event, when they have an all-you-can-eat free buffet of Old Media? I think this (plus government influenced nostalgia) is largely the reason why everybody's so focused on a human culture long gone from the living memory of humanity... it's readily available, it's an opiate of the masses, and it gives you a window into how great things were before we had to scrimp and save resources and worry about ogre attacks in the middle of the night.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Most Faeries shun human media, human tech, human anything. I don't. I've learned everything there is to know about humanity through its media and the Internet. Having it all copyright free is nice, too; Faeries actually have a deep respect for copyright and trademark. In a culture where eating lunch could indebt you to someone for life, you don't want to mess around with that kind of power.

Most of the focus is on media from the late 20th century and early 21st -- those were the easiest time periods to salvage, with the toughest recordings, stuff that survived the Pandora Event and could be recovered with ease.

But I've seen some early restoration efforts by my fellow elves who found a vault of old films from the 1930s and 1940s in some rich collector's basement, and wow... we are really missing out here! Yeah, okay, they didn't have color back then, but it's a crazy-different take on America that you've just got to see to believe. There's the WWII movies that were made afterwards, true, but... I dunno, man. It's just not the same as immersing yourself in true period media.

Still, I worry that since all we have is the media, we're missing out on any real representation of history. Media's got slant, always has, always will. How much knowledge has been lost because of that? How much has been misrepresented thanks to years of raising our kids on free media? We may never know.