Manifest data: the image in the age of electronic reproduction

So what does all this mean? What does it mean for photography, both now and in the future? More to the point, where does it leave images in general? What is the status of any image in an age of electronic reproduction? As we will see (and isn't it always the case?), everything comes down to this question of identity, to the question "what is . . .?"

Even the New York Times felt the need to refer to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin when trying to describe the potential consequences of this new industry. Benjamin's 1936 essay on the effects of mechanical reproduction tells a rather complicated tale of sacrifice and resurrection. According to this tale, authentic social relations are depleted by their technically induced commodification, in the process creating the conditions for the phoenix-like return of these relations in a post-capitalist economy. His central point was that the shift from production to reproduction, one of the "basic conditions" of capitalism, would also be the source of this system's downfall. Technological manifestations of this shift, such as photography, therefore embodied the potential for both oppression and liberation. This explains Benjamin's strange ambivalence about technical reproducibility. Interestingly, it is an ambivalence that has been repeated in many of the commentaries on its electronic version, commentaries that often combine utopian predictions of unfettered democratized access to the world's visual archives with a fear of the potential trivialization of meaning and history enabled by this same access.

There is also a certain nervousness about the prospect of one man, none other than the world's wealthiest capitalist, gaining so much power over the very process - reproduction - that Benjamin saw as crucial to capitalism's demise. It is hard to ignore the irony of the situation. The Internet is on the verge of becoming an essential part of daily life, providing a vast electronic marketplace in which virtually anything can be bought and sold. Microsoft, another Gates company, is currently spending millions to develop search and navigation software that will make it possible for any interested subscriber, from schoolchildren to industry executives, to locate, download and automatically pay for the images owned by Corbis. Here is the ultimate goal of this whole exercise, and Gates obviously plans to make considerable profits on his investments. But will this new enterprise also accelerate the alienation of his subscribers from their own culture, thereby hastening what Benjamin saw as that culture's inevitable implosion and transformation? Time will tell.

While we wait, there are a number of more immediate concerns to ponder. One of these is censorship. In November 1995, America Online declared that "breast" was an indecent word and cut off access to any user's groups who identified themselves with it. The decision was later reversed in the face of complaints from enraged subscribers interested in information on breast cancer. In December 1995, Compuserve temporarily denied four million users of the Internet access to more than 200 discussion groups and picture data bases after a federal prosecutor in Munich said the material contained in them violated German pornography laws. On February 8, 1996, American legislators, keen to capture the moral high ground in the lead-up to an election, introduced laws designed to outlaw electronic traffic considered "indecent." The Microsoft Network, like the other companies offering access to the Internet, already warns its subscribers against exchanging what it deems "offensive" speech. It remains to be seen whether Corbis chooses to exercise a similar level of control over its ever-expanding image empire. Presumably the company will have to monitor the range of pictures made available to its school-age market. But will this censorship be extended to its adult customers? No policy has yet been announced. However, on one level, a selection process of some kind or other is already taking place - only 4% of the company's holdings have been converted to digital form. Perhaps certain pictures will simply never see the (electronic) light of day.

Some have argued that Gates will limit access to these images in other ways. English sci-fi novelist Douglas Adams, for example, in a recent article for The Manchester Guardian Weekly, insists that Gates has been peddling "second-rate technology" for years, holding back the computer revolution rather than expanding it. It is certainly true that Microsoft's present dominance of the software market is a consequence of luck and entrepreneurial panache rather than of product superiority (Gates made his fortune by fortuitously acquiring an operating system designed by someone else and licensing it to IBM for use in their personal computers). According to Adams, Windows 95, the Microsoft operating system through which Gates hopes to manage the world's access to the Internet, is, like its predecessor MS-DOS, a "piece of crap," a "feeble, me-too imitation" of an already outdated Macintosh interface. Crap or not, the products that Gates sells are undeniably successful. And as a consequence of his Corbis-related activities, he will soon own not only the vehicle but also a major portion of the content being conveyed over the information superhighway. To really cash in, all he needs to devise now is the right kind of toll-gate.