Like many words associated with communications technologies, broadcast is an old word that has gained entirely new meanings in the last century. First used in English in the second half of the eighteenth century, it originally meant to spread seed widely when sowing a field (that is, to cast it broadly).
These origins soon led to further metaphorical senses of the word, including the wide dissemination of information and ideas. By the early 1920s, it had fallen to broadcast and broadcasting respectively to provide a noun and verb for the young activity of transmitting information via radio.
Television took up the term upon its appearance, as did online services in turn. With interactive media, however, another related term had shifted its possibilities considerably: broadcaster. Shortly after its launch, YouTube adopted the slogan “broadcast yourself” as its motto, embodying a central truth of online media—suddenly, everyone with an internet connection and a computer could take part in something that had previously been the exclusive province of large corporations.
For historical reasons, the sense of the word broadcaster has shifted only gradually in the last few decades, still referring largely to either “official” media presenters or corporations. What has happened, though, is the sundering of the second half of the word from its traditional formulation, and the birth of a whole spectrum of new kinds of “-casting” to describe new possibilities.
Perhaps the best known of all these new senses is “podcasting.” The term first appeared in 2004, in an article for the Guardian newspaper by writer Ben Hammersley. Inspired by the dominance of Apple’s digital music player the iPod, it described the new possibility of broadcasting via the iPod—or indeed any other digital music player—through the creation of downloadable audio files, individually known as podcasts.47
Both the term and the practice took off, soon becoming an integral part of the digital music and broadcasting world—as well as spawning further linguistic variants, such as vodcasts for video podcasts. Still more radical, however, is a different kind of “-casting” designed fully to exploit the new capacities of digital media. This is what’s sometimes called lifecasting—a verb conjuring the novel possibility of someone broadcasting information about almost every aspect of their daily lives online.
One strong candidate for coiner is the American pioneer Justin Kan, who in 2007 launched the website Justin.tv as a live record of his entire daily life relayed from a webcam attached to his cap. Under the title “lifestreaming”—and in the noun form “lifestream”—a similar concept had been discussed at least since 1994 by the American computer scientist and writer David Gelernter, who together with technologist Eric Freeman envisaged broadcasting someone’s entire life live through a continuous “stream” of digital images and documents.48
Although the technology involved is new, it’s worth noting that the ideas underpinning lifecasting and its variants are ancient. The eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s notion of a panopticon (from the Greek pan, “all,” and optikos, “relating to sight”) embodied similar aims—a new kind of prison in which every single moment of inmates’ lives could be observed, without their being able to see the observers.
Bentham imagined a round building constructed around a central “observation house” and, though no prison was ever built that precisely matched his designs, it could be argued that mass interactive media have finally delivered a world in which his vision is being realized.