Unless you’ve been hibernating under a rock for the past month or so, you’ve probably heard about the utterly insane performance by Kobe Bryant against the Toronto Rapters on Jan 22 - almost exactly one month ago. Scoring 81 points and leading the Lakers back from a third quarter deficit of 18 points, Kobe launched himself into the annals of sports history overnight. Soon enough, sports fans around the country (and perhaps the world) began debating whether Kobe’s 81 points at 6′6″ in the modern era was a comparably more impressible performance than the NBA 100 point record still held by Wilt Chamberlain (7′1″) from the 1960’s.
However, even more impressive than Kobe’s 81 is the fact that less than 48 hours later, the performance in its entirety was available for download from the Google Video Store (http://video.google.com) for $3.99. Take a moment to wrap your head around that thought. What if such a service existed when Wilt dropped his 100? What if such a service were provided back in 1998 when Jordan hit “the shot” against Utah in one of basketball’s most memorable moments? This technological step brings validity to a point I made in one of my October entries talking about the “long tail” of media. To sum up the ideas from that entry, our culture, encompassing literature, music, and multimedia of all sorts, is growing at such an incredible rate that cataloguing all of the data is a very real and prevalent challenge for us. It was reassuring to see that Kobe’s performance, along with almost every NBA game since the start of the service, is available on-demand for the world to enjoy, albeit at a slight cost. This is one small step in accomplishing the holy grail of human culture: a library of media comprehensive enough to store the ever evolving story of the human race.
While Chamberlain’s historic night in Hershey, Pennsylvania is relegated to forever live in the fogs of myth, survived only by the famous picture of Wilt holding a makeshift score card reading “100″, Kobe’s night is blessed by our technological advancements as to be forever encased in 1’s and 0’s, perfectly preserved for all those who wish to access it. Most importantly, the footage, the data itself, is not bound to some unknown archive; rather, it is widely available to anyone who wishes to get their hands on it. The next time someone comes along and shatters records, we won’t have to wonder about how it compares to the mysterious past - it’s there anytime you wish to recall it. January 22, 2006 won’t have to go into history as yet another foggy memory.