As of late, I’ve considered the idea that content is transformed into something much more like a zombie than the living, breathing content of the past. This is highly debatable and not necessarily true today, but it’s trending that way. Perhaps I should be clearer. The content I’m referring to is that content that lives on our screens, either at home on our TVs or computers or at the cinema. This digital content is at the mercy of the technologies – the mediums – that provide access to it. To put it another way, content has become the excuse for the medium to exist.
This idea is, perhaps, disputatious. McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and Postman’s “the medium is the metaphor,” predict and have created our current fascination with our mediums. Suggesting that our mediums are the secret influencers of content, shaping content to the medium’s abilities, manipulating content’s purpose or goals, changing – in the end – the ways in which we acquire knowledge and think about the world, our mediums free us and limit us. The artist’s job is to see these restrictions and freedoms as opportunities to create meaningful content. How has the focus of art shifted to its medium rather than its content? I suspect it has something to do with the evolution of the tools we have at our disposal. The paint brush is a varied and complicated tool in its own right, but it is far more simplistic a device than the camera. The still image is far more simplistic than the moving image when accompanied with sound. Today, the artist who selects the tools of New Media is playing with even more complex tools. The complexity of these tools has established a fascination of its own. The artist is falling in love with the method by which he or she reveals content. This love affair has also extended to the user. We find ourselves a fascinated culture, startled by the fact that things feel a bit more “Star Trek” these days. We have been given tools that we have yet to understand completely, and for this reason they fascinate and beguile more than the content we produce for them. What we are witnessing is a “bubble,” a moment in time where artists throw whatever they can get to stick on their New Media canvasses. They are more concerned with engaging and manipulating their tools than they are producing thoughtful, soulful content that reveals the intricacies of our existence. Then again, what better theme could an artist have? Isn’t our existence more wrapped up in our tools than it is in anything else? Can content be of lesser importance than the medium and still be artful? Can we simply say, “Look at what I did with this tool?” and suggest that such production is art? If so, how?
We must first classify the behavior of the user. The user typically performs two acts when given a device to use. These two acts are either consumption or production. To use the iPad as an example, as it has many commonalities with the smart phones David Pogue of the New York Times has so cleverly categorized as “App Phones,” the device was built with minimal user interface capabilities. Sure, yes, it promotes interactivity like no device before it (if we see it merely as an extension of the first iPhone), but the device does not enable sophisticated user input strategies. We touch it and realize that our thumbs are far inferior to the keyboard that frees all ten fingers, the mouse, and even wacom pads that provide detailed input possibilities. For this reason, the iPad is a product made for consuming, not producing, as such it changes the behavior of the user, pushing them to utilize the device to consume rather than produce. If this is true, however, my leading statement is crap. How can a device that promotes consumption have damned content? Surely content is required if consumption is the behavior of choice. This too implies that content is being produced. If it weren’t there would be no content to consume.
The zombie metaphor works well here. What is a zombie? I’m glad you asked. A zombie is the reanimated dead. Again, another problem arises with my analogy. When did content die? How was it reanimated?
I’m not the first to suggest that content as we have come to know it died with the birth of new media. The claims that old media forms are dead are nothing new. What I am suggesting is that old media has been reanimated, that it has taken on Lovecraftian elements, awakened in the labs of new technologies in the hopes that it will find itself as alive as it was before it died. Because this content has been transposed onto a medium that it was not designed to exist for, we see it ineffectually struggle to find relevancy. It moans and lumbers along while pretty graphics circle around it, providing something resembling a pulse but something too that is not truly meaningful in relation to the content.
This brings me to my point, a point I wish to be clear on. I do not grieve for old media. I do not care if this particular trajectory will negatively influence society, its relationships, or its spirituality. Instead, I hope only to notice, to observe an epistemological shift generated by significant technological advancements that effect the individual m0re directly than any that have come before.
We find ourselves at the cusp of something truly new, not some new tech that makes the experience of the old more interesting. Instead, we are doing what we must. We utilize the content we are accustomed to producing in order to PLAY with the new tools we have developed. Much like Marx suggests of products introduced in a capitalist market, the production of a good does not meet the demand for that good; rather, it creates a need for that good. Currently, we’re still trying to discover for what this product is best suited.
This has created an interesting bubble in our culture, one that I assume will pass but that may not do so for some time. Today, our mediums are our great art, not the content resting inside them. People who spend their days at coffee shops know what I’m talking about. We see a phone, a computer, a gizmo and ask if we can hold it, if we can use it. The shine, the aura of these products have become more fascinating than the content they provide.
Jonathan Ive, the design genius behind Apple’s look and feel recently had this to say on design:
“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material — the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”
The phrases used at the end of his comments are the most intriguing, especially when we consider the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, who believed that art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility was in danger of removing itself ever further from its equivalent in nature, threatening and diminishing its “aura” as it became reproducible. What Ive’s suggests here is that the computer, the phone, the tablet are “real” objects, objects with their own life, contained in their own nature, establishing its own authenticity if designed by recognizing that form and material are inseparable. When done this way, he creates something authentic and “real in a very particular way.”
What I suggest here is that we are producing a new “nature.” It is real in a “particular” way. It is not produced by God; rather, it is produced by man. This, then, suggests that Benjamin’s fears concerning aura are no longer concerns at all. We have created an authentic environment that supports the creation of authentic content, but we have only created environments for that content to exist in and not the buildings and trees and wildlife that can give it substance.
Walter Ong says, “Major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness, are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish” (Interfaces of the Word, 1977: 9-10).
What is the effect of this “evolution” on the “major developments” of our culture? Currently, we have nothing new to add to our words except images and sound. If we shift from a linguistic critique of culture to one focused on semiotics, we see that everything we do is somehow interpretable. This allows the artist to depend upon at least three of the human senses simultaneously when using a digital medium to convey their messages. We seem to have reached an end to the ways in which we can communicate. Outside of telepathy, we don’t have much more at our disposal, so we focus on ways to augment the modes of communication to which we have access. We focus on speed of transmission, ease of access, and opportunity to consume. Cellphones provide portable access. Home theatre systems enlarge and amplify the content we access. And so on. But, the new tools at our disposal, have affected something much more interesting. They have brought on another epistemological shift. We acquire knowledge and produce content in ways we never have before. It has affected the way we behave. It has affected the things we expect from information produced for the purpose of consumption.
This shift is what I find compelling, as it has disrupted, completely, the way we view our older content distribution systems. Reading a book is, somehow, less rewarding – as an activity but not as an experience – than it was just a few years after these new tools were created. Yet, we find ourselves so enamored with or confused by our new tools that we foist the content of old media onto new mediums. We are using it as a place holder, waiting to discover what works best in these new spaces.
We are reanimating content. It lives on in our new mediums but does so without its soul, without its humanity. This explains, in part, why the focus of content produced in new mediums is subservient to the way in which those new mediums function. We first appreciate the form and then dive into its content, and if we are not distracted by something else, we tackle what is there. However, the rewarding aspect of these artifacts is how they came to exist and not what they produce. We are fascinated with the way they work more than what they are working to accomplish.
More to come…
Content Beware 