The cautious with a chip on his shoulder versus the overly optimistic.
My dad posted an article Clay Shirky wrote on “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” (think: Rome/Babylon/America) to Facebook a while back, and I liked it, so I picked up a couple of Shirky’s books and read them during a Christian rock festival (Cornerstone Festival) this July. I also happened to read about a book Jaron Lanier had written, in the vein of Amusing Ourselves To Death and all those hip, anti-media, obsessed media and media theory junkie folks, so I brought that with me as well. Surprisingly, they talked about and against each other!
The Internet: face-less, socialist, pseudo-spiritual garbage dump, and devaluer of culture
Jaron Lanier is a hippie known for his early work in artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and his love for really old instruments. But he apparently was close to the invention of the Internet, and wrote a book this spring called You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto.
He suggests that very few instances of creativity have come from the Internet itself, and what does come of it usually peters out after those few and far-between instances. 98% of the Internet is mash-ups of other media, lists of past events, descriptions of things that you can find in books. His argument is summed by saying that a pop-culture thesaurus (Wikipedia), a tool to search things with (Google), and the ability to send strings of 140-character paragraphs into the ether (Twitter) are the most popular, extremely dull technologies of Web 2.0.
Lanier is all about the foundations of the Internet; he’s concerned that the structure – sending irrelevant bits and bites back and forth without context – is hurting our image of ourselves as humans and is destroying the opportunity for people to innovate, make a living, and value ourselves. Wikipedia’s hive-mind hierarchy, Google’s formulas for deciding what sites you care about, and the social web in general, prioritize the general population over individuals.
Identity is separated from actions on the Internet; trolling is a constant problem, because people are immune to the social influence that normally balances interactions in-person. It is always a safe bet to be angry with a post than to praise it.
The Internet: communal, productive, forward-thinking garbage dump of culture
Clay Shirky wrote the books Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations in 2008 and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age this spring.
Shirky takes a completely different tack on the Internet’s benefits. He mostly dodges the issues Lanier has, and compares the Internet to America’s last past-time: television. After sleeping and eating, TV is our most common activity; 20 hours a week, destroys our self-image, completely passive activity, etc.
Web 2.0 and its interactive glory will push our world to new heights, where every bit of our stagnant lives, every moment we would otherwise be exclusively consuming media and content during, we will now be producing content, too. We will write comments, post responses and videos, all faster than ever before. And the more ambitious of us will collaborate around the world to make movies, music, and games without ever meeting or even seeing each other. Sounds great.
Beating the Robots
Lanier would say that having a personal, verified identity and being willing to be different on the Internet will be healthy in the long run.
His pessimism, or realism, regarding Shirky’s rosy view of the future productivity of the Internet over TV culture has one out-of-the-box solution I have thought of. Lanier is concerned with the middle class losing its purpose, especially as more and more skilled work is turned over to robots, leaving upper-class people to oversee the robots and lower-class people to work at McDonald’s. The Internet is part of the robots taking over, because it is written for robots (Google’s pretty literal). We will create a future where people don’t have things to sell to people who will buy. The economy will collapse, among everything else.
My idea comes from the pivotal book on German Expressionist Film and film’s role in World War II, From Caligari To Hitler. In this book published in 1947, Siegfried Kracauer examines the perspective of the Germans through World War I and entering World War II, through their film. In those early days, people didn’t know what to think of film. They didn’t see it as an art form, and actors in live theatre looked down on it.
So what can’t robots do? Make art. Art, as far as I’m concerned, is something created as art, to communicate something to an audience. It’s communication through a medium intentionally as art (not purely for knowledge or information). Film found its place as artwork and entertainment. The Internet, this new, unexplored medium, can become art and entertainment, also.
There are films that are “instructional;” showing you how to drive, for example, and showing you how to cook, on The Food Network. The Internet will have all of these parts, but there will also be parts of the Internet as art – not just displaying paintings or playing music, but taking advantage of all of the Internet’s abilities as a mixed medium art form.
The foundations need to be made into an art form. Not just paintings scanned and displayed, or music recorded and displayed – the Internet itself needs to be art, like film became an art itself, not just a recording of live theatre.
The design and programming (how the website acts when you interact with it) need to be considered and approached as artwork. It will gain not just utilitarian value as a function, but as a form, too. People will be interested in going to a website because it is itself a piece of artwork.
Hard to imagine, but I think it is a good idea in the long run to appease Jaron Lanier.
So it was with film; people thought of it as cheap and inappropriate compared to the live theatre of the day. But slowly actors could use the extra income, and they appreciated the trade-offs in ease of filming over performing every evening, and they migrated to film.
