Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
Rise of the Machines, Part II
This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, Clay Shirky, April 26, 2008
What always fascinates me about the technology Utopian crowd– in this case, the web 2.0 guru, is that they sound like they are talking about people when really they are talking about systems. And whenever they talk about these systems amazing things happen, as if by magic.
It’s like looking for the subject in the sentence, “It’s raining.” Who is raining? Who is consuming and producing and sharing? It’s all that messiness of the world, uh, all the complications of the people in the world, that this way of thinking would like to avoid.
The problem is that if you fill in that blank “who” things don’t sound so nice or neat. We in the west have certainly created a social surplus, but it is deeply rooted in the poverty of the global south. And maybe Shirky is right that we also created a cognitive surplus.
I think, though, that people have always been smarter than the boredom offered by capitalism. Shirky says we went on a collective bender and watched sit coms for the last several decades. Some of us did other things– civil rights movements, or unions, or feminism, or environmentalism.
And some of us were doing other things: most dramatically, waging state-sponsored wars that killed hundreds of millions of other people. I think the people in the first group have just barely managed to save us from the people in the second group.
One of the ways these folks saved us is that they kept turning spears into plowshares; the paranoia about the Soviet Union helped to create the very internet that Shirky believes is going to save us. My guess is that this is simply another tool, and that we don’t quite yet know who will be using it.
I don’t think it helps, though, to talk about the future as if the dominos were already pushed over, even in the name of a certain kind of optimism. I think that first group still has a lot of spears left in its arsenals and that the creation of plowshares is not yet automated.
The Rise of the Machines
Just as, today, we have no living memories of a time before the existence of radio, we will soon live in a world in which no one living experienced growing up in a society without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine what we stand to lose and gain, before it is too late. Susan Greenfield and others are right that there is no necessary correlation between technological and moral progress, and that unintended consequences have proliferated from all those leaps humanity has made over the last hundred and even thousands of years. In the past, such losses have barely registered in our daily lives, because those who could tell us about them were long dead. But today, with epochal change taking place on the scale of generations, our past and our future are almost simultaneous—and the joyful, absorbing complexity that games can deliver is also their greatest threat.
Within the virtual worlds we have begun to construct, players can experience the kind of deep, lasting satisfactions that only come from the performance of a complex, sociable and challenging task. Yet such satisfactions will always remain, in a crucial sense, unreal. Whatever skills it teaches and friendships it creates, an eight-hour World of Warcraft session is nevertheless solipsistic like few other activities. Is a descent into precision-engineered narcissism on the cards? I believe not: the ways we are already making and playing games show that to be human is to demand more than this. But the doomsayers are right in one important respect. If we do not learn to balance the new worlds we are building with our living culture, we may lose something of ourselves.
Tom Chatfield, The New Prospect, June 2008
It’s Friday and I think this is the latest I’ve posted since I started this blog almost two years ago so I won’t add much to this quote. Chatfield’s piece is thoughtful and worth reading, even in the end his main point is that people are people and technology won’t change that anytime soon.
Each new media or genre at least since the novel has been met with the same dire warnings about certain doom. Each has been wrong, too, unless you want to blame media for the non-stop violence of the last hundred years or so. Maybe we can link Grand Theft Auto to global warming.
Aretha Franklin – Don’t Play That Song For Me