Jul 4, 2008
Does Digital = Disposable?
I recently wrote about the Kindle, and how the digital distribution of books could mean virtual microruns ensuring nothing is ever out of print, and that pretty much anyone can self-publish for next to nothing. One of the commenters wrote, “I can’t see how anything that is, or will be, a ‘classic’ book can be enjoyed any way other than with book in hand.” This is a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by other people as well — that if you truly love a book, you need to own a real, printed copy, or that anything worth watching on TV is worth owning on DVD, or that it’s OK to download a lot of pirated music, but you always have to pay — or even buy the CD — if it’s an album you really love. With a camera loaded with film, you think long and hard before you take a shot; with a digital camera, you can take hundreds of shots willy-nilly, toss out the duds and frame the best ones later (I’ll ignore, for the moment, the temporary permanence of digital picture frames). There’s a sense that certain works are of a high enough calibre that they deserve to be enshrined in the form of physical manifestation.
The counterpoint, of course, is that everything else can be distributed digitally, consumed, and then deleted. Naturally, if you’re going to discard something, it’s far better to be able to delete it than have to actually throw it in the garbage: plastic discs or pulpy paperbacks clogging the landfills of the world. But if something that’s crappy doesn’t deserve anything more permanent than digital distribution, does it follow that anything digital is inherently disposable?
The human tendency to want to enshrine images or ideas of value in a tangible form is only natural; since we were troglodites, we have made physical recordings of events (both historical and fictive) that we wanted to share or to keep in memory. It’s only very recently that the media we were working with became intangible; even the impermanent media, like newspapers, were still physical objects. We’re so used to creating physical copies of media there’s still a sense that deeming something unfit for recording in physical form is the same as saying the idea itself is valueless.
Of course, just because some things aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on doesn’t mean that everything distributed digitally is worthless … does it? You can find the entire works of Shakespeare online — but then, you can find expensive leatherbound copies as well. Presumably, as long as something has achieved validation in book or DVD or CD form, that validation can’t be diluted no matter how many digital copies are made. If an editor somewhere decided to print some books, at least it has that editor’s stamp of approval. But a book released digitally? Hell, anyone can do that.
I sometimes worry if perhaps we’re headed down the slippery slope. Of course, everything is backed up in hard copy somewhere, but our patterns of distribution and consumption are definitely flowing towards the non-physical media. I don’t even remember the last CD I bought (although I have paid for lots of music online). I’m stuck buying DVDs for now, but assuming I had a subscription to (for example) Netflix and could stream all the movies I wanted for a monthly fee, I’d stop buying DVDs too. The trouble with digital books is addressed in the post I link to above, but I believe those problems will be overcome soon, and the majority of our newspapers, magazines and books will be replaced with a single digital reader with the features of the Kindle. Buying something physical is such an investment — not only of materials, which are finite, but also money (they tend to cost more) and especially time. I don’t expect us to stop making physical media in my lifetime, but I do expect the ratio of physical to digital to skew radically towards the latter. As tangible media are gradually phased out, and all we’re left with is the digital, how will we know the good from everything else?
If that happens, perhaps that sense of devaluation will come with it. Sure, you can download Shakespeare to your iPhone whenever you want, and delete it when you’re done with it — but does that put Shakespeare on the same level as (off the top of my head:) Shot at Love with Tila Tequila? Do the words “classic,” “timeless,” and “enduring” mean as much when you’re talking about classic, timeless, enduring YouTube clips?
And can any work of art created with the intention of releasing it solely in digital form ever be considered a classic? If Shakespeare were alive today, self-publishing on his website, would we see him in the same light? Or does the fact that one couldn’t pick his works up and use it to (off the top of my head:) press flowers cheapen them somehow? Make them ephemeral? Frivolous?
I’ve asked a lot of questions here; I don’t have any answers. Maybe someone will provide some insight in the comments section. It worries me; I think we run the risk (have the opportunity?) of becoming a near-totally digital culture, totally democratising and levelling production and access to all forms of media. There will, of course, be a Darwinian battle for popularity, and the highest-quality texts will, by and large, rise to the top … but how will this be established? Lifetime number of downloads? User reviews on a scale of 1 to 5 stars? Is there anything more enduring we can come up with to elevate future works of value? Will the classics of tomorrow be doomed to exist solely in the shuffling terabytes of binary?
At the risk of being too PoMo, I feel obliged to point out that this very blog wouldn’t exist if it had to be printed and distributed on paper. It’s not “worth it,” and definitely doesn’t have a wide enough audience.
I don’t think digital distribution is bad, overall — people like me get blogs, for one thing, and without adding to consumerism, either.
But … if this is the state of the art these days, perhaps publishing really is doomed. There’s only so much demand, and the more content being thrown around, the less of a real audience works of value can build over time. To be enduring, a work first has to endure … I wonder if any new work could ever reach an audience (share) as broad as Shakespeare’s again?
While I know that you are not directly addressing it, this topic skirts the issue of authenticity and replication. The whole concept of dwindling tangibility dates back to the creation of the printing press, and the associated decay compounded with each successive step in mass production technology. In the past, when there was an increase in access to replicated works, there were similar outcries (like those of today) by philosophers and members of the public that the path of artistic reproduction led to a devaluing of culture and a flattening of experience. Within that vein of discourse, Walter Benjamin gained “celebrity” for his texts regarding authenticity and photography. While some would view the resistance to new technology and forms of distribution as espousing a Luddite or anti-progressive perspective, others would say it is important to be critical of how culture is packaged. But, when did the idea of being concerned with posterity become so pervasive? Why are some folks preoccupied with how culture is consumed and whether modes of interaction are detrimental to a given individual’s experience with art, media, and the world?
Regardless of tangibility, time tends to validate the cultural “worth” of things, and cultural artefacts tend to acquiesce in the face of some populist metric. Do we (or should we) have control over what becomes the representative cultural material of our time? For a historical example, some would say that Shakespeare himself was a populist, based on the character content and bawdy humour present in a great deal of his plays. Does that make Shakespeare’s work any less authentic or culturally relevant? There is even a small group that protests the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work (“The Shakespeare-Bacon Theory”), so why should such a figure of controversy be part of the contemporary canon?
I don’t really know where I’m going with this… other than to say that apocalyptic sentiments with respect to culture have been raised before, but in spite of that, advances in access and replication have provided some contribution to culture. Digital technology, especially, is flattening the access of tools and materials to be more inclusive to the general public. Photography, in a broad sense, has never been more popular (as evident in the explosion of image hosting sites like Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, etc.), and the idea of disposable content adds to the repertoire of the neophyte photographer. If anything, technological ubiquity should improve the cultural canon of a given time, because (in theory) it should force artists and authors of content to be more creative… or to invent new tools that will later be consumed by an interface available to the masses.
The disposable, the replicated, and the mediated experience will always be an issue (and it has been since we decided to seek shelter from the “profanity” of nature)… but I think we’ll all be okay as long as the Benjamins of the world remain critical and questioning.
One more point on “classics” and enduring art, since it was a big part of your original post. In my previous comment, I questioned how the context for defining a representative canon develops in a given time (e.g. Shakespeare). For the vast majority of art and literature, at least up until the past century, the lens for discerning “classic” stemmed from what was coveted by the Western tradition (a.k.a. old rich white men). Does that lens of choosing artistic media capture the spectrum of thought and the best of all human creations? Probably not, but what would the current Western perception of art be if media was always subject to democratisation?
I think your question about what will endure as art, culture, etc. is a fascinating one, and I hope we live to see what type of artefact baggage comes along with us. Who knows… maybe we’ll be typecast as the parody/youtube mash-up era.
You’ve hit on some really interesting ideas. I actually wrote this without thinking of the move to digital distribution as a continuation of trends we’ve seen in the past (that is, manual replication → mechanical replication → digital replication). Probably my thoughts would have been a little more orderly if I had. Digital distribution is totally unlike anything that has come before, in that it’s free and instantaneous and virtually universally accessible — but seen as an extrapolation of changes we’ve already seen, these are quantitative differences, not qualitative ones.
I hope I didn’t come across as apocalyptic. I don’t think technology is capable of bringing about the end of high culture, or texts destined to be timeless classics. In fact, I think it will bring us lots of hidden gems that would otherwise miss. But at the same time, technology is capable of burying them in crap. So while I think digital technology is great — even if it means the proliferation of crap in disproportionally large amounts (we can always ignore it, right?) — it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I know people who say there’s nothing good on TV (or YouTube, or whatever). Of course, there’s something for everyone on TV (or YouTube, or whatever), even if it’s book readings or art criticism or documentaries about eye surgery. But it’s understandable if you think that there’s nothing good on TV, because finding what you’re looking for is like finding a needle in a haystack.
One of the major topics I haven’t talked about yet (but am planning to) is new ways that content can be pre-filtered for us, especially in organic, subculture-based ways (I call it “word of mouse”); think of it as crowdsourcing the job of the critic. This isn’t organised enough to be happening on a large enough scale to be utile yet, but I think it will happen.
I completely agree with your assessment of distribution types and their magnitudes of difference, and you did not come across as apocalyptic… my post started to digress into generalities in the latter paragraphs.
Another tangent to this topic -that you reminded me of- is the dynamic way in which users of content customize the lens through which they interact with media. For an internet instance, I have an extensive set of bookmarks that include media blogs, design blogs, Ignis Fatuus, photo repositories, and financial websites that I navigate to on a daily basis. In aggregate, these addresses form an ephemeral piece of information infrastructure, and it in turn serves as my filter through the maze of digital crap. iTunes facilitates a similar type of filtering with its playlist interface… a filter that enables users to navigate, expand, and compose smaller themes within an impossibly huge collection.
Maybe these forms of information downsizing, at the scale of the person, represent ways in which media will be cataloged and judged on the macro scale in the future.
You know, I also have a very extensive set of bookmarks, divided and subdivided by genre (for example, I have a “Blog” folder containing my own blogs, a subfolder for the other sites I plan to reference on this blog, a sub-subfolder for archived sites I’ve already referenced, sub-sub-subfolders for specific referenced sites divided by subject, as well as a subfolder for friends’ blogs I check daily and a sub-subfolder for friends’ blogs I check less frequently). It’s practically burdensome.
I’ve been saying for a while that if *I* worked for Google and had one day a week to develop whatever app I wanted, I’d work on something to organise these bookmarks a little better. One of the most significant changes Mozilla made to the new Firefox was to install a “smart” navigation bar that learns which websites you visit regularly and makes them easier to find.
I’m pretty sure you and I are a little more intense than most people when it comes to bookmarking (frankly, I don’t think most people want to do the work, or are as anal, or even know how), but we can’t be the only ones. I’m sure eventually some ingenious person will come up with a system making it easier to pull up the sites one wants.
I’m personally suspicious of digital over physical distribution, if only because I’m acutely aware of how catastrophic a hard drive failure can be.