Friday, January 30, 2009

The New Industrial Revolution

The line between work and play -- profession and leisure activity -- is blurry. Sitting in front of a screen doesn't necessarily mean we are laboring away at our jobs. We can easily toggle through the day, switching between putting the finishing touches on a work-related document and updating our online profiles on our social networking site of choice. Most of us are okay with that, not really recognizing a problem with fitting both worlds into a given day. However, we can't deny that the blurry divide between these supposedly disparate sides is only blurry because the labor involved in achieving both is the same.

As Lev Manovich suggests in The Language of New Media, "Today, the subject of the information society is engaged in even more activities during a typical day: inputting and analyzing data, running simulations, searching the Internet, playing computer games, watching streaming video, listening to music online, trading stocks, and so on."

Being a part of the Information Age means keeping up with information flows. No longer bearing the one-way flows of yore, this means our work has significantly increased. Our web footprint alone is evidence of our erratic effort to maintain this lifestyle, one that isn't always a choice. We seem to have crossed the line that divides utility from excess. Our tools no longer help us do more with less effort, they create needs that never existed in the first place. While the work required is simple -- most children today have enviable hacker mentalities -- the amount of work required has brought us back to something that feels more like the Industrial Revolution, when technology was primarily an investment in increased production (electricity extended daylight, the clock regulated efficiency, etc.) We engage in work days that begin early in the morning and spill into our evenings without much of a break in between. We're always plugged in, connected in some way, unable (or unwilling) to unplug.

It takes work to keep up with our leisure activities. And those tools and methods are the same ones I use to draft a lesson plan (generating text-based documents, searching the Internet, pulling images and video, tagging data, posting my findings online) and to stay in contact with friends and family (checking multiple e-mail accounts, generating text-based communication, pulling images and video, posting content online). These shared activities make them easier to do simultaneously, but harder to set limits.

This sharing of work space, tools, and time make it difficult to differentiate between work and play, making us slaves to the activities themselves, not their by-products. Mobility creates or, in most cases, extends the desk job. We are experiencing a revolution in its own right, but without the ability to recognize and practice the possibility of limitation, we are on the brink of fatigue, and there is no concrete reason for it. As Jean Baudrillard affectingly put it, "To become an end in itself, every system must dispel the question of its real teleology... In other words, there are only needs because the system needs them."

Sustainability comes through the perfect balance of tolerance (even celebration) of this life and the pursuit of it with caution.

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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Way We Were

Having the history of new media on my mind these days forces me to confront old texts from great thinkers introduced to me during my jejune (but ultimately fruitful) early years as an undergrad.

Every time I present Benjamin's
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it is met with hostility and dismissiveness. His Marxist leanings can't be ignored for the sake of his edifying, albeit overly intolerant and slightly smug and moralistic, identification of soulless art. First, I must emphasize the importance of his attributing (certain) art with the notion of a soul -- defined only by a works of art's quality of true originality and non-reproducibility -- as being undeniably illuminating!

Walter Benjamin dared to attack the irreversible rise of technology, not because he was an aging ludite with a chip on his shoulder, though it can be argued that he knew very little about the rogue world of film and photography, except to suggest that its impact could be revolutionary and political in its very inability to resemble works of art that embodied an aura. His arguments in this essay presciently suggest that reproduction itself will take ownership over a work of art. He at once feared and celebrated the idea and metatext of it all: that a work can be stripped of its novelty in the process of reproduction. It changes the way we make, exchange, and define art. It changes the role of the artist, and blurs the clarity behind the creation of the work: its source undefined, all of its parts borrowed or hacked, manipulated beyond recognition, and recycled to infinity.

Perhaps when I first read this text -- before artist and technology became inseparable partners in creation -- these ideas were digestibly unoffensive. And even though I can't imagine a world without photography and film as works of art with recognizable auras, I also can't imagine a world without such mindful antagonists as he. Recognizing the potential and, in his mind, the setbacks of reproduction, Benjamin unknowingly set the groundwork for dialogues about virtuality, space and interactivity, and simulation, all of which rely on technologies of reproduction (data transfer, for example); however their resulting spaces of in-betweenness are the very definition of the soul-defining quality of aura he argued makes a work of art a true work of art, something that only those engaged in exclusive rituals could take part.

Rather than support his claim that art can be distinguished by its nature of non-reproduciblity, I recognize a compromise that allows for a certain porousness in his arguments. Finding the aura -- a definition that has changed since Benjamin penned it in this context -- has become a personal goal to at once cement (or, in some some cases, revive) his ideas and to prove him wrong, both good reasons to keep this text in circulation.

Plus, check out that moustache.

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