More Resistance to Frictionless Sharing

I posted a few initial, negative responses to frictionless sharing before, and now Molly Wood at CNET shares her thoughts. A lot of what she says is in the same vein as what Farhad Manjoo had to say about this kind of sharing ruining taste, but the article is definitely worth a read. Here's an excerpt: 

Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.

Where Is This World Headed (and how do I ask that visually)?

It would be easy to call Postman and others like him a bit paranoid when they talk about the decline of text and a steady progression to an entirely visual/audio-oriented culture. In Postman's case, that was an assumption he made on the way to concluding what that kind of culture that produces and some have questioned that presupposition. Some have suggested, and I think rightly to an extent, that increased presence on social media sites has brought about an increase in student-produced composition. Young people are texting, emailing, chatting, and updating statuses so often that the bulk of their discourse happens via text and no longer orally. Postman may not be happy about the genre, length, or sophistication of such compositions, but it would be hard to argue that even the most avid users of social media aren't text dependent.

Are you ready for it? BUT. Present text-dependence hardly indicates where the minds behind digital media want us to end up. Engadgetrecently covered a technology conference and posted on some remarks made by the CEO of Dreamworks (of course, I'd be more excited about this idea if it were Pixar leading the charge). Their full post:

Is the internet on the cusp of a post-text era? Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg certainly thinks so. Speaking at the Techonomy conference in Tucson yesterday, Katzenberg confirmed that his company is already working on expanding 3D animation to the realm of social media, as part of a collaboration with Intel. As Technology Review reports, the two companies have been working on the project for the better part of four years, developing 12-core chips and software capable of delivering real-time photographic animation. Katzenberg didn't offer many details beyond that, but seemed confident that his company's new technology could radically alter the way users share and engage with online content by transcending the boundaries of traditional text. "Text is a learned process but what we do [at Dreamworks] is intuitive and instinctual and you do it from the moment you are born," he said, "We're trying to see if we can move many of these things we can do today in text but moving up to video and audio... with sight and sound." The exec went on to cite Apple's Siri personal assistant as proof that this transition is already underway: "Whether we do it or somebody else does it, we will move from a text world into a audio visual one." Intriguing claims, to be sure, but we'll know more next year, when Dreamworks' new campaign gets underway.

This "post-text" world has already found some footing in social media with an increased use of YouTube and sites like DailyBooth, where you are encouraged to join in on "one big conversation about your life, through pictures." Text-based status updates and messages now give way to personal snapshots and a steady stream of uploaded images. I first heard of DailyBooth in Devin Friedman's excellent The Viral Mewhich he wrote for GQ at the end of last year. It is still one of the most interesting reads on social media and where it is heading. Coincidently, it is also where I first encountered the idea of frictionless experiences which I will be writing about more extensively soon. The article is well worth a read.

For my requisite video, I'd like to share one of my favorites from Stephen Fry - not just because of the words, but the interplay between text and images. 

Quick Quote

Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplisitic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves. (pg. 141)

In a lot of ways this statement serves as Postman’s thesis and I would call it somewhat naïve if it weren’t written 36 years ago. There are plenty of genres on television that lend themselves to complex, substantive information (as I’ve suggested before), and I’ve heard “Previously on Mad Men” far too many times to grant that all television is nonhistorical and noncontextual, but at the same time I can’t help but apply this critique, even if only in part, to tools like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps Facebook will, at some point in the future, be able to mediate different genres like television does now (though I doubt Twitter will ever effectively mediate political debates, class lectures, and the like). If anything, my critiques of Postman and appreciation for so much of what is good about television has made me tread a bit more tentatively in my criticisms of Facebook – although I still think many of my concerns are still legitimate.

This is not to say that Postman doesn’t raise some important points. I still think more thought could be put into the form/content discussions (or, at the most basic level, that these conversations should happen). Nicholas Carr has offered an updated critique in the vein of Postman with his book, The Shallows, and I think where there are points of intersection between Postman and Carr, Postman’s questions still merit answers.

Now for a bit of (ironic) fun: Pixar animations could stand as the biggest objection to many of Postman’s concerns about important cultural conversations taking place through digital mediums – especially when they so vividly paint (and implicitly critique) a Postman/Huxleyan hybrid future. I should also note that this video will have even more relevance when I talk about frictionless experiences later. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 3

The second half of Postman’s work is rather uneven with his stronger chapters acting as bookends to what I expected to be a more constructive collection of essays. His opening chapter entitled Now… This talked about televised news and the changing nature of journalism in the digital age. I’ve covered this chapter elsewhere in conjunction with some contemporary discussions on networked journalism and I think Postman is at his most prophetic in this chapter.

The next few chapters fall pretty flat. He takes on televised religion and politics in turn by basically applying his general critiques in the first half of his book to more concrete phenomena, but the chapters are so generic that they are virtually interchangeable and I don’t think they do much to add to his argument.[1] In fact, I think there are some problems in his chapter on politics in particular.

Postman argues that the dominant metaphor for American political discourse is the television commercial (pg. 126). His critique, as anyone reading the book or my blog should anticipate, is twofold: commercials are too short to mediate any serious talking-points (much less initiate community-wide conversations), and that since commercials are image-based they are unable to make claims. Technically, he argues that claims must be made through language:

More precisely, it must take the form of a proposition, for that is the universe of discourse from which such words as “true” and “false” come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then the application of empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the other instruments of reason are impotent… By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. (pgs. 127-128)

Since the commercial is the controlling metaphor for political discourse, this non-refutable nature of television advertisements also applies to the realm of American politics.

I’m not naïve enough to argue that elections are won on reason alone. I grew up during MTV’s relatively successful Rock the Vote campaigns and vividly remember the question that resonated the most with young voters during Bill Clinton’s run for office: boxers or briefs? President Obama made excellent use of YouTube in his campaign, and the most powerful artifact from his run was the “Hope Poster.” And, of course, George W. Bush turned the 9/11 lapel pin into a portable monument that has shaped the picture of patriotism in the U.S. Even pop-culture is in on the joke (just watch the opening 60 seconds and pardon me for using television to make, or at least supplement, an argument):

But any student of rhetoric should object to some of Postman’s conclusions. Images can’t make claims? Pathos isn’t a legitimate form of (reasonable!) argument? In what strikes me as a glaring counterexample, Postman (just one page later) talks about a politician who used a commercial to “project himself as a man of experience, virtue and piety,” all of which seem to be refutable claims. What is the difference between “project” and “claim” or “argue”?

In the end, my problem with Postman (as I’ve written before) is that most of his objections could be answered by insisting on teaching people how to read images. Increased visuality requires a shift in educational emphases (a point that he fails to acknowledge in his chapter on education, and instead makes the argument again television contains no arguments, just narratives; pg. 148). If a class like RWS 744 existed at a high school level, would televised arguments be as subversive as Postman suggests? One of my favorite quotes is from William Blake and I think it is appropriate here:

This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you look with, and not through, the eye.  

We need to concern ourselves with teaching people to look “through the eye” otherwise Postman’s critiques are, in general, fitting.

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[1] If I were, for a moment, to put on my confessional protestant and seminary graduate hat I would recommend that all mainline evangelicals read Shuffle off to Bethlehem as it serves as a relevant critique of American Christianity’s obsession with celebrity and their appropriation of entertainment  models.