Worries About Digital Media

One of the main worries regarding Digital Media is that it is putting a whole lot of power into the people's hands. This can of course be seen through blatant examples like Wikileaks. Wikileaks is a major step towards a more democratic society, in which, believe it or not, America does not currently partake. We are a democratic republic, not a democracy. We hire politicians to represent the people and vote for us on important issues like wars, budgets, bills, etc. This is a republic. And say what you will about it; it is not always that representative of what the people want. Digital Media is leading the democratic revolution so to speak. And not just with issues like politics. Our entertainment for the past century has been dictated in more or less a republic fashion, but that's all changing now. Before, in order to hear a song, it would have to be produced by a record label, our representatives. But now, young artists no longer need the middle man. They can jump the representatives and go right for the people themselves by putting their work online. Countless numbers of people have gotten widespread recognition by doing this. Recognition that, had they been forced to attempt to get their music produced by a major record label, they probably would not have gotten. See our representatives' jobs are to try to find and produce music that we will like. But it's becoming more and more evident that they really have no idea what people will like. So now the people have started deciding for themselves. This is a major worry for a lot of people on the other end of this phenomenon. Total democracy isn't the best thing for some people.

Another more legitimate worry about digital media is the affect that it is having on our relationships. I would make the argument that a lot of what is going on right now in regards to the internet has a quality vs. quantity vibe to it. Massive amounts of information are readily available for us to have and to harness, much more information than one might be able to find in a text book or and encyclopedia. But the question is not about the amount. Clearly the whole world can compile more information than three or four guys writing a book. The concern is with the quality of the information. And i think, more or less, it is at this point in time a legitimate concern. Now I equate this with the affect that social networking sites, mainly Facebook, is having on our relationships. When Mark Zuckerburg received the honor of 'Person of the Year' from Time magazine, one of the things that they praised him for was increasing the number of people that we can stay in touch with, the quantity of our relationships. And I would say, "yes". He absolutely did. There's no arguing that. But I would also say, "that's not really of that much importance." Facebook may have been able to increase the quantity of our friendships, but has it increased the quality all that much? The answer is almost definitely 'no'. In fact, if anything, the argument could easily be made that Facebook has actually decreased the quality of our friendships. No longer to we have to actually speak to someone in order to stay in touch with them. No longer do we have to converse with them and ask them what's going on in their lives. Now we can simply sit, virtually sift through their new photos and their new statuses, and enjoy their friendship completely voyeuristically. Kind of lends itself to a sort of detachment no? This is really the main concern regarding Digital Media in light of its affect on our relationships.

Probably the biggest worry in regards to Digital Media is that of addiction and the affect it is having on the way kids spend their time. This goes hand in hand with behavioral issues and cognitive issues in my mind. I think that this concern certainly does have some validity behind it. My argument, however, is not for socialization face-to-face, or even really for a larger appreciation of nature. My argument is for boredom. Boredom is, in my opinion, the most important thing for an adolescent. It is when we are bored that we think. It is when we have nothing better to do that we become incredibly creative. Thirty years ago, when parents could simply turn off the television, kids were thrust unwillingly into a state of mind that, little did they know, would actually end of benefitting them enormously. Either A.) they would sit, bored, and think, therefore exercising their minds and their originality, or B.) they would go outside and use their imagination to create a world for themselves. Both things are incredibly important. But, because of Digital Media and its ever constant presence in our lives, we have become so afraid of boredom that it no longer has a chance to sit down and take root. If we stopped doing what we were doing every time we were a little bored, we would never get through the first twenty minutes of Citizen Kane, or the first three chapters of Crime and Punishment. And think about how much we would really miss out on. But this is what is happening. Our addiction to the internet is causing these new generations of kids to actually process information in a different way. Firstly, because of the internet, kids are being conditioned to read things in short bursts, like Twitter posts for example. And these short bursts of information can often be incredibly shallow. Now I'm not saying that Twitter posts don't have the potential to be intellectually provocative and stimulating, but unfortunately, when kids are so used to only having their attention held for extremely short periods of time, sitting down and reading a novel or sitting down and writing an essay becomes exceedingly difficult. People say that theatre is an old person thing. But I disagree. I don't think you all of a sudden start liking theatre when you get older. I think the reason that theatre has a generally older audience is that those generations of people have much longer attention spans than this new one. And that does not bode well for a lot of different art forms, crucially the stage. This is my main worry about Digital Media. 

I try to take steps in my every day life to combat what i believe to be the negative affects of Digital Media, while simultaneously trying to embrace the numerous very positive aspects of it. I myself do not have a Facebook. And to many people's surprise, it has not affected my social life negatively. I find it funny actually that people view it oppositely. Most people equate the number of hours that one spends on Facebook with antisocial behavior. Interesting that the more time you spend on a networking site designed to increase our social lives, the less social you are considered to be. Anyway, by an act of god, my phone broke recently. I can still get voicemails and make calls, but I'm no longer required to text, which has been an incredible weight off of my shoulders for the past few weeks. I think that in order to appreciate technology, we need to remind ourselves of life without it. And sometimes, like in this case, we might find that the technology we have grown to depend has actually been having a more negative affect on our lives than a positive one. Now at the same time that I try to distance myself from what I consider the underbelly of Digital Media, I really do try to embrace the truly incredible things about it. It is changing the world in which we live at such a rapid pace, it is impossible not to experience it on some level. Philosophical phenomenon like Wikileaks or Anonymous or even Wikipedia, are going to be the foundations on which the future is built. And if we can just filter a few things out, I think that that future looks extremely new, extremely fresh, and extremely promising.

The Almighty Collective

Digital Media is such a broad term that it is almost impossible to define it. From a very technical standpoint,  as you mentioned in your audio lecture, digital media has to do with how files are stored. As opposed to analog form, digital storage is choppy and separated into little tiny bits, which when put together, resemble the more fluid reality. The screen of your iphone is a great example. One of the most revolutionary things about the iphone 4 was that the "little tiny bits" that made up the screen had gotten so small, they were completely unobservable to the human eye. This makes it seem like the screen and the contents expressed on the screen are really part of one continuous analogous form, when in reality, they are not.

That, however, is the very technical definition. I happen to have a different comprehension of digital media.  I think that Digital Media is an idea, an intellectual revolution, a challenge to the status quo. The documentary RIP addresses issues along this vain. The film is about the artist Girl Talk whose career consists simply of cutting and pasting. The mashups that he creates out of prerecorded music are emblematic of the digital revolution. The revolution of ideas and their legitimacy as a potential piece of property. Since the internet has made the world and its inhabitants so much more accessible, it has also thrown us head first into a tornado of philosophical change. No longer does the individual bear much prominence, but it is the collective that is now worshipped. The collective has now become our new God.

We live in an age where we are constantly reaching out at hundreds of thousands of straws, trying to drag them back and make something new out of them. New from the old. One from the many. Ideas no longer belong to just one person, they belong to the entirety of the human race. I'll give two somewhat contrasting examples of this. The first: assume a vaccine is invented by one man. Should that be considered intellectual property and kept from the sick? I dare say that no. Once it is discovered, the idea can have no copyright and cannot be legally kept from other people. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is of course accredited to him, but it does not belong to him. He cannot keep people from experiencing our expanding upon it, adding to it, subtracting from it, teaching it. It is now an idea shared by the many. The second, less agreeable example of this is music or movies or text. What differentiates these things from the first example? Are these not simply thoughts organized into a product just like a vaccine or a theory. Of course, the inventor should (in a fair world) be given credit for the invention of these things, but once created, once they exist amongst the rest of the ideas floating around the cyber-cloud, do they not in theory belong to us, the collective? One cannot claim that a word belongs to one. So how can one claim that a sentence belongs to one? Or a paragraph? Or a poem? Or a song? Or a book? The line is impossible to find, and one of the results of the digital media resolution is the abolishment of any notion of a line to begin with. There is no line. Nothing separates a word from a book. They are both, at their most basic, simply ideas. Philosophical thought. They belong to everyone.

Simpsons Did It!

How has Digital Media dissolved boundaries? Well, let's start with the obvious physical boundaries. Countries separated by lines, continents separated by oceans. Those once incredible boundaries have now, for all intents and purposes, been dissolved. We no longer need to struggle to discover what one may be thinking in Iran. We no longer need to read big books about South African society written years ago so that we can attempt to make an educated assumption about the society today. These boundaries no longer exist. We might as well live next door.

Now on to the slightly more interesting type of boundary dissolution. Intellectual. The concept of intellectual property has been thrown into a new more terrifying arena. In a world where people's ideas exist in a literal digital cloud that anyone can access, use, reuse, futz with, etc., it becomes exceedingly more difficult to draw a line in the sand in regards to ownership of one's ideas. Helene Hegemann is the perfect example of this, a girl whose novel has recently received a very high honor literary award. It was discovered some time after she received he award that large portions of her book were "copied and pasted" from other authors. She made the argument, however, that the notion of intellectual property is one past its due date. That there is no such thing anymore as an original thought.

This is such a phenomenon among youth today that actual websites have been created around this idea. Creative Commons, for example, is a site designed to educate by encouraging people to build off of one another's ideas.  "Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally" it's catch line reads. Which brings to mind new phenomenons like Girl Talk, a remixing, literal 'copy and paste' band that has gained momentum through the internet. Girl Talk is a man who specializes in mashups, taking two or more separate songs, and compiling them together aesthetically. His success and critical reception is incredible, and forces us to confront the big questions surrounding creativity and originality.

What does it mean to be creative? What does it mean to be original? Because of the internet, there is so much information and so many ideas at our disposal, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the concept of originality is one that may be dying out. A South Park episode called "Simpsons Did It" captures and satirizes this phenomenon perfectly. In the episode, Butters attempts to come up with an original way of enslaving the town of South Park. But with every idea he invents comes back the inevitable response from his trusty side kick, "Simpsons did it!." The Simpsons has been around for well over a decade now, so it is really a perfect analogy for this discussion. Imagine every human being that's ever lived. Imagine every idea that any of those human beings have ever had. Now imagine having an original thought.

Kind of hard to do right? Well, I don't know the answer. I'm not sure what more will be discovered in the coming days, months, years, decades. But I know that whatever comes up, at least at the present moment, the internet will be at the forefront of those discoveries and of those creative progressions.

Video Collage

With this video I started out with the music because, as I said before, music can often lead people in the direction that I would like them to go while watching this video. Spliced together with the raw footage of an Apachi helicopter attack in Iraq released by Wikileaks is an interview with Stephen Colbert and an interview with Michael Moore, both giving their reactions to the footage and the manner in which it was handled. I tried to present two contrasting views on the matter. Granted Colbert may be satirical, but his sarcasm is based in reality, and many people actually feel that way. Colbert takes the stance that this material is misleading and more of an editorial than a leak. He thinks is it unfair to cut and release this footage with an attempt to score political reaction points. Michael Moore on the other hand applauds Assange for releasing this information. We will always be a better people for knowing the truth, no matter what that truth might be. He also makes the comparison to Ellsberg, saying that while the Pentagon Papers may have been released in a more mature and organized fashion, it is not the means that counts, it is the end. And in the end, we know the truth. I really attempted to make this as blatant a continuation of my text assignment as I could, exploring two contrasting reactions to Assange, all the while in the shadow of his forefathers and his most important predecessor Daniel Ellsberg.

Audio Project

With this audio collage I tried to combine a number of ideas, most prominently though are truth and creativity. These are two ideas that we don't always juxtapose in our minds, that we rarely ever relate to one another. But we should. As Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."Wikileaks is all about the truth, exposing, revealing, and discovering it. But I thought I would attempt to shine a different light on that concept, try to put it in a different context.

First I created the music for this piece. The music sets the mood and helps steer the audience in the direction of what I would like for them to get out of this. I found some great clips of Einstein discussing political matters, famine, hunger, war, unjust government action, excess power, the real juicy political stuff that has belonged to Wikileaks for the past several months. The audio clips discussing science and discovery are from an interview on the Daily Show with a neuro-physicist named Neil Dugrass Tyson.

In this audio piece, I attempt to compare and contrast two different vantage points in regard to truth. The vantage point of Neil Dugrass Tyson, which is that one needs to start with imagination, or as Jon Stewart so elegantly put it, "a false bridge that will allow you a couple of footholds to then find the truth".

As we know from my image piece, Julian Assanges outlook on the matter is slightly different. "Start with the truth," is his motto. And the justification for his belief is very strong.

Believe it or not the missing link between the two forms of thought is Albert Einstein himself, a man who regarded imagination with the utmost respect, but also had a soft spot for the people who suffered political wrongdoings around the world.

The point I'm trying to make with this audio piece is that the two forms of thought can coexist. They do not have to be mutually exclusive. We live in the era of Digital Media, where different random ideas are brought together to live under the same roof everyday. The material and the abstract. And to relate it back to my text and image assignments, the arts can be an incredible way of leading us to the truth. It takes a creative mind to find the truth. Even just to start out with it.

Wikileaks Image

My Wikileaks image attempts to combine a number of things. For one, the picture of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the pentagon papers, top left looming behind it all, presents a sort of foil for Julian Assange, a mixture of forefather and pure juxtaposition. Daniel Ellsberg is, for all intents and purposes, Julian Assange's predecessor, and while Julian Assange seems to be attempting to step farther than just about anyone before him, we all owe a lot of credit to those before us who helped define our generation. "Start with the truth" is something that Julian Assange was quoted saying, making the argument that any decision based on untruths is a decision that will not have a favorable result in the long term. It is the truth that he is attempting to release, the truth that he intends to allow people the chance to understand and react to. It is also the truth that will instill fear into governments worldwide. John Adams once said that "fear is the foundation of most governments," a shout out to whistle-blowers if I've ever heard one. And certainly the fear of truth that Wikileaks is now instilling in governments will result, in the long term of course, in more favorable policies for the people of those countries, or else in revolution. Which brings me to the next aspect of my image collage, physical revolt. Interesting that people give Wikileaks the credit for sparking the Tunisian revolution, because I think it would be fair to say that Tunisia should have the credit for sparking the Egyptian revolution, and that Egypt should have the credit for sparking the next one and so on and so forth. These results cannot always be peaceful. When a government remains unchanged by released information, then it is time for the people to force a change on their governments, which seems to be the case in this scenario. Of course, while Assange may be the harbinger of all of this potential violence, he himself is not directly encouraging any sort of physical violence. He is the man in the Bansky stencil with the bandanna throwing a bouquet of flowers over the wall (seen in the background of the image collage), the flowers of course in this case representing the truth. It is what people chose to do with those flowers that may be less pretty.

Creativity and Intellect

Some people claim that these two cannot coexist. I disagree. In fact, I think that not only can they coexist, but that they depend entirely on one another. You cannot have creativity without intellect and you cannot have intellect without creativity. Unfortunately, however, this is not the picture that has been painted in our minds. Our schools are mostly to blame. In high school, kids develop an image of themselves, and in high school, kids are more or less told everyday that one who is intelligent cannot possibly be creative and one who is creative cannot possibly be intelligent. Now, not directly of course, but for every art teacher who makes a quip about, "well I could never do science" or "I couldn't add two and two" and for every math teacher who makes a quip about, "oh I couldn't draw a straight line", or "put me on stage and I'll combust",  kids start to get the idea that these two realms of being are mutually exclusive.

As Einstein once said, "imagination is more important than knowledge". And of course I don't need to explain that Einstein was and still is one of the world's most renown intellectuals. I was watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other day, and he was having a very interesting conversation with his guest, an astrophysicist named Neil Dugrass Tyson. After Tyson explained some very fascinating things about our relationship to the cosmos, Stewart made a funny quip about how for all we know, Tyson could be completely making stuff up. This prompted him to give a very interesting explanation for the process of scientific discovery. "When you are on the frontier of knowledge between what is known and unknown, reaching out into the abyss, sometimes you do actually have to make stuff up that might be true so that you can organize a research plan to find out whether or not it is" Jon Stewart astutely came up with a beautiful metaphor. "A false bridge that will allow you just a couple of footholds to possibly find the truth."

"This is the creativity of discovery that not everyone has," Tyson summed up. And it brings us right back to Einstein. "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Now, I think even Einstein may have jumped the gun, but I'd say that this example at least proves that they are, if nothing else, completely equal. One's intellectual life coincides with one's creative life. It is inevitable. And the more you shape one, the more the other will be shaped.