Is Making Us Stupid?

Key text What the Internet is doing Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed to our brains you stop, Dave?” out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of The Atlantic Online So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the thought, but they also shape the process of July/August 2008 implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous thought. and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Nicholas Carr Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep away my capacity for concentration and space death by the malfunctioning machine, is contemplation. My mind now expects to take in calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits information the way the Net distributes it: in a that control its artificial” brain. “Dave, my mind is swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along feel it.” the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles an uncomfortable sense that someone, or with reading to friends and acquaintances – something, has been tinkering with my brain, literary types, most of them, many say they’re remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming having similar experiences. The more they use the memory. My mind isn’t going so far as I can the Web, the more they have to fight to stay tell but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog article used to be easy. My mind would get about online media, recently confessed that he caught up in the narrative or the turns of the has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through major in college, and used to be [a] voracious long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He anymore. Now my concentration often starts to speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose reading on the web not so much because the the thread, begin looking for something else to way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward convenience, but because the way I THINK has brain back to the text. The deep reading that used changed?” to come naturally has become a struggle. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the I think I know what’s going on. For more than a use of computers in medicine, also has described decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I online, searching and surfing and sometimes now have almost totally lost the ability to read adding to the great databases of the Internet. The and absorb a longish article on the web or in Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist Research that once required days in the stacks or who has long been on the faculty of the periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman minutes. A few Google searches, some quick elaborated on his comment in a telephone clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the he quickly scans short passages of text from Web’s info thickets’ reading and writing e mails, many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace scanning headlines and blog posts, watching anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping that. Even a blog post of more than three or four from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still you toward them.) await the long term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a definitive picture of how Internet use affects universal medium, the conduit for most of the cognition. But a recently published study of information that flows through my eyes and ears online research habits, conducted by scholars and into my mind. The advantages of having from University College London, suggests that immediate access to such an incredibly rich store we may well be in the midst of a sea change in of information are many, and they’ve been widely the way we read and think. described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price.

Screen / 1 Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2 As part of the five year research program, the Experiments demonstrate that readers of scholars examined computer logs documenting ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a the behavior of visitors to two popular research mental circuitry for reading that is very different sites, one operated by the British Library and one from the circuitry found in those of us whose by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide written language employs an alphabet. The access to journal articles, e books, and other variations extend across many regions of the sources of written information. They found that brain, including those that govern such essential people using the sites exhibited “a form of cognitive functions as memory and the skimming activity,” hopping from one source to interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We another and rarely returning to any source they’d can expect as well that the circuits woven by our already visited. use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought they ever went back and actually read it. The a typewriter, a Malling Hansen Writing Ball, to authors of the study report: be precise.

It is clear that users are not reading online in the His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new focused on a page had become exhausting and forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. browse” horizontally through titles, contents He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It feared that he would soon have to give it up. The almost seems that they go online to avoid reading typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once in the traditional sense. he had mastered touch typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not his fingers. Words could once again flow from his to mention the popularity of text-messaging on mind to the page. cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 19708 or 1980s, when But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. television was our medium of choice. But it’s a One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a change in the style of his writing. His already different kind of thinking perhaps even a new terse prose had become even tighter, more sense of the self. “We are not only what we telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend psychologist at Tufts University and the author of wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of “thoughts’ in music and language often depend the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf on the quality of pen and paper.” worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening equipment takes part in the forming of our our capacity for the kind of deep reading that thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes emerged when an earlier technology, the printing the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, press, made long and complex works of prose Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to commonplace. When we read online, she says, aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric we tend to become “mere decoders of to telegram style.” information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. read deeply and without distraction, remains People used to think that our mental meshwork, largely disengaged. the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the way speech is. We have to teach our minds the case. James Olds, a professor of how to translate the symbolic characters we see neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute into the language we understand. And the media for Advanced Study at George Mason University, or other technologies we use in learning and says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” practicing the craft of reading play an important Nerve cells routinely break old connections and part in shaping the neural circuits inside our form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, brains. “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Screen / 2 Is Google Making Us Stupid?

3 As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is called our “intellectual technologies” the tools re created in the Net’s image. It injects the that extend our mental rather than our physical medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, capacities we inevitably begin to take on the and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical content with the content of all the other media it clock, which came into common use in the 14th has absorbed. A new e mail message, for century, provides a compelling example. In instance, may announce its arrival as we’re Technics and Civilization, the historian and glancing over the latest headlines at a cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our clock “disassociated time from human events and attention and diffuse our concentration. helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a “abstract framework of divided time” became computer screen, either. As people’s minds “the point of reference for both action and become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet thought.” media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into add text crawls and pop up ads, and magazines being the scientific mind and the scientific man. and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce But it also took something away. As the late MIT capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed easy to browse info snippets. When, in March of in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human this year, The New York Times decided to devote Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the the second and third pages of every edition to conception of the world that emerged from the article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, widespread use of timekeeping instruments explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried “remains an impoverished version of the older readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct them the “less efficient” method of actually experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed turning the pages and reading the articles. Old constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to media have little choice but to play by the new eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped media rules. listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives or exerted such broad The process of adapting to new intellectual influence over our thoughts as the Internet does technologies is reflected in the changing today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the metaphors we use to explain ourselves to Net, there’s been little consideration of how, ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s people began thinking of their brains as operating intellectual ethic remains obscure. “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to About the same time that Nietzsche started our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at using his typewriter, an earnest young man a biological level. named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in The Internet promises to have particularly far Philadelphia and began a historic series of reaching effects on cognition. In a paper experiments aimed at improving the efficiency published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan of the plant’s machinists. Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he could be programmed to perform the function of recruited a group of factory hands, set them to any other information processing device. And work on various metalworking machines, and that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an recorded and timed their every movement as well immeasurably powerful computing system, is as the operations of the machines. By breaking subsuming most of our other intellectual down every job into a sequence of small, discrete technologies. It’s becoming our map and our steps and then testing different ways of clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our performing each one, Taylor created a set of calculator and our telephone, and our radio and precise instructions an “algorithm,” we might say TV. today for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

Screen / 3 Is Google Making Us Stupid?

4 More than a hundred years after the invention of The company has declared that its mission is “to the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at organize the world’s information and make it last found its philosophy and its philosopher. universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to Taylor’s tight industrial choreography – his develop “the perfect search engine,” which it “system,” as he liked to call it was embraced by defines as something that “understands exactly manufacturers throughout the country and, in what you mean and gives you back exactly what time, around the world. Seeking maximum you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be output, factory owners used time and motion mined and processed with industrial efficiency. studies to organize their work and configure the The more pieces of information we can “access” jobs of their workers. and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Where does it end? and , Management, was to identify and adopt, for every the gifted young men who founded Google while job, the “one best method” of work and thereby pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at to effect “the gradual substitution of science for Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a Once his system was applied to all acts of manual HAL like machine that might be connected labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring directly to our brains. “The ultimate search about a restructuring not only of industry but of engine is something as smart as people or society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in “For us, working on search is a way to work on the future the system must be first.” artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it world’s information directly attached to your remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than And now, thanks to the growing power that your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page computer engineers and software coders wield told a convention of scientists that Google is over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to beginning to govern the realm of the mind as do it on a large scale.” well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, Such an ambition is a natural one, even an and manipulation of information, and its legions admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with of programmers are intent on finding the “one vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a best method” the perfect algorithm to carry out small army of computer scientists in their employ. every mental movement of what we’ve come to A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is describe as “knowledge work.” motivated by a desire to use technology, in ’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones California the Googleplex is the Internet’s high to crack it? church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is “a company that’s founded around the science of unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize the output of a mechanical process, a series of everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, behavioral data it collects through its search and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of enter when we go online, there’s little place for experiments a day, according to the Harvard the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not Business Review, and it uses the results to refine an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The the algorithms that increasingly control how human brain is just an outdated computer that people find information and extract meaning from needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

Screen / 4 Is Google Making Us Stupid?

5 The idea that our minds should operate as high Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and speed data processing machines is not only built although it may replace the printing press, it into the workings of the Internet, it is the produces something altogether different. The network’s reigning business model as well. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed faster we surf across the Web the more links we pages promotes is valuable not just for the click and pages we view the more opportunities knowledge we acquire from the author’s words Google and other companies gain to collect but for the intellectual vibrations those words set information about us and to feed us off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading commercial Internet have a financial stake in of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as for that matter, we make our own associations, we flit from link to link the more crumbs, the draw our own inferences and analogies, foster better. The last thing these companies want is to our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman tendency to glorify technological progress, eloquently described what’s at stake: there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the dense and “cathedral like” structure of the highly development of writing. He feared that, as people educated and articulate personality a man or came to rely on the written word as a substitute woman who carried inside themselves a for the knowledge they used to carry inside their personally constructed and unique version of the heads, they would, in the words of one of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their us all (myself included) the replacement of memory and become forgetful.” And because they complex inner density with a new kind of self would be able to “receive a quantity of information evolving under the pressure of information without proper instruction,” they would “be overload and the technology of the “instantly thought very knowledgeable when they are for the available.” most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real As we are drained of our “inner repertory of wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong the new dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, technology did often have the effects he feared but we risk turning into “pancake people’ spread he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many wide and thin as we connect with that vast ways that writing and reading would serve to network of information accessed by the mere spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand touch of a button.” human knowledge (if not wisdom). I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s 15th century, set off another round of teeth emotional response to the disassembly of its gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut “I books would lead to intellectual laziness, making can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid” and its final men “less studious” and weakening their minds. reversion to what can only be called a state of Others argued that cheaply printed books and innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts broadsheets would undermine religious authority, with the emotionlessness that characterizes the demean the work of scholars and scribes, and human figures in the film, who go about their spread sedition and debauchery. As New York business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re the arguments made against the printing press following the steps of an algorithm. In the world were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the of 2001, people have become so machinelike that doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad the most human character turns out to be a blessings that the printed word would deliver. machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to So, yes, you should be skeptical of my mediate our understanding of the world, it is our skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of own intelligence that flattens into artificial the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be intelligence. proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data- stoked minds will spring a golden age of The URL for this page is intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. http://www.theatIantic.com/doc/200807/googIe

Screen / 5 Understanding Media

Key text The Medium is the The electric light is pure information. It is a Let us return to the electric light. Whether the Massage medium without a message, as it were, unless it light is being used for brain surgery or night is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This baseball is a matter of indifference. Marshall McLuhan fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another It could be argued that these activities are in medium. The content of writing is speech, just as some way the “content” of the electric light, the written word is the content of print, and print since they could not exist without the electric is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, light. This fact merely underlines the point that “What is the content of speech?,” it is necessary “the medium is the message” because it is the to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which medium that shapes and controls the scale and is in itself nonverbal.” An abstract painting form of human association and action. The represents direct manifestation of creative content or uses of such media are as diverse as thought processes as they might appear in they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human computer designs. What we are considering association. Indeed, it is only too typical that the here, however, are the psychic and social “content” of any medium blinds us to the consequences of the designs or patterns as they character of the medium. It is only today that amplify or accelerate existing processes For the industries have become aware of the various “message” of any medium or technology is the kinds of business in which they are engaged. change of scale or pace or pattern that it When IBM discovered that it was not in the introduces into human affairs. The railway did business of making office equipment or business not introduce movement or transportation or machines, but that it was in the business of wheel or road into human society, but it processing information, then it began to navigate accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous with clear vision. The General Electric Company human functions, creating totally new kinds of makes a considerable portion of its profits from cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has happened whether the railway functioned in a not yet discovered that, quite as much as A.T.& T., tropical or a northern environment, and is quite it is in the business of moving information. independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, The electric light escapes attention as a by accelerating the rate of transportation, tends communication medium just because it has no to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and “content.” And this makes it an invaluable association, quite independently of what the instance of how people fail to study media at all. airplane is used for. For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium. Then it is not the light but the “content” (or what is really another medium) that is noticed. The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.

See online also:

http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

Marshal Mcluhan on Youtube: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g

Screen / 6 How web video powers global innovation

TedTalks If nothing else, at least I've discovered what it is You can think of them as three dials on a giant Chris Anderson we put our speakers through: sweaty palms, wheel. You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to sleepless nights, a wholly unnatural fear of turn. And the firs thing you need is... a crowd, a http://www.ted.com/talks/ clocks. I mean, it's quite brutal. group of people who share a common interest. chris_anderson_how_web_ The bigger the crowd, the more potential video_powers_global_ And I'm also a little nervous about this. There are innovators there are. That's important, but innovation.html nine billion humans coming our way. Now, the actually most people in the crowd occupy these most optimistic dreams can get dented by the other roles. They're creating the ecosystem from Running time 18 mins 53 prospect of people plundering the planet. But which innovation emerges. The second thing you seconds. recently, I've become intrigued by a different way need is light. You need clear, open visibility of of thinking of large human crowds, because there what the best people in that crowd are capable are circumstances where they can do something of, because that is how you will learn how you really cool. It's a phenomenon that I think any will be empowered to participate. And third, you organization or individual can tap into. It certainly need desire. You know, innovation's hard work. impacted the way we think about TED's future, It's based on hundreds of hours of research, of and perhaps the world's future overall. practice. Absent desire, not going to happen.

So, let's explore. The story starts with just a Now, here's an example – pre-Internet – of this single person, a child, behaving a little strangely. machine in action. Dancers at a street corner – This kid is known online as Lil Demon. He's doing it's a crowd, a small one, but they can all tricks here, dance tricks, that probably no six- obviously see what each other can do. And the year-old in history ever managed before. How did desire part comes, I guess, from social status, he learn them? And what drove him to spend the right? Best dancer walks tall, gets the best date. hundreds of hours of practice this must have There's probably going to be some innovation taken? Here's a clue. happening here. But on the web, all three dials are ratcheted right up. The dance community is (Video) Lil Demon: ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. now global. There's millions connected. And ♫♫Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ amazingly, you can still see what the best can do, because the crowd itself shines a light on them, Chris Anderson: So, that was sent to me by this either directly, through comments, ratings, email, man, a filmmaker, Jonathan Chu, who told me Facebook, Twitter, or indirectly, through numbers that was the moment he realized the Internet was of views, through links that point Google there. causing dance to evolve. This is what he said at So, it's easy to find the good stuff, and when TED in February. In essence, dancers were you've found it, you can watch it in close-up challenging each other online to get better; repeatedly and read what hundreds of people incredible new dance skills were being invented; have written about it. That's a lot of light. even the six-year-olds were joining in. It felt like a revolution. And so Jon had a brilliant idea: He But the desire element is really dialed way up. I went out to recruit the best of the best dancers mean, you might just be a kid with a webcam, off of YouTube to create this dance troupe – The but if you can do something that goes viral, you League of Extraordinary Dancers, the LXD. I get to be seen by the equivalent of sports mean, these kids were web-taught, but they were stadiums crammed with people. You get so good that they got to play at the Oscars this hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about year. And at TED here in February, their passion you. And even if it's not that eloquent – and it's and brilliance just took our breath away. not – it can still really make your day. So, this possibility of a new type of global recognition, I So, this story of the evolution of dance seems think, is driving huge amounts of effort. And it's strangely familiar. You know, a while after important to note that it's not just the stars who TEDTalks started taking off, we noticed that are benefiting: because you can see the best, speakers were starting to spend a lot more time everyone can learn. in preparation. It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two.... Months of preparation Also, the system is self-fueling. It's the crowd crammed into 18 minutes, raising the bar cruelly that shines the light and fuels the desire, but the for the next generation of speakers, with the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination effects that we've seen this week. It's not as if that attract new people to the crowd. So, this is a J.J. and Jill actually ended their talks saying, model that pretty much any organization could "Step your game up," but they might as well use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd- have. So, in both of these cases, you've got these accelerated innovation. Invite the crowd, let in the cycles of improvement, apparently driven by light, dial up the desire. And the hardest part people watching web video. about that is probably the light, because it means you have to open up, you have to show your stuff What is going on here? Well, I think it's the latest to the world. It's by giving away what you think is iteration of a phenomenon we can call "crowd- your deepest secret that maybe millions of people accelerated innovation." And there are just three are empowered to help improve it. things you need for this thing to kick into gear. Screen / 7 How web video powers global innovation

2 And, very happily, there's one class of people piracy, we're doomed. I don't think it will be. who really can't make use of this tool. The dark Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a side of the web is allergic to the light. I don't huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely think we're going to see terrorists, for example, wired to decode it. publishing their plans online and saying to the world, "Please, could you help us to actually Here, let me introduce you to Sam Haber. He's a make them work this time?" unicyclist. Before YouTube, there was no way for him to discover his sport's true potential, because But you can publish your stuff online. And if you you can't communicate this stuff in words, right? can get that wheel to turn, look out. But looking at video clips posted by strangers, a world of possibility opens up for him. Suddenly, So, at TED, we've become a little obsessed with he starts to emulate and then to innovate. And a this idea of openness. In fact, my colleague, June global community of unicyclists discover each Cohen, has taken to calling it "radical openness," other online, inspire each other to greatness. And because it works for us each time. We opened up there are thousands of other examples of this our talks to the world, and suddenly there are happening – of video-driven evolution of skills, millions of people out there helping spread our ranging from the physical to the artful. And I have speakers' ideas, and thereby making it easier for to tell you, as a former publisher of hobbyist us to recruit and motivate the next generation of magazines, I find this strangely beautiful. I mean, speakers. By opening up our translation program, there's a lot of passion right here on this screen. thousands of heroic volunteers – some of them watching online right now, and thank you! – have But if Rube Goldberg machines and video poetry translated our talks into more than 70 languages, aren't quite your cup of tea, how about this. Jove thereby tripling our viewership in non-English- is a website that was founded to encourage speaking countries. By giving away our TEDx scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research brand, we suddenly have a thousand-plus live on video. There's a problem with a traditional experiments in the art of spreading ideas. And scientific paper. It can take months for a scientist these organizers, they're seeing each other, in another lab to figure out how to replicate the they're learning from each other. We are learning experiments that are described in print. Here's from them. We're getting great talks back from one such frustrated scientist, Moshe Pritsker, the them. The wheel is turning. founder of Jove. He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this. But look at this Okay, step back a minute. I mean, it's really not video. I mean, look: if you can show instead of news for me to tell you that innovation emerges just describing, that problem goes away. So it's out of groups. You know, we've heard that this not far-fetched to say that, at some point, online week – this romantic notion of the lone genius video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific with the "eureka!" moment that changes the advance. world is misleading. Even he said that, and he would know. We're a social species. We spark off Here's another example that's close to our hearts each other. It's also not news to say that the at TED, where video is sometimes more powerful Internet has accelerated innovation. For the past than print – the sharing of an idea. Why do 15 years, powerful communities have been people like watching TEDTalks? All those ideas connecting online, sparking off each other. If you are already out there in print. It's actually faster to take programmers, you know, the whole open- read than to view. Why would someone bother? source movement is a fantastic instance of Well, so, there's some showing as well as telling. crowd-accelerated innovation. But what's key But even leaving the screen out of it, there's still a here is, the reason these groups have been able lot more being transferred than just words. And to connect is because their work output is of the in that non-verbal portion, there's some serious type that can be easily shared digitally – a picture, magic. Somewhere hidden in the physical a music file, software. And that's why what I'm gestures, the vocal cadence, the facial excited about, and what I think is under-reported, expressions, the eye contact, the passion, the is the significance of the rise of online video. kind of awkward, British body language, the sense of how the audience are reacting, there are This is the technology that's going to allow the hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how rest of the world's talents to be shared digitally, well you will understand, and whether you're thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd- inspired – light, if you like, and desire. Incredibly, accelerated innovation. The first few years of the all of this can be communicated on just a few web were pretty much video-free, for this reason: square inches of a screen. video are huge; the web couldn't handle them. But in the last 10 years, bandwidth has Reading and writing are actually relatively recent exploded a hundredfold. Suddenly, here we are. inventions. Face-to-face communication has been Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. That's every day. Cisco actually estimates that, within what's made it into this mysterious, powerful four years, more than 90 percent of the web's thing it is. Someone speaks, there's resonance in data will be video. If it's all puppies, porn and all these receiving brains, the whole group acts Screen / 8 How web video powers global innovation

3 together. I mean, this is the connective tissue of Here's a group of kids in a village in Pakistan near the human superorganism in action. It's probably where I grew up. Within five years, each of these driven our culture for millennia. 500 years ago, it kids is going to have access to a cellphone ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage. It's capable of full-on web video and capable of right here. Print scaled. The world's ambitious uploading video to the web. I mean, is it crazy to innovators and influencers now could get their think that this girl, in the back, at the right, in 15 ideas to spread far and wide, and so the art of the years, might be sharing the idea that keeps the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine. world beautiful for your grandchildren? It's not But now, in the of an eye, the game has crazy; it's actually happening right now. changed again. It's not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now I want to introduce you to a good friend of TED do for face-to-face communication. So, that who just happens to live in Africa's biggest primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely shantytown. wired for... that just went global. (Video) Christopher Makau: Hi. My name is Now, this is big. We may have to reinvent an Christopher Makau. I'm one of the organizers of ancient art form. I mean, today, one person TEDxKibera. There are so many good things speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright which are happening right here in Kibera. There's light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for a self-help group. They turned a trash place into a learning and to respond – and in his case, intense garden. The same spot, it was a crime spot where desire to laugh. For the first time in human people were being robbed. They used the same history, talented students don't have to have their trash to form green manure. The same trash site potential and their dreams written out of history is feeding more than 30 families. We have our by lousy teachers. They can sit two feet in front of own film school. They are using Flip cameras to the world's finest. record, edit, and reporting to their own channel, Kibera TV. Because of a scarcity of land, we are Now, TED is just a small part of this. I mean, the using the sacks to grow vegetables, and also world's universities are opening up their curricula. [we're] able to save on the cost of living. Change Thousands of individuals and organizations are happens when we see things in a different way. sharing their knowledge and data online. Today, I see Kibera in a different way. My Thousands of people are figuring out new ways message to TEDGlobal and the entire world is: to learn and, crucially, to respond, completing the Kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas. cycle. And so, as we've thought about this, you know, it's become clear to us what the next stage (Applause) of TED's evolution has to be. TEDTalks can't be a one-way process, one-to-many. Our future is CA: You know what? I bet Chris has always been many-to-many. So, we're dreaming of ways to an inspiring guy. What's new – and it's huge – is make it easier for you, the global TED community, that, for the first time, we get to see him, and he to respond to speakers, to contribute your own can see us. Right now, Chris and Kevin and ideas, maybe even your own TEDTalks, and to Dennis and Dickson and their friends are help shine a light on the very best of what's out watching us, in Nairobi, right now. Guys, we've there. Because, if we can bubble up the very best learned from you today. Thank you. from a vastly larger pool, this wheel turns.

Now, is it possible to imagine a similar process to this, happening to global education overall? I mean, does it have to be this painful, top-down process? Why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate? It's the participation age, right? Schools can't be silos. We can't stop learning at age 21. What if, in the coming crowd of nine billion... what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors, instead of net plunderers? That changes everything, right? I mean, that would take more teachers than we've ever had. But the good news is they are out there. They're in the crowd, and the crowd is switching on lights, and we can see them for the first time, not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers, but as individuals we can learn from. Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. You're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history, a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter, wiser, more beautiful place. Screen / 9 Post Cinema: Digital Theory and the New Media

Film Theory— The new technologies also have clear impact on We also find an uncanny affinity between the an Introduction production and aesthetics. The introduction of new media and what used to be regarded as digital media has led to the use of computer avantgarde practices. Contemporary video and Robert Stam animation in Toy Story and of CGl special effects computer technologies facilitate media jujitsu and in Jurassic Park. Morphing is used to interrogate the recycling of media detritus as “found essentialist racial differences (for example, in objects.” Rather than the 1960s “aesthetic of Michael Jackson’s Black or White), in an aesthetic hunger,” low budget videomakers can deploy, a that emphasizes similarities across difference kind of cybernetic minimalism, achieving rather than the graphic conflicts of Eisensteinian maximum beauty and effect at minimum montage (Sobchack, 1997). The seven minute expense. Video switchers allow the screen to be Swiss film Rendezvous a Montreal (1987) offered split, divided horizontally or vertically, with wipes an entirely computer generated film which stages and inserts. Keys, chromakeys, mattes and fader a threshold romance between Marilyn Monroe bars, along with computer graphics, multiply and Humphrey Bogart. In mainstream film, audiovisual possibilities for fracture, rupture, computer generated sequences appeared in Star polyphony. An electronic quilting can Trek II (1983), while computer generated together sounds and images in ways that break characters appeared in Terminator II (1991). The with linear character centered narrative. All the cyber-fetishist journal Wired spoke in 1997 of conventional decorum of dominant cinema – “Hollywood 2.0,” implicitly comparing the film eyeline matches, position matches, the 30 degree industry’s transformation to the frenzied rule, cutaway shots – is superseded by production of obsolescence implicit in the proliferating polysemy. The centered perspective recurrent upgradings of computer software. inherited from Renaissance humanism is relativized, the multiplicity of perspectives At the same time, digital cameras and digital rendering identification with any one perspective editing (AVID) not only open up montage difficult. Spectators have to decide what the possibilities but also facilitate low budget images have in common, or how they conflict; filmmaking. And in terms of distribution, the they have to effect the syntheses latent in the Internet makes it possible for a community of audiovisual material. strangers to exchange texts, images, and video sequences, thus enabling a new kind of The obvious fact that mainstream cinema has international communication, one, it is hoped, largely opted for a linear and homogenizing that is more reciprocal and multicentered than aesthetic where track reinforces track within a the old Hollywood-dominated international Wagnerian totality in no way effaces the equally system. Thanks to fiberoptics we can look salient truth that the cinema (and the new media) forward to “dialup cinema,” the capacity to see, is infinitely rich in polyphonic possibilities. The or download, a vast archive of films and cinema has always been able to stage audiovisual materials. The shift to the digital temporalized contradictions between the diverse makes for infinite reproducibility without loss of tracks, which can mutually shadow, jostle, quality, since the images are stored as pixels, undercut, haunt, and relativize one another. Jean with no “original.” We are also promised Luc Godard anticipated these possibilities with his computer generated actors, desktop computers 1970s video research films like Numéro Deux and that can produce feature films, and creative Ici et Ailleurs, and Peter Greenaway pushed them collaborations across geographically dispersed in new directions in films like Prospero’s Books sites. and The Pillow Book, where multiple images mold an achronological multiple entry “narrative.” The new media can combine synthesized images with captured ones. The digitalized culture industry can now promote “threshold encounters” between Elton John and Louis Armstrong, or allow Natalie Cole to sing with her long departed father. They are capable of chameleonic blendings a la Zelig and digital insertions a la Forest Gump. The capacity for palimpsestic overlays of images and sounds facilitated by electronics and cybernetics opens the doors to a renovated, multichannel aesthetic. Meaning can be generated not through the drive and thrust of individual desire as encapsulated by a linear narrative, but rather through the interweaving of mutually relativizing layers of sound, image, and language. Less bound by canonical institutional and aesthetic traditions, the new media make possible what Arlindo Machado (1997) calls the “hybridization of alternatives.”

Screen / 10 Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

From Death 24x a Second, In 1993 (at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg) Here the cinema can find a way back to its pp101-103 Douglas Gordon exhibited an installation piece, essential stillness and the double temporality to 24 hour Psycho, which expanded Hitchcock’s which Taubin refers. While the flow of the image Laura Mulvey original by slowing it down electronically from its at 24 frames a second tends to assert a original 90 minutes to 24 hours. Naturally, these ‘nowness’ to the picture, stillness allows access viewing corrections erode the tightly drawn, to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then- graphic structure of the original story line and its ness’. This is the point, essentially located in the reference to traditional narrative genre. However, single frame, where the cinema meets the still Hitchcock’s filming practice has left its imprint in photograph, both registering a moment of time the formal, linear quality of the images, their stark frozen and thus fossilized. contrasts of light and shade, reflecting the carefully designed images, always patiently But, inexorably, a reverie triggered by 24-Hour storyboarded before filming and with a Psycho must be affected by the presence of preference for back projection, especially in death that pervades it, hovering somewhere Psycho. This work creates a dialogue between between the stillness of the photograph and the the film and technology to discover something movement of the cinema. In Douglas Gordon’s that is not there in the original as screened but reworking, in Psycho itself and in Hitchcock’s can be revealed within it. The installation has a films more generally, stories, images and themes reverie-producing effect, especially in the light of of death accumulate on different levels, leading changes that have taken place in film like threads back to the cinema, to reflect on its consumption since 1993. During the 20 years deathly connotations as a medium and ultimately leading up to the cinema’s centenary in 1995-6, its own mortality. Just as Psycho, in 1960, video had transformed the ways in which film marked a final staging post in the history of the could watched, introducing the spectator to a studio system as the basis for the Hollywood film new kind of control of the image and its flow. 24- industry, 24-Hour Psycho, like an elegy, marks a Hour Psycho is, as much as anything, a point of no return for the cinema itself. celebration of the radical new possibilities offered by video viewing. Douglas Gordon had happened In an art gallery, the spectator watches Gordon’s to reverse his Psycho tape to freeze frame the reflection on the slowmotion effect, unable (as in scene in which Norman watches Marion through the cinema) to intervene in the projection flow. the peephole, and then, it is said, accidentally But 24-Hour Psycho is also a significant, and a discovered the beauty of the film when run at two public , meditation on new forms of private frames per second. spectatorship. Anyone who wants to is now able to play with the film image and perhaps, in the As Amy Taubin has pointed out, 24-Hour Psycho process, evolve voyeurism and investment in opened up a Hollywood genre movie to the spectacle into something closer to fetishism and aesthetics of slow motion and thus to the investment in repetition, detail and personal traditions of the avantgarde film. She comments obsession. Gordon’s own discovery of another on the way that the work, beyond its slow dimension to the film image, as he slowed his motion, seems to take the cinema. paradoxically machine to examine a highly self-reflexive refracted through an electronic medium, back to moment of voyeurism, can stand symbolically for its own materiality and yield up the stillness of this shift in spectatorship. 24-Hour Psycho may the individual frame in the filmstrip: represent an elegiac moment for the cinema, but it also marks a new dawn, the beginning of an By slowing the film down to a 13th of its ‘expanded cinema’, which will grow in possibility normal speed, Gordon shows us not a ‘motion as electronic technologies are overtaken by digital picture’ but a succession of stills, each ones. In this aesthetic juncture André Bazin’s projected for about half a second. We become perception of the cinema takes on a new await of the intermittency of the film image relevance as it is possible to watch the slow and the fragility of the illusion of real time in process of mutation as ‘the image of things is motion pictures. also the image of their durations’ and the process of ‘change mummified’ becomes a spectacle in its own right.

Screen / 11 Andrew Keen online

Go to:

http://ajkeen.com/e.htm

(Chapters 1 / The Great Seduction, and 2 / The Noble Amateur from The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy) .

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=11131872

(A radio interview with Andrew Keen)

Screen / 12 Thinking is so over

The Sunday Times The web was going to be the great educator, Arbitrating on the dispute, Wikipedia gave no June 3, 2007 but the cult of the amateur is now devaluing weight to his expertise, and treated him with the knowledge, says net entrepreneur Andrew same credibility as his anonymous opponent. John-Paul Flintoff Keen “The consequences of this dismissal of traditional, credentialed experts are both chilling Before the internet it seemed like a joke: if you and absurd,” says Keen. provide an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters one of them will eventually come up “What defines the best minds,” Keen argues, “is with a masterpiece. But with the web now firmly their ability to go beyond the ‘wisdom’ of the established in its second evolutionary phase – in crowd and mainstream opinion.” Wikipedia is which users create the content on blogs, premised on a contrary theory of truth that would podcasts and streamed video – the infinite have seemed familiar to George Orwell: if the monkey theory doesn’t seem so funny any more. crowd says that two plus two equals five, then two plus two really does equal five. “Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters,” argues Andrew Keen, At a working breakfast in 2004 Keen was alarmed who believes that “web 2.0” is killing our culture, to be told the new democratic internet would assaulting our economy and destroying time- overthrow the “dictatorship of expertise”. And honoured codes of conduct. that’s happening already. Wikipedia, with its millions of amateur editors and unreliable An Englishman who moved from north London to content, is the 17th most trafficked site on the California in the 1990s and swapped university net. Britannica.com, a subscription-based service lecturing for internet entrepreneurship, Keen has with 100 Nobel prize-winning contributors and turned against the thoughtless barbarism of his more than 4,000 other experts is ranked 5,128. peers. In an alarming new book The As a result, Britannica has had to make painful Cult of the Amateur he argues that many of the cuts in staffing and editorial. ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, These cutbacks don’t only affect the individuals the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an laid off. They affect us all – because if Britannica endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed and publications like it should disappear we’ll be political commentary, unseemly home videos, obliged to rely on the unreliable patchwork of embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable information parcelled out on Wikipedia by people poems, essays and novels. who often don’t even reveal their identity.

Worse still, the supposed “democratisation” of “Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a the web has been a sham. “Despite its lofty dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen, who finds idealisation it’s undermining truth, souring civic classic signs of totalitarianism in Silicon Valley. discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and “Anyone who disagrees is wrong. These people talent,” he says. Take the much vaunted “wisdom manifest some of the symptoms of 19th century of crowds”, which has led to the astonishing Russian idealists and utopians, who think that growth of the free online reference work their vision of the world is going to change Wikipedia. The English site alone boasts 1.8m everything for the better.” articles freely contributed by ordinary web users and more are created every minute. This is not only about reference libraries. It’s much more important. What Wikipedia has done But as the sum of what we all know and agree, to reference books, bloggers do to traditional the wisdom of crowds has no greater value than news media. Papers and magazines close down Trivial Pursuit. Wikipedia is full of mistakes, half while broadcasters sell off radio and television truths and misunderstandings. What happens if stations, as more people turn to podcasts and you try to do something about it? William streamed videos. Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and an expert on But as Keen shows, many blogs and “news” sites global warming, disagreed with a Wikipedia are merely fronts for public relations machines. editor over a particular entry on the site. After Others conceal their agendas. They’re also trying to correct inaccuracies Connolley was unaccountable and rarely remove their mistakes. accused of trying to remove “any point of view It was once said that: “A lie can make it halfway which does not match his own”. Eventually he around the world before the truth has the chance was limited to making just one edit a day. to put its boots on.” That has never been more true than in the freewheeling, unchecked blogosphere.

Screen / 13 Thinking is so over

2 “Many bloggers flaunt their lack of training and Where necessary, governments should intervene, formal qualifications as evidence of their calling, as the Americans did last year by clamping down their passion,” says Keen. But they also lack on gambling sites. “This is not about being connections and access to information. A herded into a gulag but the complete flattening of politician can avoid dealing with ordinary citizens culture so that everything becomes a commercial but would be a fool to refuse calls from break,” says Keen. “‘Free culture’ is about giving representatives of the press and TV news. If it away so that you can advertise. I grew up traditional news-gathering disappears, who will wondering why there were no ads in novels. That hold politicians to account? was because I was prepared to spend money to buy the book.” Even if they had the talent and the connections, no blogs could afford to conduct investigations comparable to the great newspaper campaigns of the past. So the idea that content on the web is “free” is mistaken: the hidden cost may be the demise of old media and entire art forms on which the free content depends.

Already, Keen contends, illegal downloads have destroyed the music business. (He’s not alone. The great singer-songwriter Paul Simon told Keen: “I’m personally against web 2.0 in the same way as I’m personally against my own death.”) And with download speeds increasing and becoming more widespread it’s only a matter of time before film and TV studios face the same demise.

Another web idea dismantled by Keen is the concept of the “long tail” – the slow but gradual accumulation of sales by niche products such as books that could never have commanded shelf space in shops but can wait for buyers to find them on Amazon. In other words, you may never get more than 10 buyers for your little book of poetry, but thanks to the net you can publish it anyway. Somehow those 10 readers will find you.

But talent is “the needle in today’s digital haystack”, says Keen. In a world without newspapers, publishing houses, film studios, radio and TV stations there’ll be nobody to discover and – no less important – to nurture talent. The result could be no less catastrophic than Pol Pot’s decision to eliminate talent and expertise in Cambodia by mass execution.

“Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media – with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters and actors – can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril,” says Keen.

He is not against technology: he just wants to see a bit more control. We must choose between sites such as Wikipedia, where the cult of the anonymous amateur prevails, and the newer alternative Citizendium, which aims to improve on Wikipedia’s model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Screen / 14 Is today’s internet killing our culture?

http://www.guardian.co.uk Andrew to Emily: The economic consequences of this anarchy are /commentisfree/2007/aug/ particularly corrosive. The digital revolution fatally 10/andrewkeenvemilybell So is today’s internet killing our culture? Let me undermines the value of the copy, thereby begin this exchange with three simple questions: resulting in a cultural economy increasingly Andrew Keen v Emily Bell dependent either on advertising or a confusing 1/ Is the internet good or bad for consumers of and often deceitful confusion of independent and culture (the audience)? commercial content.

2/ Is the internet good or bad for creators of The end result is disastrous for both the creator culture (writers, film makers, musicians, and consumer of culture. The internet is journalists)? producing the cult of the amateur, a dumbing- down of culture, in which innocence is replacing 3/ Is the internet good or bad for the cultural expertise as the determinant of value. Worse still, economy? as the copy loses its economic exchange value, the only way artists will be able to make a living I think the internet is generally bad news for will be through the live performance of their consumers and creators of culture as well as for work. So the end result of the so-called our cultural economy. To make my argument, let “democratised” culture will actually be a me compare the age of modern mass media with shrinkage in both the size of the cultural economy today’s postmodern internet age. and in the number of professional artists. That means fewer professionally-produced books, In the mass media age, the copy was the key movies and recorded music. Only the rich will be commodity in terms of economic value. able to afford to physically access the artist in an Intellectual property was defensible, a economy where value will be increasingly meritocracy of elites maintained gatekeeper determined by physical presence. Instead of more status of the cultural economy and there was a cultural democracy, therefore, the internet will clear hierarchy between the creators and create more cultural inequality and privilege. consumers of culture.

Of course, the mass media age wasn’t ideal for Emily to Andrew: either the audience or for the author. Firstly, mass media produced a lot of trash (tabloid Your views have, I think, a growing currency – I newspapers, television soap operas, bad have read in the Guardian that Aimee Mann Hollywood movies etc etc). Secondly, artists (musician) sees the copying of music as the weren’t always fairly rewarded for their labour. greatest threat to her art form and criticises Thirdly, gatekeepers didn’t always recognise real MySpace et al for being littered with would-be talent, so some legitimate artists never got musicians who are just not very good. You are recorded or published. appalled that the internet is littered with would-be writers who equally are no good, and that in all But the achievements of mass media radically areas we will see a diminution of the cultural outweigh its flaws. A significant part of the mass economy. This is interesting and challenging media meritocracy – BBC, Guardian, New York stuff, but you seem to be muddling up an ability Times, National Public Radio, many publishers to make money from cultural activity with a and record labels – were committed to the diminution in the quality of the work itself. production of high-quality culture. This enabled many artists to earn a full-time living from the Rembrandt died in poverty, so did Mozart, Vivaldi, sale of their creative work. Most importantly, Van Gogh, etc, etc. What has changed about the culture – in the form of paperback books, world is that it is possible now to be a recorded music, movies and newspapers – professional artist in some fields without became accessible and affordable for the masses. necessarily being much better than a number of amateurs – and this is where the internet is Today’s internet, quite literally, turns the mass levelling the playing field and changing the media age on its head. Anyone with internet economy. As Clay Shirky, the new media access can publish anything online, which results economist and thinker put it, it is the “fame in the mob chaos of YouTube, the blogosphere versus fortune” model – when people will do and Wikipedia. As the traditional media what you do, sometimes just as well, for fame gatekeepers lose their power, the very idea of rather than fortune, then you are in an cultural authority is undermined, meaning that unsustainable business. Mediocrity will, however, everybody (ie: nobody) can legitimately determine no longer be economically viable – you are right aesthetic standards or truths. about that.

Screen / 15 Is today’s internet killing our culture?

2 Artists – good ones – in any field, do not think Andrew to Emily: they have a choice over their profession. It is a driving obsession to create and perform. There is Thanks for acknowledging that my views have a no way that the internet can possibly encroach on growing currency, particularly among this most private impulse. It might even seed it. It professional artists like Amy Mann. But it’s the is possible to access far more inspirational unsung heroes of our mainstream media – material for free than ever before, and the desire professional editors, fact checkers, cameramen, of children and younger adults to experiment with recording engineers – who have responded most this is as keen as ever. As a “consumer of enthusiastically to my book, The Cult of the culture”, I consume (buy) far more than I ever did Amateur. And that’s not simply because they are pre-internet – books from Amazon, tracks, worried about losing their jobs. I trust their symphonies and audio books from iTunes, DVDs professional judgement on the mediocre writing, from Play.com. I admit that my behaviour is mediocre recordings, mediocre videos that litter damaging to retail – not necessarily a good thing today’s internet. The irony of the digital – but it is fantastic for artists. revolution, I fear, is that we are dragging art back into that very pre-modern arrangement in which The internet challenges us all to up our game – it Rembrandt, Mozart, Vivaldi and Van Gogh “died exponentially increases our audience, but it in poverty”. Take away the exchange value of the exposes frailty. It creates noise of deafening copy, and how are artists able to monetise their volume and, yes, it threatens copyright. But as creative work? Increasingly, I suspect, they will Larry Lessig says, there are now more layers of be dependent on wealthy patrons who will invest extended copyright on pieces of creativity than in their creativity, invite them to perform to their ever before – and the net result of this is to friends or buy personalised versions of their actually stifle creativity rather than preserve it. creative work. Why should Disney own The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and every future iteration? Wealth in the I’m delighted that you are spending more money worlds of music, art, film, television, publishing, online on books, DVDs and music. Unfortunately, is greater than it ever has been, but it is not however, you aren’t typical. Take the dramatic evenly distributed. This is not the problem of the decline in the sale of recorded music. Just in the web or the internet but the problem of those first couple of months of this year, overall sales creative “industries”. are down 20%. I don’t see how this is “fantastic” for the music artist. Fewer bands are getting Where we profoundly disagree, I think, is in our record contracts, fewer A&R people are employed evaluation of “cultural gatekeepers”. For the past by the labels, fewer recordings are being sold by 30 years, apart from pockets of public funding or fewer record stores. All this seems about as eccentricity, these cultural gatekeepers have been fantastic for music artists as the enclosure laws driven by shareholders or private equity firms. were fantastic for the peasantry. They are profit-first, margin-centric businesses. Fewer professionally-produced books, movies Yes, we do disagree about cultural gatekeepers. and recorded music, would, it seems to me, not Sure, editors, movie makers and record label be the end of the world, but a long-overdue executives have been driven to maximise profits market correction. The internet – I can tell you by their shareholders and investors. But what do now – is not going to snuff out the careers of any you want them to do – try to lose money? In The talented musicians, great authors, or aspiring Cult of the Amateur, I write admiringly about artists – it will help them find a voice and a what you’ve done at Guardian Unlimited, market far more quickly than most other “cultural particularly in terms of combining high-quality gatekeepers”. If the internet is so full of professional journalism and economic amateurish dross then it is no threat to the profitability. Aren’t you a gatekeeper (and a very polished professional – but what you know talented one, in my opinion)? Why don’t you let Andrew, is that it is full of people who are anyone write for the Guardian? I respect your potentially as good as, if not better than, those faith in the digital revolution, but can you give me who have been fortunate enough to reside in a one example of a “great author” who has distribution bottleneck – and that is why you are become successful through the internet? And scared. how many “talented musicians” have found fame and fortune online (yes, I know about the Arctic Monkeys – but who else?).

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3 You are right that I’m scared. But it’s not of And what about those statistics? As you bizarrely “distribution bottlenecks” (whatever they are). cling to the notion that hard cash sales are an No, what I’m scared of is a culture in which we indicator of cultural value and rightly worry that are all aspiring artists and nobody is making A&R execs, lawyers, accountants, sales and money. I’m scared of YouTube, MySpace and the marketing execs, will be in for a rough ride, what blogosphere. I’m scared that the talented artist of are the numbers actually saying? Nielsen’s the future will realise neither fame nor fortune. research says sales of digital music increased by 65% in 2006 over 2005. In 2005 only two tracks sold more than a million digital downloads – in Emily to Andrew: 2006, 22 sold more than a million.

Let’s take this point by point. People are scared of Illegal downloads are a problem and pricing for change where the implication might be that their music is under pressure – but arguably $30 for a daily lives will change or their jobs will disappear. CD (which is what it was in the UK for many This is an historical truism – it has happened in years) is too much. In books as I’m sure you manufacturing, mining, agriculture – the media is know, Amazon has had a transformative effect on no different. back catalogues as well as new releases. There are massive increases in the number of titles But to make the leap from this to the assertion published each year, and overall sales growth – that new industries and economies are bad for all total book sales were up in the US and the UK by parts of society and culture is patently nonsense. nearly 3% in 2006 (a Harry Potterless year). As for dragging art back to the “pre-modern arrangement” where the wealthy were the I don’t equate cultural value with sales but patrons of arts, visit the world’s leading galleries whichever way one looks at your argument there of modern collections or tour the opera houses are substantial holes in the logic and the facts. and – guess what – the patronage model is Tell me which major cultural events of the 20th exactly the same as it always has been and I century would have been snuffed out by the suspect always will be. internet. Which artists have turned their backs on their vocation because of the off-putting nature of Your points entirely pertain to mass culture where internet economics? And tell me who, under the the CD and the paperback book, the newspapers age of 25, agrees with your golden ageism and the films are guarded by those most arguments? Nobody who grew up with the trustworthy of arbiters, Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey internet feels your sense of deathly cultural Katzenberg, Sumner Redstone, David Geffen, foreboding. Many of them are creating new art formerly Conrad Black, etc. I’m not too worried forms online which you would shudder at. That’s about no longer having my cultural choices the point. This is their rock ‘n roll, and maybe determined by this narrow elite. yours has run its course.

Thank you for your praise for The Guardian and Guardian Unlimited, but without the internet we Andrew to Emily: would not have reached a worldwide audience of more than 15 million a month. We have an Point counterpoint. But first a short confession exciting opportunity to invest in journalism for the about technology and progress. I’m not a Luddite future and build not just a national but and I’m certainly not suggesting that all international presence for liberal news and technological progress is a bad thing. I actually comment. Without the web, our particular future like the internet. I think it is a wonderfully useful would look extremely different, and not in a good communications and informational tool. I couldn’t way. have written or marketed my book without email or Google. I love BBC and NPR podcasts, the As for concrete examples of where people have Guardian, the Huffington Post and Politico.com, built music careers through the MySpace page iTunes and eMusic, ComedyCentral.com and and the download – Lily Allen, Sandy Thom CharlieRose.com. And, believe it or not, I am (whatever one might think of her output), Kate actually enjoying this little online battle we are Nash, Gnarls Barkley, The Klaxons – I could go now engaged in. on. Smart musicians, businesses and other creators are working out how to use the internet to promote their work – rather as you are now – not chanting “burn Steve Jobs – he’s an iWitch!”.

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4 But liking the internet doesn’t mean that I like all You accuse me of “golden ageism” and suggest of its cultural consequences. Particularly since that nobody under 25 would agree with me. many of these consequences – the demise of the Interesting, and perhaps a fair point. But is that a record business, the undermining of newspaper’s compliment or a critique? Why should I trust classified ads, ubiquitous intellectual piracy – are people under 25 to determine the future of unintended. I think you are establishing a false culture and information? I don’t see a lot of under dichotomy. You seem to be saying that either one 25-year olds writing for the Guardian Online is for all technology progress or one is a (which is why I read it). Today’s under-25 reactionary clinging to a romanticised status quo. generation should be more focused on the But, just as the industrial revolution resulted in laborious work of learning about the world than massive social dislocation and misery, so the in expressing their often inchoate and ill-informed digital revolution is also profoundly reshaping our opinions. What, exactly, have you learned from economy and society. Media is the first industry the under-25 generation about the war in Iraq or to be made more “efficient” by the digital the media business that you didn’t already know? revolution. Expect the same redundancies and structural crises in sectors such as healthcare and financial as the digital revolution also Emily to Andrew: “disintermediates” (ie: lays off) experts and supposedly hands power to the consumer. For We seem to have reached an agreement that more on the efficiencies on the new digital there is a cultural richness on the web, produced economy, read Simon Head’s The Ruthless sustainably by the professional scribes you crave Economy. – so I’m not quite sure where the argument goes from here. Is there anything, anything at all about the digital revolution that worries you? However I was snagged by your assertion that nobody under 25 had anything to contribute on You are right about overall sales of books, wrong issues of the new economy or, alarmingly, on about overall sales of music. The reason why Iraq. Or even on anything. book sales are up and overall music sales are down is piracy. It’s easy to steal music and hard I believe Colby Buzzell was 26 when he was to steal books online. This suggests that the posted to Iraq – maybe that extra year gave him impact of the internet on the music business isn’t the edge – but his blog, and the book that it good (The Cult of the Amateur addresses the yielded, My War: Killing Time In Iraq, is certainly demise of the recorded music business in detail). more insightful than anything you or I could have Would you agree? written about the conflict. This is the point – as Dan Gillmor would have it, “there’s always Then there is the all-important issue of the someone closer to the story than you”. When gatekeepers. Sure, I don’t want my information they can relate through a blog then their tampered with by Conrad Black. But not all contribution is equally if not more valuable than gatekeepers are quite as black and white as anybody else’s. Conrad Black. Haven’t the Sulzberger and Graham families been quite responsible Amateur is not going to fully replace professional managing the New York Times and the – it is idiotic and misleading to suggest it will. But Washington Post? And are you saying that the it will supplement and expose mainstream media work and artists that Katzenberg has developed – in fact it already does. at Disney (The Lion King, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc, etc) or Geffen at Asylum Records I could write a diatribe about bookshops – how (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, etc, etc) are they are terrible places full of largely irrelevant, all bad? Who on MySpace is curating the next often erroneous and badly-written tomes which Tom Waits or Joni Mitchell? Where on YouTube clog up and stifle the conduits for high-quality can I watch the next Lion King? literature. I could say that the several hundred thousand new titles a year are unsustainable Would we have had the opportunity to dross, environmentally damaging and culturally watch/listen/read the fruits of Hitchcock, Dylan moribund in their form and content. But what and Martin Amis in a flattened, gatekeeper-free would be the point? Like attacking the internet for media economy? You say yes, I say no. It’s hard its phantom menace, it is just tilting at windmills to prove one way or the other. But I think that the for effect. There’s no heft to the argument. culture and media businesses have done a pretty good job over the last 50 years serving up high- quality, affordable books, movies and music. Today, that economy is in structural crisis and I am pessimistic that the careers of the Hitchcocks, Dylans and Amises of the digital future will be as effectively discovered and nurtured.

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5 For some people cultural depravity started at the Dan Gillmor might be right that “there’s always renaissance and hasn’t let up since. Your somebody closer to the story than you”, but isn’t timescale is more compressed, but your that even more reason to have professional pessimism is just as misplaced. Is there anything journalists as filters for the news? Blogs – which that worries me about the digital age? This is like are no more than electronic diaries – should asking me if anything worries me about living in indeed become the raw material for objective, London; there is abuse, theft, fraud, unpleasant professionally-trained journalists to learn more and illegal activities made widespread. But this is about young people’s experiences in war, the inevitable outcome of millions of individuals – education and family life. Without the good and bad – interacting on a daily basis. The gatekeeping role of these journalists, the body tents in the next road do not stop London information is raw, like uncooked food. We have from being a remarkable and wonderful place, no proof of its origin or veracity; it is, by just as pirated Robbie Williams albums do not definition, untrustworthy. negate the urgent excitement of a truly democratised medium. Perhaps I coined the wrong question on what worries you about the internet. What I should You would have us all atomised, trusting a have asked is what solutions would you suggest decreasing number of dubious gatekeepers who to the darker elements of internet culture. After chase the mass market with increasing fervour, all, however much you love living in London, I’m bleeding out the differentiated and the sure there are some things about the city that you dangerously original. would like to reform to make it a more civilised place. Your London metaphor is actually very apt. If the mainstream media are as good as you say I suspect that the internet today is rather like the they are, then there is nothing to worry about. I smoggy, slum-ridden London of the early think there are plenty of issues particularly around industrial age. Yes, it’s a revolutionary, vibrant the investment in journalism, the quality of factual and incredibly important medium – but to TV production, the challenging perspectives become genuinely habitable, it needs to be which no longer find their way into mainstream substantially reformed. channels. But this is not the fault of the web, it is the collective failing of existing media. So, Emily, can you give me one realistic reform that would make the internet a more habitable Professionals, it seems to me, hold their own place today? where they deserve to. Here’s my magic bullet. I think we’ve got to fight anonymity. That’s the real curse of today’s Andrew to Emily: internet. Sure, there are occasions (active military perhaps) when anonymity can be justified. But, I can’t believe that I really wrote that reactionary we fortunately don’t live in Iran or China where garbage about not trusting the views of anybody people are put in jail for their views. So this cult under 25 (a professional editor would have of anonymity – in which we often have no idea caught/censored such a patently stupid remark). who is authoring a blog or a review or post – has You are of course right that Colby Buzzell’s blog is little real justification. of tremendous value for journalists and historians as well as any citizen who cares about what is The curse of anonymity is making the internet a happening in Iraq. And I’m sure there are other smoggy, nasty place akin to darkest corners of credible blogs by young people which have early 19th century London. When we don’t reveal sociological and political significance. who we are, we behave with less civility towards others. There’s no accountability for what we say But what I see on the web, particularly in when we author anonymously. The Guardian’s America, is a cult of innocence, a cult of youth, in very own Timothy Garton-Ash called it a which self-expression – however ill-informed, “cyberswamp”. He’s right. And its full of slithery narcissistic or irrelevant – has become the thing- libertarian creatures who won’t reveal the truth of in-itself. Interestingly, the carnage of war is one who they actually are. issue that the under-25 crowd know more about that the older generation. So yes, I applaud blogs by young troops. And I would also welcome blogs by young people about sex, gangs, education, family violence and all the other serious issues with which they are intimately familiar (in contrast with most of the indulgent marginalia infesting MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc). The question is how do I find these types of blogs? And how do I know that they are accurate?

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6 So my challenge to you as Guardian Unlimited’s On the one hand we might rail, quite rightly, generalissima is to challenge and undermine the against the tabloid mania for ripping away every culture of anonymity. That should be the price of last vestige of privacy and turning it into news. entry on to the Guardian site, the social contract On the other hand we think full disclosure on the we make with one another to collectively make web will help to raise standards. I think the the community a better place. You could establish difference would be marginal. Anonymous discussion groups in which anonymity is actively bloggers who really have any influence are discouraged. Figure out ways to reward people always surfaced, by volition or investigation, in who register with their real names, ages and any case. Let me draw a couple of analogies: professional identities. I’m sure you’ll find that peer reviewing academic papers is done will provide higher-quality content, more genuine anonymously, for good reason; voting is done community and more civil conversation. And your under the cloak of anonymity. Better that than the advertisers will be happier, too, if they can nightmare of validation – how do you know associate their brands with this richer, more someone is who they say they are? credible content. So everybody wins if internet anonymity is undermined. Agree? There are plenty of valid and good reasons for wanting anonymity which I would not presume to question. But it means authenticity might be Emily to Andrew: harder to establish. Or does it? I find myself turning up the authority on technorati searches – See the wonder of the internet! We start off miles but it is not the authority of paid professionals, it apart and end up in total agreement. Well is the authority of others who blog in the same perhaps that’s an exaggeration. However, it’s an area. Take, for instance, the blogroll on Jay interesting question: what would make the Rosen’s site: for someone interested in the internet a better place? development of the media it is a goldmine of interesting nuggets. I trust Jay not because he is I’m not sure about the anonymity argument – a skilled academic but because he has blogged although I know it is favoured by a number of my for years in an area which I am interested in and colleagues. I don’t think that anonymity is the have some knowledge of. His posts are informed worst thing about the web or even one of the and attract informed opinion. If an anonymous worst things. It’s perfectly possible that you and I, posts a damaging fallacy, how much who are having an engaging debate about the resonance does it really acquire? More than a pros and cons of democratised media, will be fallacy which is perpetrated by a trusted mocked or derided or insulted by people who are gatekeeper? able to keep their own identities hidden. But this is just the same as the person in the crowd who I remember in the 1980s, a series of articles in shouts “Shut up, you moron!” at Speakers’ Britain’s largest-selling quality Sunday newspaper, Corner. It’s rude and, if you have a very thin skin, The Sunday Times, questioning the health it might be undermining, but anonymous people information hysteria around HIV when the paper are – let’s face it – just that. maintained it was contained within the population of gay men and intravenous drug And then you and I, who fall into the users. Luckily for the population at large, this did “professional” category, are not anonymous – we not gather credibility as a view or influence health have biogs and accountability. But I bet few policy. Now, I imagine, it would be shot down by people really know who either of us are, or what better-informed bloggers before it got out of the our motivations and private thoughts might be. starting blocks. Are we candid and genuine? Are writers with bylines really “brands” and everything that term Sorry, that was a lengthy diversion from what denotes – in other words, only a projection of would make the internet a better place. Not a bar what they really want the public to see? on anonymity then. Maybe some international standards for privacy and disclosure which stop the unjust yielding of private information to corporations or governments would be a start. So I suppose I am saying that more anonymity would be a good thing.

I suppose that leaves us as far apart as ever.

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