The Inevitable Page 9
As we’ve learned from the steady democratization of other arts, soon you’ll be able to make music without being a musician. One hundred years ago, the only people technically capable of taking a photograph were a few dedicated experimenters. It was an incredibly elaborate and fussy process. It took great technical skill and greater patience before you could coax a picture worth looking at. An expert photographer might take a dozen photos per year. Today anyone with a phone—which is everyone—can instantly take a photo that is a hundred times better in most dimensions than one taken by the average professional a century ago. We are all photographers. Likewise, typography was once an arcane profession. It required many years of expertise to be able to place type on a page in a pleasing and clear way, since there was no WYSIWYG. Maybe a thousand people knew what kerning was. Today they teach kerning in grammar school, and even newbies can accomplish far better typography with digital tools than the average typesetter of old. Same for cartography. The average web hipster can do more with maps today than the best cartographers could manage in the past. So too it will be for music. With new tools accelerating the fluid flow of bits and copies, we will all become musicians.
As music goes, so goes the other media, and then other industries.
Movies repeated the pattern. A movie was once a rare event, one of the most expensive products to produce. It took highly paid guilds of professionals to make even a B-rated movie. Expensive projection equipment was need to view it, so it was troublesome and rare to see a particular one. Then video cameras came along with file sharing networks, and you could watch any film anytime you wanted. Films that you might be able to see once in your life you could now study by watching hundreds of times. A hundred million people became film students, starting to make their own videos and uploading them to YouTube in the billions. Again, the audience pyramid flipped. We are all filmmakers now.
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The grand move from fixity to flows can be starkly illustrated in the status of books. Books began as authoritative fixed masterpieces. Crafted with great care and reverence, they were machined to last generations. A big fat paper book is the very essence of stability. It sits on a shelf, not moving, not changing, perhaps for thousands of years. Book lover and critic Nick Carr enumerated four ways books embody fixity. Here’s my rendition of how books stay:
Fixity of the page—The page stays the same. Whenever you pick it up, it’s the same. You can count on it. That means you can reference or cite it, certain it will say the same thing.
Fixity of the edition—No matter which copy of the book you pick up, no matter where or when you purchased it, it will be the same (for that edition), so its text is shared between us. We can discuss a book sure that we are looking at the identical content.
Fixity of the object—With proper care, paper books last a very long time (centuries longer than digital formats), and their text doesn’t change as they age.
Fixity of completion—A paper book carries with it a sense of finality and closure. It is done. Complete. Part of the attraction of printed literature is that it is committed to paper, almost like a vow. The author stands upon it.
These four stabilities are very attractive qualities. They make books monumental, something to reckon with. Yet anyone who loves paper books understands that printed volumes are increasingly expensive compared to a digital copy; it’s not hard to imagine a time when very few new books will be printed. Today most books are predominantly born as ebooks. Even old books have had their texts scanned and blasted into every corner of the internet, encouraging them to flow freely on the superconducting wires of the net. The four fixities are not present in ebooks, at least not in the versions of ebooks we see today. But while book lovers will miss the fixities, we should be aware that ebooks offer four fluidities to counter them:
Fluidity of the page—The page is a flexible unit. Content will flow to fit any available space, from a tiny screen in a pair of glasses to a wall. It can adapt to your preferred reading device or reading style. The page fits you.
Fluidity of the edition—A book’s material can be personalized. Your edition might explain new words if you are a student, or it could skip a recap of the previous books in the series if you’ve already read them. Customized “my books” are for me.
Fluidity of the container—A book can be kept in the cloud at such low cost that it is “free” to store in an unlimited library and can be delivered instantly anywhere on earth at any time to anyone.
Fluidity of growth—The book’s material can be corrected or improved incrementally. The never-done-ness of an ebook (at least in the ideal) resembles an animated creature more than a dead stone, and this living fluidity animates us as creators and readers.
We currently see these two sets of traits—fixity versus fluidity—as opposites, driven by the dominant technology of the era. Paper favors fixity; electrons favor fluidity. But there is nothing to prevent us from inventing a third way—electrons embedded into paper or any other material. Imagine a book of 100 pages, each page a thin flexible digital screen, bound into a spine—that is an ebook too. Almost anything that is solid can be made a little bit fluid, and anything fluid can be embedded into solidness.
What has happened to music, books, and movies is now happening to games, newspapers, and education. The pattern will spread to transportation, agriculture, health care. Fixities such as vehicles, land, and medicines will become flows. Tractors will become fast computers outfitted with treads, land will become a substrate for a network of sensors, and medicines will become molecular information capsules flowing from patient to doctor and back.
These are the Four Stages of Flowing:
1. Fixed. Rare. The starting norm is precious products that take much expertise to create. Each is an artisan work, complete and able to stand alone, sold in high-quality reproductions to compensate the creators.
2. Free. Ubiquitous. The first disruption is promiscuous copying of the product, duplicated so relentlessly that it becomes a commodity. Cheap, perfect copies are spent freely, dispersed anywhere there is demand. This extravagant dissemination of copies shatters the established economics.
3. Flowing. Sharing. The second disruption is an unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own new uses and to be remixed into new bundles. The product is now a stream of services issuing from the shared cloud. It becomes a platform for wealth and innovation.
4. Opening. Becoming. The third disruption is enabled by the previous two. Streams of powerful services and ready pieces, conveniently grabbed at little cost, enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products. The status of creation is inverted, so that the audience is now the artist. Output, selection, and quality skyrocket.
These four stages of flowing apply to all media. All genres will exhibit some fluidity. Yet fixity is not over. Most of the good fixed things in our civilization (roads, skyscrapers) are not going anywhere. We will continue to manufacture analog objects (chairs, plates, shoes), but they will acquire a digital essence as well, with embedded chips. (Except for a tiny minority of high-priced handmade artifacts.) The efflorescent blossoming of liquid streams is an additive process, rather than subtractive. The old media forms endure; the new are layered on top of them. The important difference is that fixity is not the only option anymore. Good things don’t have to be static, unchanging. Or, to put it a different way, the right kind of instability can now be good. The move from stocks to flows, from fixity to fluidity, is not about leaving behind stability. It is about harnessing a wide-open frontier where so many additional options based on mutability are possible. We are exploring all the ways to make things out of ceaseless change and shape-shifting processes.
Here is what a day in the near future looks like. I tap into the cloud to enter the library containing all music, movies, books, VR worlds, and games. I choose music. In
addition to songs, I can get parts of the songs as small as a chord. A song’s assets are divvied up one channel at a time, which means I can get just the bass or drum track, or just the voices. Or the song with no voices—perfect for karaoke. Tools allow me to stretch or shrink the duration of a song without changing its pitch and melody. Professional tools let me swap instruments in the song I found. One of my favorite musicians releases alternative versions of her songs (for extra cost), and even offers a historical log of every version during its creation.
Movies are similar. The myriad components of each movie are released in pieces, not just the soundtrack. I can get the sound effects, the special effects (before and after) of each scene, alternative camera views, voice-overs, all in workable shape. Some studios release a whole set of outtakes that can be reedited. Using this wealth of unbundled assets, a subculture of amateur editors reedits released movies in the hopes of bettering the original director. I’ve done a few here and there in my media classes. Of course, not every director is interested in being reedited, but the demand is so high and the sales of these insider pieces so good that the studios bank on it. Mature-rated movies are reedited for squeaky-clean family versions, or, on the black net, illicit pornographic versions are made from G movies. Many of the hundreds of thousands of documentaries already released are kept updated with material added by viewers, enthusiasts, or the director, as their stories continue.
The streams of video produced and shared by my own mobile devices are born with channels so they can easily be reworked by my friends. Selecting out the background, they insert my buddies into exotic scenes and playfully manipulate the context in a very believable way. Each video posted demands a reply with another video based upon it. The natural response to receiving a clip, a song, a text—either from a friend or from a professional—is not just to consume it, but to act upon it. To add, subtract, reply, alter, bend, merge, translate, elevate to another level. To continue its flow. To maximize the flowing. My media diet may be thought of as streams of pieces, some of which I consume as is, and most of which I engage in to some degree.
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We have only started flowing. We have begun the four stages of flowing for some types of digital media, but for most we are still at the first stage. So much more of our routines and infrastructure remains to be liquefied, but liquefied and streamed they will be. The steady titanic tilt toward dematerialization and decentralization means that further flows are inevitable. It seems a stretch right now that the most solid and fixed apparatus in our manufactured environment would be transformed into ethereal forces, but the soft will trump the hard. Knowledge will rule atoms. Generative intangibles will rise above the free. Think of the world flowing.
4
SCREENING
In ancient times culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation, and rhetoric instilled in oral societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate, and the subjective. We were People of the Word. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s 1450 invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science, libraries, and law. Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.
Mass-produced books changed the way people thought. The technology of printing expanded the number of words available, from about 50,000 words in Old English to a million today. More word choices enlarged what could be communicated. More media choices broadened what was written about. Authors did not have to compose scholarly tomes only, but could “waste” inexpensively printed books on heartrending love stories (the romance novel was invented in 1740), or publish memoirs even if they were not kings. People could write tracts to oppose the prevailing consensus, and with cheap printing an unorthodox idea might gain enough influence to topple a king or the pope. In time, the power of authors birthed the reverence for authors, and of authority, and bred a culture of expertise. Perfection was achieved “by the book.” Laws were compiled into official tomes, contracts were written down, and nothing was valid unless put into words onto pages. Painting, music, architecture, dance were all important, but the heartbeat of Western culture was the turning pages of a book. By 1910 three quarters of the towns in the United States with more than 2,500 residents had a public library. America’s roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, a robust free press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books), and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing. We became People of the Book.
But today more than 5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives. Digital display manufacturers will crank out 3.8 billion new additional screens per year. That’s nearly one new screen each year for every human on earth. We will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface. Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards, and tablets. Letters are no longer fixed in black ink on paper, but flitter on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our eyes can blink. Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls, and the sides of buildings. They sit in front of us when we work—regardless of what we do. We are now People of the Screen.
This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen. The People of the Book today are the good hardworking people who make newspapers, magazines, the doctrines of law, the offices of regulation, and the rules of finance. They live by the book, by the authority derived from authors. The foundation of this culture is ultimately housed in texts. They are all on the same page, so to speak.
The immense cultural power of books emanated from the machinery of reproduction. Printing presses duplicated books quickly, cheaply, and faithfully. Even a butcher might own a copy of Euclid’s Elements, or the Bible, and so printed copies illuminated the minds of citizens beyond the gentry. This same transformative machinery of reproduction was applied to art and music, with equivalent excitation. Printed copies of etchings and woodcuts brought the genius of visual art to the masses. Cheaply copied diagrams and graphs accelerated science. Eventually, inexpensive copies of photography and recorded music spread the reproductive imperative of the book even wider. We could churn out cheap art and music as fast as books.
This reproductive culture has, in the last century or so, produced the greatest flowering of human achievement the world has ever seen, a magnificent golden age of creative works. Cheap physical copies have enabled millions of people to earn a living directly from the sale of their art to the audience, without the weird dynamics of having to rely only on patronage. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model, but the audience did too. For the first time, billions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Beethoven’s day, few people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once. With the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Bombay could listen to them all day long.
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But today most of us have become People of the Screen. People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels. They gravitate toward movie screens, TV screens, computer screens, iPhone screens, VR goggle screens, tablet screens, and in the near future massive Day-Glo megapixel screens plastered on every surface. Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts, and half-baked ideas. It is a flow of tweets, head
lines, instagrams, casual texts, and floating first impressions. Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth. Fixed copies don’t matter as much as flowing access. Screen culture is fast, like a 30-second movie trailer, and as liquid and open-ended as a Wikipedia page.
On a screen, words move, meld into pictures, change color, and perhaps even change meaning. Sometimes there are no words at all, only pictures or diagrams or glyphs that may be deciphered into multiple meanings. This liquidity is terribly unnerving to any civilization based on text logic. In this new world, fast-moving code—as in updated versions of computer code—is more important than law, which is fixed. Code displayed on a screen is endlessly tweakable by users, while law embossed into books is not. Yet code can shape behavior as much as, if not more than, law. If you want to change how people act online, on the screen, you simply alter the algorithms that govern the place, which in effect polices the collective behavior or nudges people in preferred directions.
People of the Book favor solutions by laws, while People of the Screen favor technology as a solution to all problems. Truth is, we are in transition, and the clash between the cultures of books and screens occurs within us as individuals as well. If you are an educated modern person, you are conflicted by these two modes. This tension is the new norm. It all started with the first screens that invaded our living rooms 50 years ago: the big, fat, warm tubes of television. These glowing altars reduced the time we spent reading to such an extent that in the following decades it seemed as if reading and writing were over. Educators, intellectuals, politicians, and parents in the last half of the last century worried deeply that the TV generation would be unable to write. Screens were blamed for an amazing list of societal ills. But of course we all kept watching. And for a while it did seem as if nobody wrote, or could write, and reading scores trended down for decades. But to everyone’s surprise, the cool, interconnected, ultrathin screens on monitors, the new TVs, and tablets at the beginning of the 21st century launched an epidemic of writing that continues to swell. The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980. By 2015 more than 60 trillion pages have been added to the World Wide Web, and that total grows by several billion a day. Each of these pages was written by somebody. Right now ordinary citizens compose 80 million blog posts per day. Using their thumbs instead of pens, young people around the world collectively write 500 million quips per day from their phones. More screens continue to expand the volume of reading and writing. The literacy rate in the U.S. has remained unchanged in the last 20 years, but those who can read are reading and writing more. If we count the creation of all words on all screens, you are writing far more per week than your grandmother, no matter where you live.