February
Living Without Future: The Decay of Value and Meaning in the Media Age
When our worldly knowledge is based around an ever-changing cycle of products, it means that our skills and perspective have a sort of expiration date–one that is often far shorter than an average professional career.
On my desk is a pocket watch, ticking quietly. It is 123 years old, yet it works as well as the day it left the factory in Waltham, New York. Its aesthetics are timeless–polished metal, glass, and delicate black-on-white roman numerals. Though it is obsolete–its gentle discrepancies made unacceptable in a world of radio-controlled quartz movements–its value has remained largely constant over its long life. After all, even if it were broken beyond repair, it contains 4oz. of coin silver (and a broken clock is right twice a day).
This watch, for me, throws into contrast our failure to bring past visions of ‘the future’ to life. While our technology and products have become increasingly advanced, any sense of quality and value has started to come apart in the relentless product cycle. This cycle–an insistence on new and better–has infected our media and minds as well. In our movement further into the digital frontier, we have started to leave permanence behind in favor of freshness, depth in favor of convenience. We are in danger of losing a certain fundamental sense of meaning.
As a culture, we have achieved incredible things. What would the man who owned this watch in 1890 think if I showed him an iPhone? In the pocket that he carried a timepiece, I can fit a device that can record and transmit live video, can connect us to others anywhere via voice and image, can give us access to our exact location on maps from around the globe, and any number of other incredible things. It becomes even more fantastical when you take into account the ways in which this technology has changed society for the better.
However, the iPhone lacks a certain solidity and permanence–it lacks ‘realness.’ A clever man in 1890 could take his watch apart and puzzle-out its function, just as I have learned to work on them today. An iPhone, on the other hand, would be incomprehensible to either of us–assuming we could get it apart. It is more or less disposable–hardly intended to last beyond the terms of an AT&T wireless contract. It isn’t only that an iPhone does not retain its value (when broken beyond repair, it is HAZMAT worth less than nothing), it is also that it is an object that only has meaning within a fraction of our life. The commerce-driven product cycle and the push towards ‘new’ and ‘different’ that drives it encourages planned obsolescence and shoddy production standards.*
When the objects with which we surround ourselves are cheap and have no lasting power or solidity, it cheapens us and our culture. Look at images of offices from the early part of the last century–how many of the objects in that space probably still exist and have value today?** How many of the skills necessary in that office were based around basic principles of business that would still have value and application today? Now look around–how many objects in your office will have value in 80 years time? How many of your skills are based on fundamentals that could possibly have value in 80 years? When our worldly knowledge is based around an ever-changing cycle of products, it means that our skills and perspective have a sort of expiration date–one that is often far shorter than an average professional career.
When the objects with which we surround ourselves are cheap and have no lasting power or solidity, it cheapens us and our culture.
Our media is also becoming cheaper, disposable, and less permanent. With the move toward digital and away from print, we’ve begun a process towards leaving permanence and quality behind in favor of brevity and freshness–abandoning meaning for medium and context. It’s a process that means our cultural legacy is less likely to survive than the works of many cultures that have come before us. I don’t just mean that digital files are in more danger of corruption than their physical counterparts (which is arguable)–even given the limited lifespans of proprietary file formats, changes in physical storage hardware, etc. The move into the digital world has changed the way that we consume and think about media in general. The media we produce is becoming more prolific, shorter, and of a lower quality.
With the slow death of print journalism has come the birth of ‘infotainment’ as the dominant paradigm of News while independent journalism moves away from attempted objectivity and towards editorial, first-person, or folksy style pieces. More dramatic is the move away from long-form writing in both social media and expository prose. The chat room has been replaced by the instant messaging client, which is being absorbed into the social network. Personal home pages and online journals were largely eclipsed by blogs, which have begun to die out in favor of micro-blogging and social networking. In both cases, the media we create is being moved away from more permanent forms that we control and into “walled gardens” where our control is very limited. Increasingly, the media we generate is assigned an expiry date out of our control.
As a culture, our attention spans are growing shorter. Nicholas Carr has explored this issue in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
With the movement away from long-form writing also comes a sort of media-cycle that means what we produce has less value. It is possible to produce informational graphics and short-form writing of great value, but it isn’t how the vast majority of content creators have been taught. The average tweet is as cheap as a $2 pair of sunglasses. The inability to filter through the media noise makes it hard to find the valuable bits in all the static. We have so much media, so much writing, so many images—they have become as worthless as a piece of currency in a hyper-inflation economy. Our reliance on software to consume this vast quantity of media grows stronger. Our media diet becomes poor while we lose control over what we choose to consume.
I have a growing sense that the way we understand our world at any given moment will be meaningless in the next. Our lives have lost gravitas. We have lost historical continuity and the sense of our own future. We seem to have lost a sort of fundamental grasp of meaning, and that is where the hypothetical gentlemen from 1890 would not envy us our iPhones. While we may have a gadget that syncs its time automatically and displays it in sleek, bright LCD, we have started to lose a sense of what that time means in the context of our lives as human beings and as inheritors of a rich and ongoing culture.
I am hoping to try and find ways of working against these negative trends. Groups like the Long Now Foundation and books like Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford, give me hope.
For more, see the following blog posts:
The Grand Disappointment: Apple and Obama After Hype and Hope
LIFT09: The Future in Permanent Beta
Why The iPad is Crap Futurism
* Caveat: I realize that the product-cycle also drives innovation, which has essential functions in society, such as creating more energy efficient products and responding to problems like oil price inflation.
** Many of these objects are valuable because they are made of natural resources not easily come by, such as finely-grained furniture hardwoods. Of course I do not advocate a return to unsustainable logging and mining practices that produced the objects of that time. However, the plastics and cheap metals in today’s industry are arguably no less harmful in terms of how they deplete natural resources and damage the environment.
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