One of the panelists passingly mentioned McLuhan today while discussing a campaign, and it got me thinking about where we are with media theory today...Scrawled into one of my dog-eared notebooks from my early 20's is this cryptic proclamation:
"there are programmers, and there are people who've been programmed."
Ahh, such pretentious, youthful gibberish. At the time I was just beginning to understand the architecture of the web, the nature of HTML and Actionscript code, and how media is consolidated and controlled. In my post-teen angst I believed in such clear delineations between people, such wide, sweeping generalizations... Thankfully I've grown wiser with age and recognize the immense folly of making such self-assured pronouncements. But...there is still a difference between people who contribute to culture and people who solely consume what they're fed...
Although we live in an age where everyone can make media, and we are all capable of charting our own path through the media landscape, the interfaces we deal with still dictate those terms. There is still an immense industrial complex that produces most movies, TV, commercials, music, news, etc...they are the primary manufacturers of cultural content... Everyone else dabbles in uploading YouTube videos of pets , in between picking and choosing what they kind of streams they feed their brain...
I used to think there were only producers and consumers of culture... But no more - people are also living repositories of culture, and traffic in ideas and trade aesthetics for a living... We are living in the Age of the Aggregator, where we are all collectors of culture, with our conscious minds cross-pollinated from the pirated files of countless hard drives. We are mix-tapes in progress, a half-constructed collage of found objects & forwarded links. We have arrived at a confused age where four generations of a family can fight in public on Facebook... Words on a page become relics as people read less and less of substance. The Idiot Box gave birth to a bastard child called the Internet, an ADD-riddled forum of infinite possibilities & bottomless porn. Jeremiads aside, when I contemplate the future, I sometimes find myself unsure about the vast quantities of media we produce. But then I spend a week with friends in Iberia, and realize that I have nothing to worry about. Because it's not whether you produce or consume media that matters... What matters is the quality of what you consume, the integrity of what you share, and the humanity of the stories you tell... we are only as good as what we feed our minds...
"there are programmers, and there are people who've been programmed."
Ahh, such pretentious, youthful gibberish. At the time I was just beginning to understand the architecture of the web, the nature of HTML and Actionscript code, and how media is consolidated and controlled. In my post-teen angst I believed in such clear delineations between people, such wide, sweeping generalizations... Thankfully I've grown wiser with age and recognize the immense folly of making such self-assured pronouncements. But...there is still a difference between people who contribute to culture and people who solely consume what they're fed...
Although we live in an age where everyone can make media, and we are all capable of charting our own path through the media landscape, the interfaces we deal with still dictate those terms. There is still an immense industrial complex that produces most movies, TV, commercials, music, news, etc...they are the primary manufacturers of cultural content... Everyone else dabbles in uploading YouTube videos of pets , in between picking and choosing what they kind of streams they feed their brain...
I used to think there were only producers and consumers of culture... But no more - people are also living repositories of culture, and traffic in ideas and trade aesthetics for a living... We are living in the Age of the Aggregator, where we are all collectors of culture, with our conscious minds cross-pollinated from the pirated files of countless hard drives. We are mix-tapes in progress, a half-constructed collage of found objects & forwarded links. We have arrived at a confused age where four generations of a family can fight in public on Facebook... Words on a page become relics as people read less and less of substance. The Idiot Box gave birth to a bastard child called the Internet, an ADD-riddled forum of infinite possibilities & bottomless porn. Jeremiads aside, when I contemplate the future, I sometimes find myself unsure about the vast quantities of media we produce. But then I spend a week with friends in Iberia, and realize that I have nothing to worry about. Because it's not whether you produce or consume media that matters... What matters is the quality of what you consume, the integrity of what you share, and the humanity of the stories you tell... we are only as good as what we feed our minds...
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