“Instagram shows us what a world without art looks like.” –Theses in Tweetform, #19

Ricky D’Ambrose, in “Instagram and the Fantasy of of Mastery,” a mournful essay in The Nation, examines what he sees as a fundamental shift in aesthetics: “the transition from art, long vaunted as a special, and autonomous, area of sensuous intelligence, to creativity, to which art can only ever be superficially related.” Society’s love for the overlay, the template, the filter, is on the rise, inexorably it seems. In place of a personal style born of a mastery of technique, we have the instant application of a “look,” a set of easily recognizable visual tropes, usually borrowed either from an earlier artist’s style or from the output of an earlier creative technology, executed through a software routine. The McCabe & Mrs. Miller look. The Brownie 127 look. The Ms. Pac-Man look. Looks take the work, and the anxiety, out of art.

With looks, there is no time for squinting, no time for whatever is, or might be, inexplicable. A look—insofar as it has any resemblance to style at all—is a kind of instant style: quickly executed and dispatched, immediately understood, overcharged with incident. To say that a film, a photograph, a painting, or a room’s interior has a look is to assume a consensus about which parts of a nascent image are the most worthy of being parceled out and reproduced on a massive scale. It means making a claim about how familiar an image is, and how valuable it seems.

The shift from style to look is abetted by technology, in particular the infinite malleability of the digital artifact, but it seems to spring from a deeper source: our postmodern cultural exhaustion, with its attendant sense that fabrication is the defining quality of art and that all fabrications are equal in their fabricatedness. As the erstwhile taste-making class becomes ever more uncomfortable with the concept of taste, a concept now weighted with the deadly sins of elitism and privilege, the middlebrow becomes the new highbrow. The egalitarianism of the digital filter makes it a particularly attractive refuge for the antsy flâneur.

An insidious quality of the aesthetic of the look is, as D’Ambrose notes, its insatiable retrospective hunger. It gobbles up the past as well as the present. The very style that gave rise to a look comes to be seen as just another manifestation of the look: “One can now watch John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence just as one watches Joe Swanberg’s recent Happy Christmas: in quotation marks. (Both have ‘the 16-millimeter look.’) The look and its source become, in the mind of the viewer who knows the corresponding filter, identical.” The exercise of taste, like the exercise of creativity, becomes a matter of choosing the correct filter.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to the visual arts. Popular music also increasingly has a digitally constructed “look.” Writing is trickier, more resistant to programming than image or sound, but it’s not impossible to imagine a new breed of word processor able to apply a literary filter to a person’s words. A Poe filter. A Goethe filter. A Slouching Towards Bethlehem filter. Instagram for prose: surely somebody’s working on it.

Should augmented reality take off, we’ll be able to rid ourselves of artists and their demands once and for all. We’ll all be free to exercise our full, transformative creativity as observers and consumers, imposing a desired look on the world around us. Blink once for sepia-tinged. Blink twice for noir. Already there are earbuds in testing that allow you to tweak the sound of a concert you’re attending. They’re controlled by an app that includes, reports Motherboard, “a bunch of custom sound settings like ‘dirty country,’ ‘8-track,’ ‘Carnegie Hall,’ or ‘small studio.'” Sean Yeaton, of the band Parquet Courts, admitted “it could be cool to match your soundscape to your mood in mundane settings like the grocery store, but [he] balked at the idea of giving the audience control over the live sound at concerts. He pointed out that it would be pretty fucked up to go see Nine Inch Nails only to make it sound like Jefferson Starship.”

I guess your perspective depends on which side of the filter you happen to be on.

“From the very beginning of her career,” writes Arthur Lubow, of Diane Arbus, “she was taking photographs to obtain a vital proof — a corroboration of her own existence. The pattern was set early. When she was 15, she described to a friend how she would undress at night in her lit bathroom and watch an old man across the courtyard watch her (until his wife complained). She not only wanted to see, she needed to be seen.”

The bathroom was a camera, in which the girl composed an image of herself, fixed in light, for the audience, the other, to see. But was it really a corroboration of her existence that she sought, or its annihilation? Existence is continuous, unrelenting. The fixed image, the discrete image, offers an escape from the flux. The camera never lies, but the truth it tells is not of this world.

A social medium is, in a sense, a camera, a room in which we compose ourselves for the other’s viewing. The stream may feel unrelenting as it pours through the phone, but it’s not continuous. It’s a series of fixed and discrete images, delivered visually or textually. It’s a film.

“She not only wanted to see, she needed to be seen.”

Social media, writes Rob Horning, can “facilitate an escapism through engagement.” He argues, drawing on Roy Baumeister’s 1988 Journal of Sex Research paper “Masochism as Escape from Self,” that social-media use can be considered a form of masochism. The self-construction that takes place on a network like Facebook or Snapchat is a mask for self-destruction. “It might seem weird to say that we express ourselves to escape ourselves. But self-expression can dissolve the self as well as build some enduring, legible version of a self.” And: “The platform’s constrictions take on the function of bondage, restricting autonomy to a limited set of actions.”

Arbus understood the paradox of overexposure — how, when carried to an extreme, exposure begins to erase the self. In the confines of a camera, light dissolves individuality; it’s disfiguring.

Image: Kris Haamer.

In my last post, I reported on a study showing that people massively underestimate how often they use their smartphones. People consult their phones almost three times more frequently than they think they do. Yesterday, Pew came out with the results of a new survey that revealed that more than a fifth of Americans, and more than a third of young Americans, report being online “almost constantly.” Given people’s tendency to underreport gadget use, “almost constantly” means “constantly.”

Media seeks sovereignty over all experience, and its goal would seem to be in reach. “Ever in flux and process, reality cannot be approached directly,” wrote Siegfried Giedion in his 1948 masterpiece Mechanization Takes Command. “Reality is too vast, and direct means fail. Suitable tools are needed, as in the raising of an obelisk. In technics, as in science and art, we must create the tools with which to dominate reality.” An easier option is to use the tools others create for us.

The fact can no longer be avoided: You are your phone. The pattern of smartphone use is the pattern of the self. This is who you are:

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Silicon Valley lending startups are looking to base personal loan decisions on analyses of data from individuals’ phones. The apps running on a person’s device, entrepreneurs have found, “generate huge amounts of data — texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media posts, retail receipts, and so on — indicating thousands of subtle patterns of behavior that correlate with repayment or default.” How you use your phone reveals more than you think:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

Meanwhile, the New York Times today reports on a new study published in Science that reveals how a person’s economic status can be determined through a fairly simple analysis of phone use. The researchers, working in Africa, collected details “about when calls were made and received and the length of the calls” as well as “when text messages were sent, and which cellphone towers the texts and calls were routed through.” They analyzed this metadata to “build an algorithm that predicts how wealthy or impoverished a given cellphone user is. Using the same model, the researchers were able to answer even more specific questions, like whether a household had electricity.”

I am not a number, you declare. I am more than a credit score. You may well be. But the tell-tale phone reveals more than one’s financial standing and trustworthiness. The tell-tale phone reveals all. Take a look at that chart again:

It shows the pattern of one person’s smartphone use over a two-week period, beginning late on a Friday afternoon. Each vertical line represents a single use of the phone, the width of the line showing how long the use extended. The chart comes from a new study on phone use, published in PLOS ONE. Four UK researchers installed a usage-tracking app on the smartphones of twenty-three students and staff members at the University of Lincoln, and then examined the data after two weeks. They discovered that “a simple measure — recording when the phone is in use — can provide a vast array of information about an individual’s daily routine.” Data on phone use, to take a simple example, provides “a non-invasive indication of sleep length.” All but one of the test subjects used their phones as an alarm clock on weekdays, and all of them without exception reported that the last thing they do before going to sleep is to check their phone. Gaps in use during the day are also good indicators of naps.

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought. “For exploring checking behaviours,” the researchers report, “estimated number of uses show little reliability for measuring actual uses.” We see here how deeply entwined the phone has become with the self — a seamless extension of body, mind, and personality. It is so much a part of us that we are no more conscious of the device moment-to-moment than we are of, say, our hands.

If the mere tracking of phone use reveals how we spend our days, our diurnal routines, imagine what would be revealed by a deeper analysis, one that examined the apps we use, the people we connect with, the things we look at and listen to, what we say and what we write and what we like, where we go, what we search for, the photos we take. It’s all there, public self and private self. There’s no shame in admitting the fact: You are your phone.

It still feels a little shameful to admit to the fact, but what engages us more and more is not the content but the mechanism. Kenneth Goldsmith, in a Los Angeles Review of Books essay, writes of a recent day when he felt an urge to listen to some music by the American composer Morton Feldman:

I dug into my MP3 drive, found my Feldman folder and opened it up. Amongst the various folders in the directory was one labeled “The Complete Works of Morton Feldman.” I was surprised to see it there; I didn’t remember downloading it. Curious, I looked at its date — 2009 — and realized that I must’ve grabbed it during the heyday of MP3 sharity blogs. I opened it to find 79 albums as zipped files. I unzipped three of them, listened to part of one, and closed the folder. I haven’t opened it since.

The pleasure of listening to music was not as great as he anticipated. He found more pleasure in manipulating music files.

Our role as librarians and archivists has outpaced our role as cultural consumers. Engaging with media in a traditional sense is often the last thing we do. … In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself. Management (acquisition, distribution, archiving, filing, redundancy) is the cultural artifact’s new content. … In an unanticipated twist to John Perry Barlow’s 1994 prediction that in the digital age we’d be able to enjoy wine without the bottles, we’ve now come to prefer the bottles to the wine.

It’s as though we find ourselves, suddenly, in a vast library, an infinite library, a library of Borgesian proportions, and we discover that what’s of most interest to us is not the books on the shelves but the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System. Continue reading →

Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of addressing the annual convention of the Media Ecology Association in Denver. The title of my talk was “Media Takes Command: An Inquiry into the Consequences of Automation.” Here is what I said, along with the slides that accompanied the remarks.

As I was trying to figure out what to talk about this afternoon, I found myself flipping through a copy of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death — the twentieth anniversary edition. I started thinking about one of the promotional blurbs printed at the front of the book. A reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor had written that Postman “starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur.”

I can’t make claim to either the resources of a scholar or the wit of a raconteur, but at least I can follow Postman’s lead in starting where McLuhan left off. In fact, I’d like to start literally where he left off, with the final line of his most influential work, the 1964 book Understanding Media:

“Panic about automation as a threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.”

That’s not one of McLuhan’s better sentences. But it does include a couple of ideas that seem pertinent to our current situation. Continue reading →