Misc. Chat on Publishing, Media, the Future

[JenniferD]

I just wanted to talk about some stuff that doesn’t seem to fit into
any other thread, so I’ve started yet another one.

I’ve just started reading a new book called “After Photography”, by
Fred Ritchin. It’s about how photography is not what it’s always been
anymore. Partly because of the changes from film to digital, and
partly because of the changes in technology that present media
(photography in this case) to the world – the internet, multi-media,
etc. Although the book is about photography, I think a lot of his
ideas can be extrapolated into other media/creative forms – into
publishing. So I thought I’d share some thoughts from the book, and
see if anyone is interested in discussing these ideas.

In the preface he talks a little bit about how the digital age has
changed everything – how we talk, read, listen, see, write,
photograph, and even make love in different ways. Our sense of time,
community, and ourselves is different -- because “if the world is
mediated differently, then the world is different.”

I’m just going to quote a few excerpts pulled from the preface.

“Marshal McLuhan once remarked: ‘one thing about which fish know
exactly nothing is water’ -- they do not know that the water is wet
because they have no experience of dry. Once immersed in the media,
despite all its images and sounds and words, how can we know what it
is doing to us?
[...]
“We cannot be living through a revolution in media and expect it to be
primarily a revolution in shopping, mistaking the new hardware and
software for the new world. This revolution, despite all the hype, is
still largely invisible (Gil Scott-Heron was right – “the revolution
will not be televised.”)

He says he wants his book to “acknowledge the rapidly evolving present
for what it is and what it might become, while engaging one of the
less violent strategies for social change still extant: media.

“Simultaneously, it considers how at very fundamental levels our
media, in the digital environment, will profoundly and permanently
change us — our worldview, our concept of soul and art, our sense of
possibility. We are busily reinventing media under the guise of what
is essentially a marketing term, the “digital revolution,” not daring
to admit, in these perilous times, what what we are really reinventing
is ourselves.
[..]
Then talks some about the massive changes taking/have taken place.
And asks,
“But is this enormous expansion making the world a better place?
[...]
At the moment there is less appreciation for the quiescent and barely
liminal; the preference is for the incandescent and explicit. We
appear to be on a mission to wallpaper our sightlines with with
deracinated images of so little value that they render us numb while
simultaneously telling us that we can now see.

“Although photography’s evolution can be charted, analyzed, and
discussed, the will to utilize such knowledge to devise new strategies
of understanding, to select a better option from various looming
futures, is always in short supply. Given the major dilemmas facing
humanity and the planet, the harnessing of media to help us comprehend
our transitional universe and to intervene in its evolution is less a
luxury than an urgent requirement of citizenship. As photography is
transformed into a variant of emergent media strategies and becomes
partially integrated into an increasingly sophisticated multimedia, we
should be looking to create more useful, exploratory images, not just
the flamboyant, shocking ones.

The deconstruction offered by media analysis insists on the requisite
reconstruction; otherwise, all is vanity.
[...]
“Whatever we eventually choose, the new media that will surface, with
or without our intervention, will transform us. Why? Because that is
what media do and because, whether we are aware of it or not, we want
them to.

“Just think: if we could have begun a similar conversation early on
about the nascent technology of the automobile, the planet’s oceans
might not be warming, the seasons might not have become unmoored, and
the world would not now be calling the sound of glaciers cracking and
breaking ‘art.’”

I’m just thinking that maybe we could really do some good with the
collective/co-op thing. I’d like to try. I want to have a hand, a
voice in the transformation. What do you think?

Jennifer