Screens?!?

I know: this post risks sounding overly pessimistic and cranky, but there is only one question to be asked about Virginia Heffernan's new blog "Screens" over at the New York Times: why? Aren't we already completely and helplessly saturated with the banal this-and-that of web video? What is the point of yet another portal into it all? A quick glance through some of the sites Heffernan links to (AskANinja.com, Break.com, GorillaMask.net, etc.) had such great things as "Cop Gets Run Over by Motorcycle" and "Some Girl Named Peach Strips in the Middle of a Field." Call me Lionel Trilling, but geez.

Why does it feel like Heffernan's project is really sort of an elaborate promotion for these new media sites? What is it about them that we need to know? Perhaps it's the fact that she has lumped so many different types of things together. Her opinions about this or that "vlog" are probably as relevant as A. O. Scott's opinion about the latest movie. Today's taste makers are not the critics, but the cultural producers themselves, who create the new mediums and then their content.

Today's democracy of images is about as interesting as you would expect it to be. In the past, when popular culture has threatened to obliterate distinction by making Everything Available, artists have turned to self-imposed restrictions and constraints, sometimes rational, often absurd. The Surrealists did it. As did the Situationists. So did the Minimalists. Punk did it by stripping away sound until there were only three chords. In his essay "The Revenge of the Intuitive" in Wired from 1999, Brian Eno wrote this: "The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.' Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users: 'How do we pack the maximum number of options into the minimum space and price?' In my experience, the instruments and tools that endure (because they are loved by their users) have limited options."

But we have traveled far beyond the point where the word "limit" has any meaning. It is, today, the prospect of limitlessness that must account, in some way, for our perpetual dissatisfaction.

Comments

[Kurtiss Hare]

Hi Nick. Isn't it possible that we are becoming better equipped for dealing with the limitless? That digital limitlessness is in some way more manageable and presentable than any other fixed form of expression?

Managing the limitless is a brand new art, since we have only in the past experienced the problem of too much. The smartest artists (Eno) realized "too much" was a problem and solved it economically, by limiting options. The Mediascape was always beholden to natural constraints, which are now being eroded to expose its limitless form. It's kind of ugly, but our first exposure to the limitless will help teach us the art of its management. A quick Google search reveals http://www.videobomb.com/, which is surely one of many infantile steps in that direction.

[scary]
The future belongs to well-known, win-win algorithms, and the prospect of their correctness accounts for our satisfaction.
[/scary]

Thanks for your crankiness ;)

[Chuck]

I sometimes share your crankiness about these sites, although she did point me to a few new mash-ups that I hadn't seen, so I can't complain too much.

I have noticed that my local Fox News broadcasts have a story about new media (especially about My Space) almost nightly. Even the stories that are negative (teens stalked on my space yadda yadda) feel like advertising. You have to wonder how many folks immediately get on the web and go to MySpace based on those reports.

[Idetrorce]

very interesting, but I don't agree with you
Idetrorce