Pixelated Brains and New Media

The Future is an Empty Room

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[29 May 2009]

By Michael Antman

Photo (partial) by Ricko found on FlickR.com

Photo (partial) by Ricko found on FlickR.com

We Sold Our Souls for a Turkey Sandwich

There was something grotesque and depressing about that fake deli that might well have been built on the site of a long-ago actual deli owned by the area’s original German immigrants, and of the image of those colorful condiments trapped behind glass, so close and yet so far away.

Interestingly, there was an earlier, equally radical, and also technology-driven alteration of our urban environment beginning in the years immediately after World War II. In the US it was called “urban renewal”, and from the moment the first spadeful of earth was turned for the first grand civic project, it was greeted with glorious hosannas. 

Using a combination of eminent domain, legislative fiat, tax incentives, and forced population transfers, urban planners constructed futuristic housing developments and sleek shopping areas that replaced old ethnic neighborhoods from Singapore to Paris to Dublin to Chicago.

Some of the obliterated areas were fragrant and rich in culture, and others were dilapidated and malodorous, but it is indisputable that historic buildings, blocks, farmers markets, and entire Little Italy’s, Jewish Quarters, Greektowns, and Chinatowns, complete with restaurants, commercial buildings, small family-owned shops, and irreplaceable family homes, many featuring unique and richly ornamented architecture, were, in a matter of days, reduced to dust. 

In the countryside, an analogous process plowed under some of the world’s most fertile farmland and the songbirds and creatures that dwelled in its margins, only to be replaced with sprawling shopping malls, housing developments, and expressways, the better to connect the new urban centers with each other. Some of this development was badly needed, and some was horrifically ill-conceived, but in either case, much of our unique and indigenous culture was steamrolled, paved, asphalted, and macadamed to death.

All of this struck home for me a few years back, when I spent a couple of days on business in the downtown area of a medium-large American city that had, after several waves of urban renewal, lost any semblance of its former self as a vibrant Mississippi River boomtown.  Most of its old buildings had long since been flattened in favor of the kind of sleek corporate headquarters that have, depending on the architect, either brightened or blighted many American cities; others had been razed for parking lots or for new sports stadiums and temporarily fashionable condos and housing complexes.

For better or worse (and some of the new buildings were indeed beautiful) the city now looked like any of a hundred other American cities, its original and indigenous character irretrievably lost. Like the wood rat (aka “pack rat”) of legend that steals shiny bits of jewelry and replaces them with twigs or pebbles, something beautiful had been stolen, and something else vaguely characterless and ersatz had been left behind.

It was a raw and windy couple of days, and the fact that the downtown area was nearly deserted seemed to make the streets that much colder and more sterile. Before heading to the airport, I ducked into a local deli for dinner. As I entered, I could see a large cubbyholed wall stacked with one-gallon jars of bread and butter pickles, banana peppers, giardiniera, pickled cauliflower, calamata olives, giant green olives, cherry peppers, pickled onions, jalapenos, artichoke hearts, and hearts of palm.

It was a scintillating vision.

So I ordered a turkey and Swiss sandwich and asked for some spicy giardiniera on it, and some Greek olives on the side.

“No can do,” the clerk behind the counter told me. “Those are just for decoration.”  I objected, but resistance was futile: It was “corporate policy.” 

Those jars had dwelt there, unopened, for years.

So I consumed a tasteless sandwich with deli meat that might as well have been dematerialized from its original corporeal incarnation, then reconstituted by means of a matter replicator as “turkey” and combined with a splurt of mustard and a simulacrum of Swiss, and hailed a taxi to the airport.

But there was something grotesque and depressing about that fake deli that might well have been built on the site of a long-ago actual deli owned by the area’s original German immigrants (just as housing developments named, for example, “Fair Oaks”, have inevitably bulldozed an old stand of oak trees to make room for the parking lot), and of the image of those colorful condiments trapped behind glass, so close and yet so far away. It has remained with me all of these years as a fitting symbol of how technology has created a culture that is more tantalizingly accessible, and yet more distant and lacking in savor and flavor, than ever before.

Of course, digital culture is only distantly analogous to urban renewal, in part because many of those post-war housing complexes, having been deemed to be unlivable, have themselves long since been torn down. But in both cases, new technologies were enthusiastically embraced, and the old ones too quickly consigned to the past.

The point is that the old neighborhoods and landmark buildings that were destroyed to make room for the new buildings are gone forever. So too, I fear, are many of the elements of our culture that digitization is either wittingly or unwittingly wiping out. Precious parts of our civilization are being ground into digital dust, and we will never get them back.

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Pixelated Brains and New Media

Michael Antman writes on books, movies, the visual arts, and marketing.  He is the author of the novel Cherry Whip (ENC Press) and the recently completed memoir Searching for the Seagull Motel, which is about door-to-door Bible salesmen, sailors, strippers, bar brawls, beached whales, hermits, hurricanes, larcenous preachers, the pirate Jean Lafitte, and an administrative assistant to a pimp.

His website, where most of his writing is collected, is at Michael Antman Author.com and he also blogs frequently at When Falls the Coliseum.com.

Comments

I strongly take offense at your comparison of Star Trek to a piece of moldy cheese!  And there are well-regarded books documenting just how much Star Trek did get right about the future.  But the rest of your piece was spot on - really made me think.  I must say, though, that I actually like minimalism and often fantasized having a bedroom or room like those Next Generation crew quarters!  They have plenty of artwork and artifacts.  And Data even had his cat, Spot, in his room!  I say: Down with space (and Earth) clutter!  However, I admit it would be weird to someday, as you write, have no bookstores, no newspaper stands, etc. - and digital libraries?? Bravo on a great article - one I discovered while reading PopMatters on my Kindle!

Comment by Jen from New York City — May 29, 2009 @ 9:56 pm

Amen. They can have my books when they pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.

Comment by Kelly — May 30, 2009 @ 11:42 am

Just because books and other media won’t exist in physical form in the future doesn’t make them any less valuable. You’re lamenting the fact that in the future we’ll have less clutter and less stuff? I see this as a great benefit. I hate having to dedicate giant shelves to media I only really access every once in a while. I value my books and movie and games collection as much as anyone else, but the human need to collect STUFF is sickening. Our loss of the want to hoard material objects is not something to lament, it’s something to celebrate. More people have access to more information now, and the people have been empowered to create in ways we’ve never even dreamed of. Now, instead of there being a class of creatives, we can all experience what it is like to create.

Comment by Christopher Furniss — May 30, 2009 @ 2:01 pm

Dear Christopher:

I might agree with you if the stuff in question were merely status objects or ephemera, but I consider books, in particular, to be in a special category that’s very different from what we think of as “material goods” (I think most people look at it this way, too; we tend not to call someone with huge numbers of books “materialistic,” though we might call them other things.) 

No question that some people like less clutter and some people like more, but I think there’s a larger issue here, which is that the ready access to enormous amounts of information tends to commoditize that information without, on the other hand, making it more likely that people will discover wonderful new artists.  Sure, there’s some of that, but the opposite is also the case: As our bookstores and record stores disappear, it will become more and more the case that people will gravitate to fewer and fewer heavily promoted “brand names.” 

Sure, there’ll be a million interesting artists out there, but my suspicion is that it’ll be less likely, rather than more likely, that significant numbers of people will find them.  Have you seen, for example, the stats on how few songs and albums constitute nearly all of ITunes’s sales?  The vast majority of songs and albums didn’t sell a single copy over the course of a year.  The same applies to books.

And yes, I do consider the loss of common meeting places where we can browse and meet other people face to face a tremendous loss to our culture.


Best,

Michael

Comment by Michael Antman — May 30, 2009 @ 2:53 pm

I disagree wholeheartedly with your analysis of our cultural trajectory. 

Speaking as a young person, I’ve noticed when people look back on the art of their generation as superior or more ‘soulful’ as the current art, they’re only selectively remembering their nostalgia.

Going back to your Star Trek analogy, Star Trek did get a lot of things wrong.  But Deep Space Nine got right a lot about human nature that the Gene Roddenberry variations missed.  It’s parting words, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’.  We’re never going to replace alcohol with ‘synthehol’, which tastes the same but isn’t intoxicating, nor are we going to abolish money and ‘rise above’ our human desires.  People are always going to find ways to be people, and whether they’re doing it with ink on paper or digital bits, they’re always going to want flavor in their life.  They’re just probably going to get it in ways you’re not used to and you don’t consider equal to the ways you get it in your life.

In fact, one would argue having books and LPs instead of oral tradition, telephone instead of written letters, etc constitutes the destruction of the soul.  If one was born a few centuries ago, yet you find LPs and books to be sufficiently soulful.

Technologically phasing out what you consider to be special does not constitute forfeiture of the soul.

Comment by Chris — June 1, 2009 @ 3:24 pm

Hi Chris—

I, on the other hand, don’t disagree wholeheartedly with you; I think you raise some legitimate points. 

However, the oral tradition co-existed with books and LPs and it still does, though perhaps not to the same degree as before. We can still hear live music despite the ubiquity of recorded music, for example.  But there’s something perhaps unique in human history about digitization in its absolutism and its inability to compromise or co-exist with earlier technologies; it doesn’t allow competing media to survive (not because of any malign intent, of course; it’s just the nature of digitization to reduce every storage and display medium to its least tangible manifestation.) 

Thus, while live music continues to thrive, it’s extremely unlikely that CDs and DVDs will exist at all as commercially viable entities ten years from today.

I can probably live with this, as, I would guess, can you.  But every situation has to be evaluated individually, on its own merits, and DVDs, CDs and LPs are, in my opinion, in a far-different, and far-lesser, category from books.

Indeed, the primary purpose of this article is to present books as a special case worthy of our special attention. I understand your point about generational differences, but that can’t stop me, nor should it stop you, from focusing on the obvious: that the printed book is in jeopardy of dying, that the screen is a sterile substitute, and yes, that losing the printed book as a vital cultural artifact would be a tragedy, and would, to borrow your phrase, constitute forefeiture of at least part of our soul.  The empty rooms, bookshelves, and bookstores in our future will be merely visual analogues for a greater cultural, aesthetic and spiritual loss.

Comment by Michael Antman — June 1, 2009 @ 5:04 pm

It seems to me that your defense of books is like arguing that music written 200 years ago has suffered because it is played on a modern Steinway instead of the intended medium, the Klavier or Pianoforte. Or that you’d prefer the original 1939 Wizard of Oz to its current digitally restored, recolored and remastered version? Don’t you think it likely devices will evolve that improve the experience of reading beyond books in ways similar to these examples?

Most of the technology of Star Trek is a stretch too far, but I wouldn’t be so sure about the Holodeck. I think even you might put your book aside for a chance at that.

Certainly, as McLuhan stated, the medium influences how we perceive the message, and some mediums are more pleasingly tactile, sensuous, evocative, etc., than are others. But ultimately, what’s important is the message: that Hamlet exists somewhere. I don’t really care where these important, beautiful messages reside, as long they don’t rot, burn or turn to dust as books are wont to do.

Comment by Mark Guerin — June 3, 2009 @ 2:40 pm

Mark—

A rather bizarre comment, all in all.  In the first place, knowing, as I do, that you’ve read my piece in its entirety, it should have been very clear to you that I’m merely advocating the not-unreasonable proposition that books co-exist with eReaders in the future; that I’ll be buying an eReader myself one of these days; and that both printed and electronic technologies have their advantages and their disadvantages. I “put my book aside” all the time, and in fact probably spend more time engaging with social media and new technologies than the vast majority of people.

Second, every situation has to be judged on its own merits.  Your use, as an example, of remastered and restored movies (which, of course, I prefer, as long as the remastering is faithful to the intent of the original) is too far off-topic to be worth responding to.

The purpose of the article—again, you should know this—was to point out that digitization tends to have an all-or-nothing quality about it, and that, for all of their manifest advantages, I wouldn’t want digital technologies to entirely wipe out our 500-year-old heritage of printed books. 

Would you?

You also contradict yourself: In your first paragraph, you claim that new devices will “improve the experience of reading” (in some cases, maybe yes, in some cases, no) but then you say that “ultimately, what’s important is the message: that Hamlet exists somewhere.”  I think you need a few extra paragraphs of close reasoning to connect those two thoughts.

Finally, as a one-time contributor to the message boards of an organization called The Dead Media Project, I’m very aware, as you should be, that many of the “important, beautiful messages” you speak of have been lost over the decades not because they were in books (though that happens too, of course), but because they were stored on fleetingly modern technologies that very quickly became outmoded—we’ve lost vast amounts of information that were stored on old punch cards, reel-to-reels, unreadable or corrupted floppy discs, etc., because we no longer can “read” them.  In order to rescue this information, engineers have been forced to—you guessed it—print it out.  Of course, much of this information was present in books to begin with, with no need for machines to read it or interpret it.

I’m not suggesting that the same will happen with data now on the Internet, but I think your overall argument is facile and reflexive.  It certainly doesn’t engage with my actual arguments, which go far beyond the cartoonish “books are good/technology is bad” paradigm you seem to have taken away from it. 

I think Kindles and Sony eReaders, etc., are very nice pieces of technology (as, again, I state very clearly in my article), but you seem to have trouble “returning the compliment”—your contemptuous reference to books that “rot, burn or turn to dust” is beneath you.

Comment by Michael Antman — June 3, 2009 @ 6:45 pm

I was not commenting on the quality of your essay, which I still agree is well reasoned and excellently written, and perhaps I was unclear in my argument. I would not criticize your feelings about books, any more than I would critize anyone for mourning the loss of a loved one.

The point I was trying to make is that cultures are always evolving past earlier technologies and, as a culture, rarely regret doing so.

Right now, digitization is causing us to undergo a massive paradigm shift, complete with the chaos and shakeups that typically accompany those shifts. Your essay powerfully describes the downside of this transition. Digitization is no where near perfect right now and that is demonstrated, as you point out, by the fact that valueable writings have been lost due to unstable storage technologies. 

Why do art technologies change?  Because artists are always searching for ways to get closer to truth and beauty and better ways to preserve their creations.

Why do we love museums?  Not because we regret the loss of the technologies artists used to create great paintings, prints, books, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, etc., but because because of the objects themselves.  But nobody regrets that we no longer use the materials Rembrandt painted with, the instruments Bach composed on, and or the press that printed the Gutenberg bible.  Beautiful things (e.g., messages found in books) will always be beautiful independent of the technologies used to create them.  The technologies die; the beauty of what was created by the technologies survives if people love it enough to preserve it. 

I’m saddened, to a degree less so than you, that some books will disappear. Those beautiful as objects in and of themselves should and probably will be preserved in museums.

I’m more concerned that the beauty of their messages survive.

To your point that I don’t connect this thought to the idea that better reading technologies will evolve, here’s an example: I rarely if ever ‘read’ books at all anymore.  I listen to them.  My experience is different from yours, yes, but only in a relative sense, not in a quantifiable one. Am I getting less or more out of listening to a book that you read? Some narrators are terrific at bringing meanings out of words and phrases I, as a reader, might never have considered. 

The book evolved to replace the storyteller.  Did it lose anything in doing so?  Absolutely.  The non-verbal cues, the acting out of scenes, the intonation and use of different voices. 

Every technology/technique/method of delivering a message has its own intrinsic qualities that are lost when that technology is lost. But, as a culture, we seldom regret it because the newer technology often provides some advantage (ala natural selection)over the previous ones. Books are more permanent than storytelling.  Digitization is more permanent, takes up less space and can be more convenient than books. Digital audio books revive the beauty of storytelling while providing the benefits of digitization. 

Who knows what will replace digitization and why.  We just know it will happen and it will happen for the better.

Comment by Mark Guerin — June 4, 2009 @ 8:52 am

Mark,

A more accurate analogy for Bach and the piano would be Switched On Bach and the moog keyboard. The piano is certainly a technological improvement on the harpsichord, and, in the proper hands, like Glenn Gould’s, actually managed to improve on Bach as he was originally performed. But, it didn’t stop there, and you won’t convince me that electronic Bach isn’t a huge step backward. The message, all those notes, is still there, but something fine and serious and lovely was lost in what Wendy Carlos did.

Also, you can’t have it both ways with McLuhan; if the medium is important to the message, then you can’t say that the message alone is enough. Reading Hamlet is nowhere near the experience that the staged Hamlet is of the written Hamlet.

Finally, that all technological advancements “happen for the better” is simply not the case. An Mp3 isn’t better than a .wav file; it’s simply more portable. In fact, it’s demonstrably worse. Digitalization may make things more convenient, but it doesn’t make them better.

Comment by Christopher Guerin — June 4, 2009 @ 9:51 am

Thank you, a fascinating essay, and I agree with most of the points raised - though I have to say I don’t like most of them. 

I’m just wondering - to go on from the jelly spattered book you mentioned - that in a world of digitisation where everything is the same and blandly perfect, we might have a change in values.  Maybe we will turn to books because they are not perfect.  There is something comforting about a misprint or the wrong note that occurs on any printed page and in any recording, which will probably disappear as things become digital.  I suppose they remind us that the artists, like us. are human. 

Maybe the world will turn towards that as if turns towards unique clothes and furnishings.  They will seek out items like books and music that belong uniqely to them.

Comment by Clare D from UK — June 9, 2009 @ 10:31 am

You�re lamenting the fact that in the future we�ll have less clutter and less stuff? I see this as a great benefit. I hate having to dedicate giant shelves to media I only really access every once in a while. I value my books and movie and games collection as much as anyone else, but the human need to collect STUFF is sickening. Our loss of the want to hoard material objects is not something to lament, it�s something to celebrate. More people have access to more information now, and the people have been empowered to create in ways we�ve never even dreamed of. Now, instead of there being a class of creatives, we can all experience what it is like to create.

Comment by Leather Sofa — June 11, 2009 @ 3:57 pm

I believe you already made this comment above under the name Christopher Furniss. Michael duly responded, and the only thing I would add is that, just because digital books, albums, etc. don’t take up physical space, doesn’t mean that they’re somehow liberated from the crass world of consumerism. In other words, your room can look like the minimalist personal quarters on the Enterprise and still be full of junk.

Comment by K. Roberts — June 11, 2009 @ 5:08 pm

Dear Clare D:

Thank you for your comment.  What you said about the appeal of imperfection reminded me of a quote I came across in the process of researching this article.  It’s from the contemporary painter John Currin who said of his own work, in a recent New Yorker profile, that “it’s great when the accidental becomes indistinguishable from the intentional.  That’s when it begins to seem like a living thing.” 

Cheers,

Michael

Comment by Michael Antman — June 11, 2009 @ 5:31 pm

The problem with the essay is the premise is a false dichotomy - books vs digital - the reality, even today, is the two mediums are interchangeable and have complex relationships. For example Google Books has scanned 5+ million public domain books freely available as PDF’s which can be downloaded, then re-uploaded to LuLu, and re-printed as a book again (all for about $15-20). This sort of hazy merging of air and sea will be more pronounced in the future as publishers make dual digital/paper versions available.

Instead of comparing to music, a better comparison is office paper - whatever happened to the “paperless office”? Turned out to be a bad idea. Printed documents have advantages.

Comment by Stephen Balbach — July 19, 2009 @ 8:04 pm

— PopMatters sponsor —

I think that dual digital/paper versions of books is, as you note, a likely next step.  However, the step after that—or maybe the step after the step after that—is likely digital only.  Or perhaps books will survive only as either one-off customized PODs or as rare keepsakes.  I hope I’m wrong.

I agree that the “paperless office” isn’t happening any time soon (I actually never thought it was likely, for the same reason you do—printed documents have advantages.)  But our offices are a very different environment than our cultural “spaces,” whether in our homes or on our streets.

In fact, the various comparisons and analogies on this message board and others (including comparisons and analogies I myself have made), whether to musical instruments or the paperless office or various other things, are, while sometimes illuminating, ultimately only of limited value. 

Leaving all metaphors aside, I can step out of my office and take a half-hour walk and see a shuttered store where there once was an enormous Virgin Records (and books, and DVDs, and magazine) store; and a shuttered store where there once was another large and very busy record store called Rock Records; three shuttered independent bookstores; and a shuttered Rand-McNally map store that sold travel guides; and on, and on.  Not one of them has been replaced by new record/book/DVD/magazine stores, but rather by bank branches and Payday Loan stores and Subway sandwich shops and the like.  This is no metaphor or analogy; this is facts on the ground. 

Of course I realize that this cultural devastation (as I see it) has been created by many factors, including the stupidity and greed of record-industry executives, our discount culture, and of course our current recession.  But digitization (which, by the way, in every way aids and abets our discount culture) clearly is playing a very significant role in this. 

Some independent bookstores, and a small handful of specialized record stores, are still thriving, true, but I think only temporarily.  Some people may find all this perfectly fine or even vastly appealing; but for those who, like me, don’t want to see the physical manifestations of our culture entirely disappear behind a single cool screen, I think we need to recognize that digitization is, by its very nature, a uniquely uncompromising and perhaps irreversible force.  I don’t think that many people would argue that this isn’t the case with music. 

I love my various “screens” and hope they can co-exist with books, in particular, forever.  I fear, though, that this isn’t going to be the case, at least not for very much longer.

Comment by Michael Antman — July 20, 2009 @ 7:27 pm

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