Convenience of Streaming Services (5 Aug 2011)

An article at the AV Club by Sam Adams looks at the implications of Netflix’s streaming service and the growing popularity of Spotify, a music-streaming company. He begins with an observation that seems unassailable to me — “Convenience and choice are the watchwords of the digital era, in which content must be instantly accessible and as quickly digested, lest consumers flit off to some more welcoming destination” — but I was confused by the analysis that follows, which didn’t really explain why consumers are so susceptible to novelty and what he calls the “convenience trap,” the willingness to consume what’s available as opposed to what is presumably good for you. Adams fears we may be “unconsciously downgrading anything that isn’t so ready at hand.”

But what does that mean? Why does everything have to be graded? And does an unconscious grade have any meaning? If you can’t bother to make the effort to make your tastes conscious, then what difference does it make to you what you watch? And why should anyone else care? Adams is concerned that the great works may be lost to history if streaming services don’t assimilate them to their streaming libraries: “Spotify’s great, unless you want to listen to anything Hüsker Dü recorded before its major-label debut. Would you trade New Day Rising for the Black Eyed Peas catalogue?” This doesn’t strike me as a serious question. If you badly want to hear New Day Rising, try this. If you care about music, you probably won’t let Spotify dictate what you can or can’t hear, and digital reproduction has made it fairly likely that digital copies of everything will survive and proliferate. (Our real archival concern should be with the survival of analog artifacts that have yet to be digitized — even though digitization may lead to a not entirely representative version of a work surviving.) The people who have a lot invested in their entertainment choices will supplement streaming services with ready alternatives. The people who don’t diversify their supply basically don’t really care, and why should they? Because certain art is good for them, and they should be made to consume it through clever institutionalized market nudges?

Adams’s implicit concern seems to be that the tasteless masses will be left to languish in their cultural ignorance because the streaming services they thoughtlessly adopt don’t force more redeeming content on them. And he also seems to think that if you are not cleaver enough to make redemptive consumer quests for the great works, you will be too dim or disinterested to understand them: “If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it?” Apparently if one lives next door to the Prado, Goya’s works there become more or less indistinguishable for you from Hagar the Horrible comics.

Working hard to gain access to a work has nothing intrinsic to do with being willing or able to interpret it. Adams offers an S&M take on art appreciation, that art should dominate and master us while we subserviently mold ourselves to its masterful lessons: “the viewer—not, please, the consumer—is fundamentally subservient to a work of art, in which it is our responsibility, and often our pleasure, to come to the work rather than expecting it to come to us. After all, shouldn’t art be inconvenient, if not in the sense of being difficult to access, then because it forces us out of our comfort zones, requiring us to reckon with its way of understanding the world?” I am pretty sympathetic to this, but I don’t think my attitude needs to be generalized. It’s not the only way to engage with art. And though I may try harder to get something out of a show I have to travel far to see, that doesn’t mean I necessarily cruise through a nearby show on autopilot.

The idea that difficulty is necessary to have a “real” art experience is similar to the idea that something more real happens when the art encounter is “spontaneous” — being surprised by the beauty of a sunset, etc. It is always tempting to extrapolate a dogma out of such experiences when they are profoundly affecting, but that would be a mistake. I don’t think there is a prescription for assuring edifying aesthetic moments. Instead, when people try to push some recipe for the aesthetic onto someone else, they are imposing an encapsulated version of a status hierarchy that favors them. Ultimately, whatever they are pushing now (no matter how universal the principles are presented to be) will be repudiated later in pursuit of some fresh form of distinction. Isn’t this an extremely elitist question: “How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?” This seems to mean: You dummies should be watching the hard stuff (like me) but instead you are weak and let the technology trick you into watching what is mere middlebrow entertainment. You’re trapped in your own lazy tastes.

Adams points out that “we carry around unspoken assumptions about what’s long and what’s short, what’s easy and what’s hard, and when those assumptions calcify, we may no longer be aware they’re there.” Yes, this is how ideology typically works, and it extends far beyond how we choose to entertain ourselves. Making ourselves aware of our unthinking assumptions about what is common sense is probably always a good and worthy practice. But we don’t encourage people to join in that project when we imply that the reason it is necessary is so that they can conform to some other dogma about what cultural product is correct and appropriate. That replaces one politicized mystification with another. Yes, Netflix — like may consumer goods manufacturers — would probably love it if we consumed simplistic mind candy as quickly and as often as possible; that’s good business for them. And that incentive contributes to their trying to shape and promulgate a certain ideology about what it is fun to do. Their pay structure contributes to a materialization of that ideology. Convenience almost always serves an agenda of accelerated consumption, which is passed off as maximized happiness or efficiency. (You’ve consumed more, so you are better off!) But implying that people need to consume the “right” things instead of the convenient things seems to substitute an elitist ideology for a consumerist one, and may trigger reactionary retrenchment among the consumerists one may be trying to rescue with screenings of Bela Tarr films and copies of Metal Circus.

In 2007 I made the argument that subscription services “almost make the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste’s centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste.” That is, in a consumer society we have this sense that you have to put your money where your mouth is to “prove” your taste. The idea that you need to suffer to acquire access to “real” art in order to appreciate it has a similar inflection to it — that art needs to be scarce to have an aura of significance, which derives from people earning/paying for the privilege to consume it. But it seems more interesting to break out of the idea that scarcity imposes some mystical meaning on things to see what they might mean beyond that.

Conversation and Convenience (9 Sept 2010)

A few prefatory remarks: I dislike talking on the phone and generally avoid it if I can. I dislike voice mail even more, a moribund technology that I wish would be discontinued so that those behind the curve don’t accidentally use it and expect people to listen to their messages. I am not proud of my attitudes though, despite frequently airing them. These attitudes reflect my fear of being engaged in a conversation I can’t control, having to expending my precious time on discourse from another human being that I can’t skim through. Not to be overdramatic, but I think I am in some small way psychically murdering those people who are trying to reach me when I refuse to listen to their messages, when I choose my convenience over their relative inarticulateness and the slowness of the technology they have chosen to use. The same goes for timeshifting the act of conversation so that it can cease to be reciprocal and take the form of broadcasting. It’s a casual act of cruelty to deny that reciprocity, to withhold the possibility of spontaneous sympathy and understanding.

It makes me think of that section of My Dinner With Andre in which Andre talks about having to endure small talk while he was in the midst of watching his mother die.

ANDRE: [Long pause.] Well, you know, I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally, but since I’ve come back home, I’ve just been finding the world we’re living in more and more upsetting. I mean. Last week I went down to the public theater one afternoon. You know, when I walked in I said “hello” to everybody, ’cause I know them all and they all know me, and they’re always very friendly. You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I looked, and then one person, one, a woman who runs the casting office, said: “Gee, you look horrible! Is something wrong?” Now she, we started talking, of course I started telling her things, and she suddenly burst into tears because an aunt of hers, who’s eighty, whom she’s very fond of, went into the hospital for a cataract, which was solved, but the nurse was so sloppy she didn’t put the bed rails up, so the aunt fell out of bed and is now a complete cripple! So, you know, we were talking about hospitals. Now, you know, this woman, because of who she is, you know, ’cause this had happened to her very, very recently, she could see me with complete clarity. [Wally says “Un-hunh.”] She didn’t know anything about what I’ve been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan or this shirt, or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan, so they say: “Gee, you look wonderful!” Now, they’re living in an insane dream world! They’re not looking. That seems very strange to me.

WALLY: Right, because they just didn’t see anything somehow, except the few little things that they wanted to see.

ANDRE: Yeah. You know, it’s like what happened just before my mother died. You know, we’d gone to the hospital to see my mother, and I went in to see her. And I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. And I was out in the hall, sort of comforting my father, when a doctor who is a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said: “Boy! Don’t we have a lot of reason to feel great! Isn’t it wonderful how she’s coming along!” Now, all he saw was the arm, that’s all he saw. Now, here’s another person who’s existing in a dream. Who on top of that is a kind of butcher, who’s committing a kind of familial murder, because when he comes out of that room he psychically kills us by taking us into a dream world, where we become confused and frightened. Because the moment before we saw somebody who already looked dead and now here comes a specialist who tells us they’re in wonderful shape! I mean, you know, they were literally driving my father crazy. I mean, you know, here’s an eighty-two-year-old man who’s very emotional, and, you know, if you go in one moment, and you see the person’s dying, and you don’t want them to die, and then a doctor comes out five minutes later and tells you they’re in wonderful shape! I mean, you know, you can go crazy!

WALLY: Yeah, I know what you mean.

ANDRE: I mean, the doctor didn’t see my mother. People at the public theater didn’t see me. I mean, we’re just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we’re all in a trance! We’re walking around like zombies! I don’t think we’re even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we’re just going around all day like unconscious machines, I mean, while there’s all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us!

I think our communication devices are making it harder to escape the dream world; it’s making us all conversational butchers who deny one another’s reality because we can’t be bothered to look beyond our own fantasia. And signs of the resultant passive-aggressive hostility seem to be everywhere — to me anyway, it seems obvious in myself, when I find myself cursing at my phone like I have Tourette’s because it tells me there is a voice mail for me to listen to. I know then that I live in an insane dream world.

Not everyone sees it this way. At the Economist’s Free Exchange blog, Ryan Avent responds to a Kevin Drum post about hating the phone. Avent defends the drift toward textual communications:

Younger people want to talk on the phone less because the opportunity cost of setting everything else aside is higher, and because the substitutes for phone conversations are better than ever.

At any given moment, I’m carrying on many, many different conversations. Some of these conversations are conducted through blog arguments. Others, via email. Still others take place using instant messaging or Twitter. Other people use other modes—Facebook, Flickr, comment threads, and probably other social network tools I’ve not heard of. But what all these options have in common is that the participants in the discussions can engage in them at their convenience. I can return an email whenever I have a spare moment….

A phone call, on the other hand, requires both participants to be talking to each other in real time…. time spent on a constrictive phone call is time not spent on the many other conversations an individual has going.

Of course, this takes some getting used to. What is actually an increase in productivity feels to those used to long phone calls like an overwhelming and thought eviscerating wave of distraction. Plus, it’s hard to hear over cell phones! But if phone calls feel burdensome to young people, it’s because they’re often actually burdensome. And the conversion of a convenience into a burden is representative, above all else, of progress.

Here I must disagree with Avent. I don’t regard the experience of convenience or lack of it as an automatic indication of “progress.” I think putting a private illusion of productivity ahead of the fostering of a shared psychic space through conversation is a terrible mistake, an inhumane selfishness that our gadgets make all too easy for us to indulge. I don’t think the ability to conduct “conversations” at our convenience is especially beneficial. It erodes the very concept of social reciprocity, of necessarily willed attention in the moment, even if it is against one’s inclination. If there is to be a meaningful public sphere, it requires resistance, friction, argument, confrontation. It requires inconvenience, the inconvenience of focusing our attention most of all. It requires the difficulty that Jonah Lehrer talks about here with regard to e-readers.

I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.

Difficulty prompts contemplation. It disrupts the insane dream world; it forbids the caustic solipsism that ultimately doesn’t even serve ourselves, but shuts us in a crypt of incomparable and thus impotent self-regard.

The more convenience we introduce to conversation, the more we’re winnowing away the difficulties that preserve the possibilities of discourse. Instead we get a simulation of communication that precludes a confrontation with anything outside the dream world, and makes sure that the world we share with others will not change in any meaningful way. Convenient communication lets existing power relations further entrench themselves; the convenience assures that discussions of their inequity can never be broached.

Pleasure procrastination (31 Dec 2009)

The best defense for the advertising industry is that it licenses our pleasure. It gives us permission to relax and enjoy things. But that assumes that we need such permission, that our instincts lie elsewhere — possibly with a different sort of pleasure that doesn’t revolve around consumption, around possessions. It’s not clear whether by pushing its peculiar form of desire, the ad industry isn’t undermining other latent modes of pleasure, leading us to neglect them and let them atrophy. When I travel and escape from advertising, it never fails to startle me how much I miss it in subtle ways, how I need guidance about what I should be wanting. The absence of consumerist desire can seem to hurt. The pleasures of travel, such as they are, sometimes fail to compensate.

The difficulty of desire has long been a staple of French social theory. Virtually all of Lacan is about the subject. Baudrillard begins his essay “Concerning the Fulfillment of Desire in Exchange Value” with a memorable anecdote about the difficulty of ridding ourselves of what Bataille called the accursed share: “There was a raid on a U.S. department store several years ago. A group occupied and neutralized the store by surprise, and then invited the crowd by loudspeaker to help themselves. A symbolic action! And the result? Nobody could figure out what to take.” The basic idea is that we are strangers in the world our economy has outfitted us with — we must learn how to be subjects in it, and the adjustment is painful.

Baudrillard claims that “beyond the transparency of economics, where everything is clear because it suffices to ‘want something for your money,’ man apparently no longer knows what he wants.” This is persuasive to me because I often need to see that something is on sale or is a “good deal” in order to permit myself to buy it. (This is why I generally shop at Savers and Goodwill.) I’ve argued before somewhere (can’t find) that ads, as part of their function, promote the market mentality, the neoclassical economist’s view of humans as efficient utility calculators for this reason, persuading us we should find pleasure in maximizing utility, in making good deals. In reality, no deals are required for pleasure. It’s a free gift that comes with being alive.

The idea that we need external forces urging us to indulge fits well with the findings of market researchers Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy (pdf) about procrastinating pleasure, which John Tierney reports on in the NYT. The researchers claim in the abstract that “the tendency to procrastinate applies not only to aversive tasks but also to positive experiences with immediate benefits.” We like deadlines, which make us decisive and prompt us to action. Advertising, marketing, sales — all these seem to work best when they make it seem like we must “act now!” Maybe the details of the pitch and the dubious emotional associations they cultivate are ultimately irrelevant; maybe only the pressure they put on us forms the real substance of ads. The secret lurking in consumerism may be that we really don’t want to spend our time liquidating gift cards and forcing ourselves to the mall — that this isn’t inherently fun, contrary to the pervasive ideology. Free of priming we may find it a hassle to have to want stuff. We postpone consumerist pleasures not out of protestant-ethic guilt but because they actually aren’t all that compelling to us when isolated from their marketing.

The assumption that there is something inherently harmful in postponing consumerist pleasure seems a bit dubious to me. There’s pleasure in restraint and indulgence both. Tierney sums up the researchers’ apparent views this way: “Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be.” But doesn’t that work both ways — the longer we wait, the more special the occasion will seem to be when we open it? (Tierney’s conclusion sounds the same note.) We can only imagine the nirvana because we are building it around some delay in fulfillment, letting fantasies crystallize around some forestalled moment of truth. Immediate gratification isn’t more pleasurable than the circuit of desire, the chase and the capture.

Vinyl Sales Surge (9 Dec 2009)

The NYT had a mostly anecdotal piece this past weekend about how more people of the “iPod generation” are suddenly buying turntables and vinyl records. I don’t know if I am demographically part of this generation, but I can relate — I’ve been reacquiring albums I used to have in an effort to recapture the listening experiences of my youth, in which an entire side of a record would get digested in the full flush of analog warmth.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”

It makes sense for music companies to push vinyl since they have no choice but try to reorient consumers to the meaningfulness of physical objects. So it is hard to take Jbara seriously here as he spouts marketing propaganda. Nevertheless I think listening to records is appealing at this moment precisely because it is inconvenient, and maybe inconvenience is, as Jbara suggests, part of the essence of love. Overcoming obstacles is a feature, not a bug, as they say.It brings weight to the experience, makes it contrast with all the experiences that commercial culture has made easy (which in turn makes us consumers passive).

Yeats’s “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” seems relevant here. He seems to be arguing the opposite:

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.

It’s the myth of “spontaneous joy” and “natural content” that has ushered in the “iPod Generation” and its peculiar restlessness, its voracious, overstimulated cultural appetite, its demand for instantaneous distraction. The absence of “natural content” — the fact that satisfying oneself requires effort — opens the possibility of substituting novelty for deeper satisfactions. When something doesn’t spontaneously please us, we are invited to think the solution is to try something different, not work at the “difficult” thing that has failed us. The vinyl fascination may be the stirrings of a counter-movement that fetishizes difficulty as a way of fixing value, as measured in attention and consumption effort rather than ease and monetary cost.

Or perhaps it is just an expression of a nostalgia for material souvenirs of our taste. Records are a way to make my musical taste seem more substantial to me — see, these are the albums I really care about, the ones I like so much, I listen to them on vinyl. On my computer, I have everything, so none of it will seem like it is special to me. The record collection is different; it requires sacrifices. Vinyl is the new way to signify that you are “serious about music,” since having access to lots of songs and being familiar with lots of different stuff no longer suffices.

One thing I have learned in my return to vinyl is that records that skip are not endearing; they are totally annoying. And it doesn’t take very much to induce a record to start skipping.

Necessary frictions (23 Jan 2009)

These are deep thoughts occasioned by playing 1942, so measure them accordingly. The problem I faced was defeating the first big plane you encounter, about 10 stages in. I found it to be ridiculously hard and was entertaining implementing the cheat code that let’s a player destroy it with one hit. But then I began thinking about optimal frustration and about the difficulty game creators must have in finding the ideal balance between frustration and progress. Obviously games need to be just hard enough to keep you pressing reset (or, back in the paleolithic days of arcades, dropping another quarter in) when you are foiled. You have to be persuaded by the game that you can make it past the obstacle even as the game is at the same time thwarting you. What emerge from this apparent contradiction is a sense of how frustration structures the feeling of progress. When the cheat code is enabled, there is no sense of progress in 1942 — only a curiosity about what’s next keeps me going. Oh, neat: the red planes now criss-cross instead of flying in a spiral. The thirst for this sort of novelty only takes me so far, and in fact what’s revealed is how idiotic it is to care about what comes next in 1942. (It’s like the elementary-school teachers say: “When you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself.”) A measure of difficulty, of friction, is necessary to transform the arbitrary novelty into progress.

This dynamic perhaps holds true for consumerism generally — we want more things because we imagine these things will enhance or enrich our lives in some way, offer some sort of progress toward a self-concept or goal. Consumerism seizes upon that impulse as the source of profit and thus seeks to gratify it. But because maximizing the volume of exchanges ultimately suits producers best, their efforts are focused on eliminating the difficulties that impede them — they seek to enable the cheat code, as it were, and let us get what we want as soon as we think of it (and can afford it). But without any difficulty in accessing more stuff, our pursuit of novelty never gives us a feeling of progress or accomplishment. Without the frustration, our frivolous impulses can’t ripen into meaningful desires. If there is no friction, our concentration is not engaged in the same way — we don’t stoke our creative problem-solving abilities or become invested emotionally. The problem (i.e. the new thing we want to integrate into our life) takes on no metaphoric resonance or depth. To make another maudlin videogame allusion: each new impulse remains just another dot to consume as wend our way, Pac-Man-like, through the meaningless maze of existence.

Obviously, as the internet facilitates our access to cultural goods, frustration becomes harder to find. In a recent post (via BoingBoing), tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly argues that more and more culture products will become readily available social goods. He argues that access is better than ownership, and therefore society will move in the direction of providing access while eroding the barriers set up by ownership.

Very likely, in the near future, I won’t “own” any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won’t buy – as in make a decision to own — any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won’t own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to “own” it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.
For many people this type of instant universal access is better than owning. No responsibility of care, backing up, sorting, cataloging, cleaning, or storage. As they gain in public accessibility, books, music and movies are headed to become social goods even though they might not be paid by taxes. It’s not hard to imagine most other intangible goods becoming social goods as well. Games, education, and health info are also headed in that direction.

That is a pretty friction-free world that Kelly is imagining, which will may erode some of the meaning that we derive from such cultural goods. Instead of engaging, it will be easier than ever to say, “Next?”

But what also may happen, as the sources of friction that we are accustomed to are eradicated, we will produce new, synthetic ones — we will create frustration to preserve our sense of making progress. Or we will cast about looking for frustration, though calling it something else to ourselves. My thinking about this is a bit inchoate, as you’ve probably observed by now, but it seems to me that consumer capitalism, by making it easier to get more and more things (while convincing us that this is life’s end-all and be-all), has had the effect of preventing us from experiencing a feeling of progress — we are trapped instead on a treadmill of novelty. But what makes this painful for us is that we may invent frustrations to make up for the lack of friction in our acquiring things, imposing arbitrary limitations on ourselves in the absence of external limits — those problems of exchange that our existing social relations had equipped us to deal with. So these arbitrary limits can perhaps take pathological forms — crippling self-doubt, optional paralysis, inertia, dysthemia.

Essentially, this is a variation on a joke from Manhattan, where Woody Allen’s character is tape-recording an idea for a short story (and this is a paraphrase I lifted from an Amazon.ca review) “about people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.” I think consumerism has distracted us from taking on the existential problems and hung us up with the self-created problems which turn out to be far worse, as they are not constrained by any real facts about our lives.

The sadness of Michael’s (17 Jan 2009)

This may be a pointless either/or question since it can be trumped with the response of “both and” (which is a useful trick, by the way, kind of like switching causes and effects to derive theoretical “insight”). But it interested me anyway as a sort of thought experiment. Which is preferable: (1) discussing a professionally produced song or a film or whatever with a friend or (2) sharing with one another songs or films or mashups or whatever that you’ve made yourselves. I think I prefer the former but often preach the latter. Sharing stuff you’ve made too often closes off the possibility of critical discussion or interpretational analysis, devolving instead into what my high-school friends used to call ballwashing. “Oh that’s so cool! It’s so great that you’re doing that…” Often artistic professionalism is the cue to audiences that they are allowed to engage seriously with a work, to have an opinion regarding what it was about, to devote the resources to analyzing it, or even to allow themselves to enter into it vicariously. Often with homemade productions, I feel myself holding back, because I have this dread that I won’t be able to share the (frequently critical) insights that I would thereby derive. Often, I have the suspicion that the desired and appropriate response is “That’s great that you are doing that. Yay, you!” (Maybe I’m just a jerk.)

This question occurred to me because I was in Michael’s, the chain craft store, earlier today, and it struck me as a great big repository of sadness. I’m sure scrapbooking and collecting rubber stamps brings great joy to many people, but all I could imagine was failure of creativity inherent in purchasing a decorate-your-own-mug kit or any of those kits where the manufacturers try to package the creativity inside, an effort to assuage purchasers of the fear that they won’t be able to rise to the occasion and think of their own mug slogans. “We’ve thought of the project for you, all you have to do is follow directions.” These kits are basically the home-consumer version of deskilling. Rather than sell the raw materials of soapmaking, Michael’s sells you a soapmaking kit which pre-empts your learning how to make soap for real. The same is true for dumbed-down computer applications: Most of the people who have GarageBand on their iMacs will never record a song, let alone become musicians (though it presence does allow for some pleasing flights of fantasy about what you could do.) All that tends to happen when an artistic process is simplified to make it accessible to casual, semi-invested would-be creators is the production of substandard products that no one can possibly take seriously. No one who was serious about making something would stock up at Michael’s for supplies, right? The chain stands as testimony to the collective crippling of our imagination.

Generally, information has never been easier to come by, yet it’s never been harder to turn information into knowledge. Instead the volume of information is an incentive to dabble in things rather than delve into them in pursuit of some sort of mastery, no matter how slight. Is it better to know how to make really good pesto from scratch but nothing else, or to have ready access to many different kinds of passable microwavable meals but know how to make nothing well. (Or is that a particularly nefarious both-and situation?)

I feel a little guilty in bashing Michael’s, because my intent isn’t to dump on the people who shop there, reject them in favor of some superior set or artistic professionals. But some sort of process of professionalization seems necessary to bringing about a meaningful exchange between maker and user — a social relation must be brought into being in which the exchange itself matters more than the personal relation. Of course, in capitalist society, professionalization is a matter of getting paid. Making money is the mark of professionalism — transforming a production into a commodity for sale and finding success in vending it. Get to that point and you show that you’re not just dabbling; you are trying to make customers of others and live up to their expectations. That discipline elevates the product beyond hobby and craft — you’re not just dilettanting around.

But professionalism needn’t automatically be defined by money — by selling out to the Man. It could instead be seen as a matter of creating something that isn’t merely an extension of one’s ego, a matter of wanting to give a social life to some idea or thing that will can then circulate independently from us. Amateur culture often fails to achieve that separation, doesn’t rise to level where it can be seriously criticized because it seems that its primary purpose is to secure recognition for the maker. A noncapitalist understanding of professionalization might resemble flow, losing oneself in a process, wherein the end product is secondary to the creative experience itself but not a matter of total indifference. Instead it could have a ready path to manifesting its social usefulness, to finding an appreciative audience without having to be explicitly marketed — and having its meaning permanently altered by that discourse.

Utopian internet folk probably have this in mind, that the internet becomes a low-barrier-of-entry distribution channel that permits our work to become socially useful without having to be channeled through capitalist means of production first. Unfortunately, capitalist media companies and various internet startups (often under the guise of enhancing the read-write web and so on) have by this time managed to embed themselves online between most home producers and would-be consumers, and in much in the same way as Michael’s kits, the use of these intermediaries’ services tend to taint our productions automatically with amateurism. Thanks to the corporate-owned easy-to-use services, the space that had been opened on the internet for a different kind of professionalism is now being flooded with look-at-me productions. If we are all narcissists, we’ll all remain amateurs, which offers an interesting, albeit functionalist, way to look at the modern efflorescence of narcissism — it seems as though there is an incentive to try to make us that way, insecure in who we are and preoccupied with gaining recognition. But sadly, a MySpace page will never make us web designers any more than a paint-by-numbers kit will make us artists.

Trying to avoid distraction (12 Jan 2009)

Nicholas Carr, building from my post about dilettantism and incorporating an analysis of the Clash’s “Complete Control” to boot, draws this pertinent conclusion: “Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable.”

That seems right to me. The implication is that the level of our interest in our amusements, and worse, in what we may consider to be our life’s work, has its limits set by the sort of society we live in — the tendency to become distracted is not some personal failing or the indicator of someone’s weak will, but the accomplishment of a bundle of associated forces that help naturalize certain consumerist preferences. Our susceptibility to boredom is “programmable” through the amount of stuff thrown at us and the amount of stuff a “normal” with-it person is assumed to know about and the various ways cultural ignorance can be exposed. (Hence the useless entertainment quizzes and trivia contests and the like. These seem innocuous enough, but they help calibrate our boredom, suggesting what the breadth and depth of our knowledge should be.) Fortunately, we are not yet “perfected” consumers in this fashion, but — if you’ll forgive a lapse into teleology — that’s the goal a consumerist economy hopes to accomplish. That trend is palpable (though perhaps that is because those resisting it do not register, have no way of communicating their resistance to a hypermediated and hyperaccelerated society without acceding to its terms). If we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and the “helpful” tools to force more and more material through that tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I’m listening to.)

Impelled by a sense that we must streamline our consumption and absorption of information and experiential opportunity (a need fomented by media technology, which both extends marketing’s reach and expands the amount of information we can readily acquire), we end up going for quantity over quality, the superficial over the complex, and regard convenience as an abstract good rather than being defined in relation to some other activity. Convenience only speeds our pursuit of more convenience. In this, we come to resemble our society’s economic system, which seeks profit for its own sake. To keep up the incidental Marx references: in The Limits to Capital David Harvey points to this relevant passage in Capital:

The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.
As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value…becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.

Basically, the economic roles we fulfill — for most of us, that means “consumer” — shape the horizon of our subjective aims while serving the underlying function of reproducing the existing system. That means embodying the restless pursuit of novelty, at least to the degree to which we want to be at harmony with the culture we live in. We become consumerism “personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will.”

As a result, it’s hard to avoid the feeling of missing out on something, no matter how into whatever it is we actually are doing. Alternatives are always filtering in to taunt and tempt us, and we hold our ability to become absorbed, to achieve “flow,” in abeyance, waiting for the diversion.

The urge to devise a scorekeeping system for our consumption grows as we seek a way to manage it all and compare what we’ve done to some standard — to restore the meaning that’s lost with our failure to become absorbed and committed to something. So if there is no way to keep score, then the activity can seem pointless. (A commenter to my previous post made that point about Guitar Hero, adding that this aligns our personal pleasure seeking with corporate notions of total quality management. If there were only some way I could attach some kind of scoreboard to my guitar when practicing scales, maybe I would do it more.) For example, I start to fetishize the number of posts I plow through in a day in my RSS reader; if the unread posts figure reaches 500, I go into orange alert, and start reading faster, skimming more, leaping past the longish posts and the Vox.eu papers and such for BoingBoing and Metafilter links.

Consequently, we end up having to set up defenses against distraction. Writer Cory Doctorow, a BoingBoing.net contributor, offers this compendium of advice for getting writing done. The advice all seems sound if not ultimately somewhat tautological — the best way to avoid distraction is to not allow yourself to be distracted by bells and whistles on word processors or by instant messaging or the infinite research possibilities online. Such resistance makes sense if we can muster it, but it can feel bad, like stifled curiosity. The problem is that in our culture, curiosity has been co-opted, inverted, made to function as its opposite — distraction, novelty for its own sake. The growing burden on us is to enforce rigor on our curiosity or exercise the discipline to ignore the would-be forbidden fruit.

The alluring danger of dilettantism (9 Jan 2009)

I’ve been puzzled by the popularity of the game Guitar Hero, for what seems to me like obvious reasons. It’s like karaoke minus the trouble of having to hear the sounds you make. If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar. I assume I am missing the point of it, the competitive thrill, but I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty. (Sure TV shows may have become more “complex,” but these remain passive, albeit more absorbing.) A society that requires such short cuts and preemptive blows in the name of the short-attention span surely must be deeply broken, our progenitors probably would have thought.

Since, lamentably, what we do for a living tends to lack meaning for us personally, we rely more on our leisure and consumption time to supply our lives with meaning, to afford us opportunities for self-realization. But consumption and self-realization may be at odds. In his introductory book on Marx, philosopher Jon Elster (who I’d encountered before as a theorist of precommitment strategies) makes an interesting point about consumption versus self-realization:

Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.

Perhaps there is an optimal balance for these two impulses that, if Elster is right, are antithetical. But if living in a consumerist society subjects us to all sorts of marketing pressures (derived from the need to sell all the junk we make at our unmeaningful jobs), that balance tips precipitously toward consumption, and potentially destabilizes the economy and our own psychological well-being. (This is what Marx seems to be suggesting in his concern with alienation from “species being.”) Elster, paraphrasing Marx, writes, “In capitalism, the desire for consumption — as opposed to the desire for self-realization — takes on a compulsive character. Capitalism creates an incentive for producers to seduce consumers, by inducing in them new desires to which they then become enslaved.” (The word choice here suggests Elster’s skepticism.)

So, surprisingly, the way the loss of opportunities for self-realization plays out is not through a paucity of options but a surfeit of them, all of which we feel capable of pursuing only to a shallow degree before we get frustrated or bored. Consumerism and its infrastructure (meaning markets, market spaces like the internet, and the shopping-oriented personality type most readily developed within consumerism) keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena — a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. (I encounter a stray idea, digest the relevant Wikipedia entry, and just like that, I’ve broadened my conceptual vocabulary! I get bored with the book I’m reading, Amazon suggests a new one! I am too distracted to read blog posts, I’ll check Twitter instead!) But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.

With more “diversity” available, it’s becoming harder to evade boredom, which more and more seems to be engineered socially (by accelerating fashion cycles, by making us always aware of what we are missing, and by making every moment a purchasing opportunity) as opposed to developing from some idiosyncratic internal curiosity in an individual. Novelty trumps sustained focus, whose rewards are not immediately felt and may never come at all, as Elster points out, if our focus is mistakenly fixed on something ultimately worthless. (I’m thinking of my long investment in Cryptonomicon.) Rather than taking advantage of that “increasing marginal utility” that comes with practicing something difficult, our will to dilettantism develops momentum.

To take a trivial example, let’s say you decide you like psychedelic music and want to “master” it by having a deep familiarity with the genre. But then you stumble on the hardcore psych MP3 blogs, and you are probably at that point discouraged by the impossibility of ever catching up and listening to it all. There is simply too much that’s now available too readily. You might still download everything you can get your hands on — that costs nothing but disk space and a minimal amount of time — but you’ll never make significant use of the larger portion of what you acquire. Acquiring has supplanted inquisitive use as the self-realizing activity. You have become a collector of stuff as opposed to a master of psychedelic music.

This seems to happen generally, as what Elster calls “the marginal disutility of not consuming” grows stronger — i.e., we have a harder time giving up the thrill of novelty, of exposing ourselves to new things. We end up collecting things rather than knowing them, and we display our collections in the hopes that others will recognize us as though we actually do know them. Or perhaps we have already reached a point where we all figure we are all playing the same game and that that distinction between owning and mastering is unimportant. (If I own a cool guitar, maybe a replica of no-name Telecaster or the Jag-Stang that Kurt Cobain used, does it really matter if I can play it?)

Dilettantism is a perfectly rational response to the hyperaccessibility of stuff available to us in the market, all of which imposes on us time constraints where there was once material scarcity. These time constraints become more itchy the more we recognize how much we are missing out on (thanks to ever more invasive marketing efforts, often blended in to the substance of the material we are gathering for self-realization). We opt instead for “diversity,” and begin setting about to rationalize the preferability of novelty even further, abetted by the underlying message of much our culture of disposability. Concentration takes on more of the qualities of work — it becomes a disutility rather than an end vis-a-vis the stuff we acquire. If something requires us to concentrate, it costs us more and forces us to sacrifice more of the stuff we might otherwise consume. In other words, consumerism makes the will and ability to concentrate seem a detriment to ourselves. The next thing you know, everyone touts Guitar Hero as a reasonable substitute for guitar playing and mocks the fuddy-duddy nabobs of negativism who are still hung up on the difference.

Meaningful inconvenience (31 Dec 2008)

Instant gratification, as we all have learned, is readily available on the internet. If I wanted to and had some ethical flexibility, I could check out PopMatters’ list of top albums for the year, do a little creative searching involving the word torrent and have all the ones that piqued my interest. The same goes for games, films, books, basically anything culturally current. It is the apotheosis in the society-wide trend toward convenience. We get what we want with minimal fuss and as little human interaction as possible. The triumphs of Amazon.com in the midst of the worst retailing season in modern history also demonstrate how online convenience has conquered America.

But is the ensuing hegemony of online retail merely setting up a backlash? Will we rebound into a yearning for more complex and challenging shopping missions? Will we miss the so-called experience economy? Let me once more go to the bottomless well of insight that is Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements. In discussing how disappointment with consumerism might lead to a widespread embrace of public involvement, Hirschman points out that part of the appeal of civic life is that it makes for “a confusion between striving and attaining” that allows the process of involvement to provide as much pleasure as actually achieving the ends one strives for. The process becomes part of the pleasure, if not the better part of it, augmenting the pleasure achieved from the ostensible goal of the process. Therefore the “free-rider problem” — in which people wait for other people to do the work of public action — to a degree vanishes. “To elect a free ride under the circumstances would be equivalent to declining a delicious meal and to swallow a satiation-producing pill that is not even particularly effective.” Free riders get none of the pleasure of effort for its own sake, which becomes more and more appealing the more commercial interests try to make our acquisitive life effortless, and the more we are stung by the disappointments of mere things. They never satisfy for long, they lose their novelty, they fail to deliver their full promise, they cease to reflect who we are, etc. Public action, as action, expresses our being in a different way, as something that’s not merely curatorial. And in public action, the pleasures from the process and the goal compound rather than alternate, as they often do in the classical economists’ analysis of consumption, in which we exchange hard-earned money for goods that then provide pleasure. Hirschman points out that under the ordinary conditions of exchange, “the separation of the whole process into means and ends, or costs and benefits, occurs almost spontaneously” — separating out the pleasure of the process of striving from the pleasure of attainment. This seems to be a perfect description of the instantaneous, near friction-free gratification of online shopping.

But don’t we want shopping to be more like public action, and have the process of seeking our holy-grail goods be a substantial part of the pleasure itself? Thanks to digitization, anyone can have lots of media-based stuff, which for me anyway has long been the only stuff that mattered. (I haven’t grown up into the world of home furnishings yet.) So the pleasures of mere possession are threatened, as are the pleasures of use — when you have 49 days worth of music to listen to, it becomes hard to know where to start — it even becomes a positive source of anxiety. Acquiring the next album seems relatively simple and possibly more pleasurable by comparison.

Hirschman evokes the pilgrimage to describe a sort of private consumption that thrives on difficulty, that becomes more meaningful the more trouble they cause: “The discomforts suffered and perils confronted during the trip were part and parcel of the total ‘liminal’ experience sought by the pilgrim.” The next wave of retail may make a more explicit attempt to incorporate this kind of arduousness into it, meaningful inconveniences that during pilgrimages can take on symbolic significance. In other words, shopping may customarily incorporate the difficulty level that hardcore collectors already make their raison d’etre — the sort of people who fly to Japan to get a pair of limited-edition sneakers at a boutique whose very existence is a closely guarded secret. Perhaps all the stores of the future will be secret boutiques. (Ugh. I sound like a futurist all of a sudden.)

Difficult poetry (25 April 2007)

The other day I was complaining about the way we tend to promote the notion that entertainment’s main function is to facilitate self-absorption as a kind of escape. Pop culture often offers vicarious entertainments that are rather undemanding and that flatter us for our limitations, seeming to efface them as we give ourselves over to the entertainment product. In other words, they congratulate us for not thinking.

Having just floated that argument, I found this recent Slate piece by poet Robert Pinsky (a former U.S. poet laureate, if that means anything) serendipitous. He celebrates difficulty, almost for its own sake:

Difficulty, after all, is one of life’s essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual’s struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

Difficulty, in short, makes accomplishments meaningful and require us to focus our energies rather than dissipate them. But the problem with difficult poetry is not just that it’s hard to understand after a casual breezy read. It’s proudly elitist, in that it rewards those who bring the necessary intellectual capital (the result of time and money investments in education as well as what is inherited from literary-minded parents). Pinsky tries to circumvent this by suggesting that poetry can be enjoyed even if you don’t really understand what the author may have intended (after all, you wouldn’t want to be found guilty of committing the intentional fallacy) and that’s almost seems like claiming you can still enjoy chess just by moving the pieces around the board any which way. But it’s more that he advocates reading poetry as a rewarding process regardless of the end result, provided it’s undertaken with the proper seriousness of intent.

But again we confront a habitus problem — the necessary attitude for the interpretive process is a learned skill, and its rewards are learned rewards — we learn to feel rewarded by certain sorts of insights and conclusions, and what they signal about our intelligence and perceptiveness. Reading difficult poetry is no different from listening to difficult music; it opens one to the accusation of pretentious showing off. The question is whether it is possible to separate the enjoyment one gets from reading the poem from the pleasure given by being recognized for reading it. Can you read poetry without consuming it like a lifestyle product, and if so, does the difficulty of the work have anything, really, to do with the distinction?