Reading an article about the Prix Ars Electronica, which is the Oscars for digital art. It makes lots of nice points about object-based art, particularly the kind of art where the object and interaction interface itself is the content. Which means that the “art” can be taken out of the galleries and become a part of everyday life, with the device not separate from the art-experience. This one particular idea appealed:

these boundaries between forms of practice and appreciation do not exist, it’s a superflat world

Entwined & Interactive

This made me think back to Douglas Adams’ rather brilliant 1999 essay, which I’m sure most of you have seen How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. It makes an excellent case for the internet and “interactivity” as revolutionary, but in terms of a revolution-as-return. His argument is that it’s the passive media of the 20th century (television, the cinema) that’s the aberration; entertainment by-and-large has always been interactive, and our mistake is treating the “interactive” possibilities of the internet and digital media as newfangled and frightening. We are natural villagers, and the internet is giving us back the ability to organise ourselves into small villages and communities, an ability that was perhaps lost in the noise of the mid-20th century milieu. This is great stuff, and even better because he’s using so many of today’s buzzwords as if they’re old hat in 1999– his offhand point that we’re having to invent silly words for concepts not because they’re new, but rather because they were so pervasive that we never needed a name for them is a telling one.

Personally, too, I think it’s important with placing interactive experiences on a contextual timeline. To draw connecting lines between theatre and roleplaying and the spectacular attractions of the late 1800s/early 1900s. Community experiences: kaleidoscopes, fairs, carnivals. I’ve talked before about the the internet’s strength as a medium of engagement with community, especially in terms of entertainment. But there are a couple of assumptions in the essay that Adams, I think, is exaggerating for effect, that have slipped into the way lots of us think about interactivity, the internet and television. I do not like the idea of glibly drawing a distinction between “active” and “passive” media; interaction means more than affecting the story or interacting physically with the actors/storytellers. Interaction is participation, and that means more than just viewing or sharing a community entertainment experience, it also means talking about it later, thinking about it alone, engaging your brain and body with the entertainment in some way.

Layering It On

Marshall McLuhan hit upon the contradictory ideas of this when he described the media continuum as existing between “hot” and “cold”. A hot medium is one which is high-definition, or rather, highly-layered. A lot of very dense information packed into the stream: a film, the radio. A cool medium is a “less dense” one, one that requires more completion by the audience/viewer/player/participant– the telephone, the television. A hot medium, by engaging one or more of the senses so thoroughly, actually requires less participation than a cool one. So television, far from being passive, encourages engagement. (Of course, everything is converging between the poles of “hot” and “cold”, into the sliding space between: right now we’re watching television in HD on 46 inch screens, and the thickness of our images, the amount of information encoded into them, is increasing. We have comments and tags on youtube videos, augmented reality apps on the iPhone, digital/flash video that can be manipulated and clicked through, revealing ever more densely layered data– but digitally speaking it’s attempting to be inclusive rather than exclusive– each layer is like an irregularity or a tiny opening on the smooth surface of this densely packed medium, they’re all ways into the experience.)

Digital Natives, Digital Colonisers

Unfortunately, one of the comparisons that Douglas Adams draws in this essay plays into what I think is one of the most pernicious and irritating overarching metaphors about digital culture: digital immigrants and digital natives. Those born after the personal computer revolution, who did not grow up “speaking the native tongue” of the digital world will never quite achieve the mastery and ease of operation that their children, “digital natives” who grew up with these tools, will have. At face value it’s nothing particularly revolutionary– children will probably have a more instinctive grasp of technologies that they never had to regard as “new”, and they will inevitably come up with new and exciting ways of integrating them into their everyday lives that their elders didn’t think of. So far so obvious. But by using these particular terms “immigrant” & “native” we call up a whole host of irritating colonial ghosts. The implication is that only natives can ever have a natural, authentic and/or effortless grasp of culture. The immigrant is doomed to fumbling, to mispronounciation and mis-step, to being a second-class citizen. Even without talking about how that’s offensive to, you know, immigrants and naturalised citizens, this does a disservice to the wealth of older people who have learned to use digital technologies for work & for play. It smacks of the most ridiculous ageism and blame-shifting. There are plenty of people in their 20s that are functional digital illiterates, and plenty of people in their 50s who are rewriting the digital landscape. Yes, there are huge inequalities in terms of access to digital technologies and the internet, but age alone is no reason or excuse to be a luddite, or to be left behind. (Not to say it’s not a legitimate choice to be a luddite– simply that nobody is doomed to utter alienation from new technology simply by virtue of their age.)