Here's the thing. Most people I've talked to are easily smart enough to understand the idea of utility or to realize that there is something that people like about books that has nothing to do with the words inside. Disagreements thus are not rooted in people being too dumb to get what is being talked about. So to phrase an argument in such a way that people who have problems with ebooks are Luddites who'd prefer to go back to stone tablets or papyrus, or that ebook fans are cultureless morons is just inane. As far as I can tell, the actual numbers of Luddites and morons are very, very small3.
The sheer utility of ebooks is obvious. You can store a lot of them on your minipad, say; and you can read them anywhere. As much as I love books, I've come to embrace that aspect for some books actually. There are quite a few books that I know I'll read once and then probably never again. What I used to do was to buy paperbacks, read them, and then donate them to the Goodwill. There also are books that I like having in electronic form since I can mark passages for possible future use in an article. Organizing and re-finding such passages is much simpler for people like me who are too unorganized to pull this off with books.
But then there are a lot of books that I'd rather read as a book, knowing or at least assuming I'll read it again, at some stage in the future. As convenient as the minipad is, I do prefer reading text printed on paper. So I have not abandoned books at all. Instead, I've simply replaced all those that I don't really need on paper, books that I really just need for the information inside, with ebooks.
Utility aside, ebooks, at least for me, have very serious drawbacks. The book itself, the object, possesses properties that ebooks can never conceivably have. Give a book as a gift to a good friend, watch her/him unwrap it. What are you gonna do with an ebook? Hand someone a gift card for some online retailer? Or talk with a friend about a book, and then loan her/him one. These kinds of social (yes, social!) interactions lack their equivalent in the "e" world.
This is one of the reasons why social media are ultimately so bad: To pretend that "poking" someone on Facebook is the same as poking someone in real life is ridiculous. Actual social interactions involve actual human touch and objects. To pretend that a decade or two of computer technology can easily do away with thousands and thousands of years of human (and pre-human) interactions is shockingly naive.
On top of that, books require book shops, which can be a huge problem if you're a publisher, but which is great for people who love books. An avid reader, I've never figured out how to meaningfully browse for books on Amazon, say. Their computer will suggest books to me that are based on what I bought already (which usually leads to amusing suggestions when I buy something as a gift for someone with vastly different interests) or on what other people bought. But other people aren't relevant for me. Anonymous, computer-algorithm generated other people aren't relevant for anyone. If you get a recommendation then that recommendation will only work for you if the source is trusted, if you know where that other person is coming from.
On top of that, when I browse for books in a bookshop (new or used), I often pull out books that look interesting, but that have very little, if anything, to do with books I've read before. And then there's the "used" aspect: How would an ebook be used?
Regardless of where you're coming from, what is important is to separate the utility from everything else and to then not pretend that you can play one against the other. That's not going to work. At the end of the day, there will be a set of seemingly conflicting aspects, and you have to come to your own personal conclusion about them.
In some form or other, we've been dealing with this kind of debate a lot in photography. There's analog versus digital photography, there is all that talk about digital appropriation, there is the idea of an "e" version of the photobook etc. It seems inevitable that the future will predominantly "e," simply because it's a numbers game. But it would also seem that there are just enough people around for the older versions to stick around and to possibly even thrive again, in somewhat diminished form.
I don't know about you, but I personally am not interested in making utility the defining criterion for or against something. If it were all about utility we'd all be eating astronaut food now, wouldn't we? There is a time and space where astronaut food is useful, but for most of us having a real meal is vastly preferable. And in some cases, the pendulum will come down on the other side, where the aspects of utility indeed outweigh other considerations. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Honestly, I'm sick and tired of the Luddites-versus-morons "arguments" that have become so common online.
1 Those who follow my Twitter feed (@jmcolberg) have since been bombarded with tintype-style cat photos and other silliness.
2 In the following, I'll refer to physical and electronic books as books and ebooks, respectively.
3 Mind you, the same mechanisms appear commonly in pretty much all areas where some technological change invades an area. Think about artists using Google Street View, for example. We should be talking about the merit of the work (which, I've concluded, for none of the bodies of work I've seen so far is impressive at all). Instead, we talk about whether it's photography or whether appropriation is a viable artistic option.
"To say your work is original is to see yourself as removed from history and context, to see yourself in a vacuum and alone."I suppose you could do that, but obviously that doesn't make any sense. You can in fact be an artist being fully embedded in the historical context of your medium and be original. There is no conflict here. As a matter of fact, those artists whose work becomes recognized by large numbers of people usually do just that: They stand out from the crowd (of other artists), not because they pretend they have nothing to do with the tradition, but rather because the strength of their artistic convictions and abilities adds so much originality to their work.
As an aside, I don't get why Griggs insists on throwing in comments about conservative versus liberal minds in his piece. To frame your argument in such a way that anyone disagreeing is conservative (and thus, it seems, bad) strikes me not only as incredibly counterproductive, but also as misguided in all kinds of ways. There are no such things as liberal and conservative art - there is good art, and there is bad art. What is more, unlike politics (especially American politics), art offers shades of grey - instead of insisting on a black-vs.-white dichotomy.
I don't see art as a collective endeavour. No, we're not "doing this together" (Griggs' words). Or maybe more accurately, we're doing this as much together as we're buying bread together or flossing our teeth together - or whatever else we're doing together simply because we're living at the same time, being subject of a culture and society (not the same thing!) with rules, conventions and ideas.
To say that we all somehow work on all of this together strikes me as little more than a feel-good exercise, which, unfortunately, suffers from the same problems as, for example, claiming that photography is the most democratic medium. It sounds good, but it doesn't actually say anything.
A lot of artists might in fact be working on the same things, at this very same time. Some people even have the same ideas at the same time. But that doesn't mean that somehow, art is a collective endeavour. All it says is that artists are embedded in a culture, and they all reflect their culture to some extent, some artists more than others. There is nothing particularly new about this. The history of art is filled with movements and periods, where dozens if not hundreds or thousands of artists worked on similar styles or off similar (or even the same) ideas.
But when we look back, it's the Michelangelo's we remember, the da Vinci's, the Goya's, the Picasso's. And we remember them for exactly the very thing that Griggs would have us deny: Their ability, willingness, and aspiration to move beyond their peers: Their, yes, originality. It's the same willingness and aspirations that all artists share (ability is another issue, of course), their attempt to be original, that would make taking away their names so profoundly wrong - regardless of how many there are! Art is not made by ants, it is made by people, by individuals (Btw, whether or not people are trying to make a quick dime by having contests or by selling stuff is utterly irrelevant).
So when Griggs reduces art to some sort of collective endeavour, denying the unique imagination and abilities individuals (but never the collective!) might have, that - and only that - will truly lead us to the world of artistic stasis.
And you cannot insist on the experience of art, while throwing away the most crucial aspect of it, namely that here you have one individual, speaking to you across time and space (god, that's awful cliche writing, but I don't know how to express it any other way - you get the idea), one individual you're connecting with. Not some anonymous crowd, no, just one individual who somehow, seemingly magically, triggers something in you (and you secretly enjoy it even more thinking that it's just for you and nobody else).
Between Angela Merkel's suits, sorted by colour, the girls of Berlusconi, and men who made £1bn as banks were bailed out, The Spectacle of the Tragedy (Visual Database of the European Show and its Leading Actors) pretty much has all aspects of contemporary politics in Europe covered. When's the US version coming? (found here)
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Earlier this year, social-media behemoth Facebook announced that every day, its user were uploading 300 million images per day. That's a pretty impressive number, the relevance of which, I think, is debatable, though. Regardless of what you make of the number, it's fairly obvious that photography is being widely used. It might be worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of photographs created on this planet are not being produced by artists, professionals, or academics - unlike the vast majority of writing about photography. So when I read that someone writes how people mistrust photography I always wonder why there are 300 million new photographs on Facebook every day when nobody trusts photography. That aside, Facebook and the internet as a whole appear to be a pretty spectacular archive or library of photographs. This is where it gets interesting. Find the rest of the article here.
]]>As a writer, I know that writing is a much more democratic medium than photography. We all know how to read and write because we were taught to do so. We might not be all good writers (or frequent readers), just as we're also not all good photographers. But starting at a very young age we all spent years in school studying not just the rules of writing, but also studying some of the most important writing ever produced. In contrast, the vast majority of people never go to an art school or take a course in photography. As a consequence, the average person is a much better educated in reading and writing than in photography. In fact, an education (which includes being taught to read and write) is considered to be one of the very basic human rights in large parts of the world. Photography is not part of this set of rights. So which medium is supposed to be the most democratic one again?
There might be just one way left for someone to declare that photography is the most democratic medium: Most people, while being taught to do so, don't read or write that much, while they appear to be taking photographs. But that's a choice that doesn't necessarily say all that much about photography. And claims that we're all photographers now bother me as well: What about the people who don't own digital cameras, simply because they're not interested? What about the people who don't own cell phones because, say, they are too poor? The idea that we're all photographers now only makes sense if we talk about all the people who own cameras - all the other ones will not upload any photographs onto the internet because they don't have any.
To say (claim) that photography is the most democratic medium is largely a feel-good exercise. We live in a democracy, and hyping that fact is part of the fabric of our lives (while we watch, somewhat helplessly, how the actual democracy is slowly, yet steadily, undermined these days - if you live in the US, there might be all kinds of voting restrictions [squarely aimed at mostly poor, mostly non-white people], and of course, there is the poisonous influence of big money on elections). But we don't gain much, if anything, from this exercise.
What we need to be doing, instead, is to tackle the actual problem: Photography appears to be one of the most attractive media around - there are hundreds of millions of new photographs on Facebook every day. How can we increase the literacy with which these images are being viewed? In other words, how can we make the medium photography more democratic in a truly meaningful way? If people are being taught how to read and write maybe there is a way to teach people how to look at photographs? Wouldn't that be a good idea? People might then be able to look at photographs in the news and get more out of them - they might question them, say, or see whether or not they make sense in whatever context they are used in. People might be able to see advertizing more easily. People might see through the manipulations through photography in the area of politics more easily.
This would entail not engaging in discussions about how Instagram, say, devalues photography, which is, for the record, an outright absurd assertion. This would entail not dismissing photographs on Facebook as essentially meaningless postcards. This would entail not talking about photography and Photography - the former being done by uneducated rubes, while the latter is done by people in the know.
But it would also entail not writing about how photography per se can change the world, simply because a lot of people are taking pictures. That's not going to happen. Photographs have not changed the world, and they will not change the world. People might change the world, but only if they make a decision to do so. Photographs might help them make a decision. That's as good as it gets. Picking up a camera - or taking a photograph with a cell phone - is not such a decision. There needs to be more.
All that hype about how the "most democratic medium" will change the world is just that: Hype. Instead, we need to work on making photography truly more democratic, in the sense of first, breaking down the many barriers that still exist between photography done by "the masses" and by that small elite we are so familiar with, that small elite we are all part of. It's time to be more honest: This entails mostly breaking down mental barriers that exist within that small elite.
Second, we also need to realize that that small elite is in fact engaged in some things that "the masses" are not engaged in. Just like your baker knows how to bake a good bread (you wouldn't expect her or him to produce the same lousy bread you would be able to make), professional photographers should avoid trying to mimic popular trends: In the best case, it's like parents suddenly wearing cool clothes, trying to impress their kids. In the worst case, it's just condescending. People expect professionals to be just that: Professionals who know something very well. If you went to your garage to get your car fixed and the mechanic acted like your ignorant self - how much trust would you put into her or him?
Third, and this is the biggest challenge, we need to raise the general level of visual literacy. We have the most amazing tool to do just that, the internet, and all we talk about is "social networking," all we talk about is how we can promote our own photographs better. Really? Much to their credit there are sites like BagNews or No Caption Needed, where photographs are dissected. But don't expect to find any such debates on the corporate media blogs - where they belong. For the corporate media to truly arrive in the 21st Century, there has to be a change in mindsets, a change away from the ideas of "eyeballs" (aka how to make money) and "we deliver, you consume" to an idea of the media being engaged in a back and forth.
Seen in this light, the idea that photography is the most democratic medium just feels way too self-congratulatory. And honestly, who cares whether photography is the most democratic medium or just the second-most democratic one? What really matters is not how great photography is. What matters is what we all can do to make it better than it is right now - and "better" here includes more democratic in a true sense.
"Such decisions are never easy, and this one was harder than most. But this chaotic and violent event was extremely significant as a news story, and we believe this photo helps to convey that situation to Times readers in a powerful way. On that basis, we think the photo was newsworthy and important to our coverage. We did, however, try to avoid presenting the picture in a sensational or insensitive way."I suppose we can all easily agree on the fact that the "event was extremely significant as a news story." But let's talk about what follows, namely the belief that "this photo helps to convey that situation to Times readers in a powerful way."
Just as an aside, I don't buy that last sentence at all: Of course, once you put that photo into a slide show on the website's front page, it's being used in a sensational way. The Times can't be so naive and/or foolish to assume nobody would notice and/or raise a stink. Very obviously seeing the photograph reproduced will strike many people as utterly insensitive (this writer included).
So then let's ask: In what way exactly does seeing the photo of a dead or dying man (it's impossible to tell from the photograph) help convey the situation, namely the attack on the consulate and the resulting damage, which includes the death of four people?
Let's assume the photo would not have been reproduced. To only talk about the images from Libya, we would then have been left with a night-time photograph of a burning car and building with an armed and agitated man holding what looks like some semi-automatic rifle (picture 6; I'm referring to the numbers of the images in this story) and two day-time photos of some completely burned out/destroyed rooms (picture 8, also picture 9). Those aren't powerful enough? Those would not have been able to convey to people that a powerful attack had happened and that four people died? Is that what we are supposed to believe?
Needless to say, once you start discussing this topic, there are all kinds of obvious responses, the easiest perhaps being that since our media love showing corpses of foreigners they better show our own as well. Fair enough, I suppose. But what I am actually interested in here is to ask whether or maybe more precisely under which circumstances showing the bodies of dead or dying people (regardless of where they are from) has any news value. And I am convinced that the answer to that has got to be a bit smarter than saying that if the body is connected to the news item in question then you got your newsworthiness. Not so!
I am convinced that we better face the consequences of our actions, and we also need to be able to face the consequences of other people's actions that have direct repercussions for us. That said, from there it is not a simple and obvious step to demand that we need to see the corpses of people blown up by our drones or, in this current case, the body of the dead or dying ambassador to Libya. In much the same way, if there is shootout in Manhattan then we also do not need to see the dead bodies of the various victims (as happened just a little while ago). Being told what happened is enough - seeing the bodies does not add even the tiniest amount of extra insight. And that is what we need to hold our news organizations accountable for: To provide us with accurate information and to help us gain insight.
What this means, however, is not that there is a solution that applies equally well to all cases, because I'd actually like to take the word "newsworthy" rather seriously. When Osama Bin Laden was killed by US special forces deep inside Pakistan, I argued that we needed to see the body of the dead terrorist mastermind. Bin Laden, after all, had become such an icon to so many people - to us, as the evil terror mastermind, to his followers as the genius terror mastermind - that seeing visual evidence of his death would have been a cathartic moment. This situation was comparable with many Libyans flocking to the meat cooler where the corpse of Muammar Qaddafi was kept: They really needed to see that the man who had terrorized the country for many decades was dead. But those are very different situations than the current one. Bin Laden and Qaddafi were very well-known public figures that had a larger image connected to them: Because we had seen them so often in photographs before, because their images held such power over us, photographs of their corpses were truly newsworthy.
Most people, however, do not fit into that kind of category at all. Most people do not exist as mental images in the larger public's mind. I think a pretty simply rule would be to say that anyone who does not exist as a mental image in the larger public's mind should be granted the dignity (yes, dignity) not to have her or his dead body shown in a news context (Not to mention what the relatives have to go through). There is no newsworthiness to showing such a photograph, as the case of Mr Stevens makes very clear. Mind you, not to the New York Times - interestingly enough, they don't plan on using the photo in the print edition, the reasoning being that the paper will come out "a full 24 hours later." This makes you wonder whether the event will still be "extremely significant as a news story" in 24 hours - I'm tempted to think it will be, so the time delay can't really be the reason, can it?
My simple rule in all likelihood is too simple. I can already think of all kinds of situations where showing the photograph of a dead person who was unknown to the larger public still would be newsworthy. But what I'm really after here is that when someone says that such a photograph is "newsworthy," then I'd really like to hear why.
"Newsworthy" must mean more than getting the "eyeballs", the number of visitors to a website. "Newsworthy" must mean more than a photograph being connected to a news story. "Newsworthy" must mean that we, the viewers/readers, gain crucial insight into something that we would not have been able to grasp otherwise. If there is such crucial insight to be had then the general public needs to be able to see. Otherwise, we better grant the dead person the basic dignity everybody deserves, the basic dignity we, in all likelihood, would like to claim for ourselves as well.
If you make a multimedia piece and ten people decide to watch it then those ten people should pay for it. If one million people watch it those one million people should pay for it. I've seen some comments about the music equivalent that essentially ran along the lines of "Hey, why do you complain, you're not a successful musician, so who cares if only a few people steal your music?" But that has nothing to do with the market. In fact, such an approach undermines any market, since if you can just take stuff from people who are not popular (yet) start-ups would be at a severe disadvantage.
Which brings me to the idea of morality. I had a vigourous debate with David on Twitter (possibly the worst place to do that, since even when you "storify" the whole debate it's essentially impossible to follow - see the debate here) about morality and whether or not it applies or can apply. David's argument essentially boils down to saying that it's up to the producers to convince people to pay. And I do think that's if not wrong then at least only partially true. Here's why.
The first thing we might want to note is that even though many people would want to make you believe the opposite, we are already paying for intangible things we consume. The whole idea that if you get something digital that's hugely different than getting something physical, so people can't be expected to pay - that idea is simply wrong. If you go to the movies, for example, you walk away with nothing other than the ticket stub (and possibly, a stomach filled with a ton of overpriced junk food). You could argue that, well, you pay for the seats and the upkeep of the cinema, which of course is correct, but only to a small extent. Quite a bit of the money goes to the people who made the movie. What is more, I yet have to meet a single person who goes to the movies because they have those great comfy seats. Note that cinemas have been around for a long, long time (before there was anything digital), and people never had a problem with paying. People also don't have much of a problem with paying for sites like Netflix. You pay your $9 per month (or however much it is), and you can then watch movies on your computer at home. The idea that people just won't pay for intangible content or for content to watch at home is simply wrong. People do it all the time, millions of them.
The main reason why I think that paying for content online also is a question of morality is because I approach it in a slightly different way than David. In a nutshell, the debate should not be centered on why people have to pay (in other words, making people feel bad about their behaviour).We need to talk about a change in consumers' habits that is based on the consumers realizing that it is in their own best interest. And this, again, is not an unusual problem or situation. People change their habits of consumption all the time for reasons that are not solely based on the rules of the market.
For example, people who only buy organic produce do so even though it costs a lot more. This is a conscious decision, usually based on being educated about the many problems with non-organic food. Likewise, if you're a vegetarian, chances are you've made that choice for reasons that have nothing to do with the market itself. It might even be an ethical decision. I know a lot of people who don't eat meat in part because they object to the abuse of animals in the meat-processing industry (I'm one of those people). Or you might buy a Prius because you care about the environment, having convinced yourself that paying a lot more upfront is a sensible choice. Consumers can and often will change their behaviour for reasons that seem to violate simple market arguments.
This is why I prefer to center the discussion about paying for content online in part on morality. When you decide to pay for an experience online that decision might run counter to what you have "learned" over those past years where things used to be free online. Morality enters once we start talking about what is at stake here. As David notes in a comment underneath Rob's post, he and I easily agree about what drives us to have this debate: "we want to see good cultural and political work done, supported, and valued, in all senses of that word." This is what this is all about, good cultural and political work done, supported, and valued.
The moment you phrase it that way, this becomes a question of morality, a question of values: Do you want to pay for something because you realize that not only will you be given a unique experience, but with your payment you also support the work? As Rob notes underneath his post "If you want to live in a world with artists you have to support them. I think that attitude is slowly catching on." That attitude has nothing to do with markets. It has nothing to do with supply and demand. Focusing the debate about paying for content online only on the market misses the crucial aspect: We don't need to pay for content online because someone says so, but because we want to, realizing that it's the right thing to do, because, as David wrote, "we want to see good cultural and political work done, supported, and valued, in all senses of that word."
It was one of those rare cultural moments yesterday, disguised as an astronomical event, Venus passing in front of the Sun. If you've missed it you'll have to wait another 200+ years to see it again. What struck me about this moment was (and still is) that for once, the web was not going "viral" about some stupid nonsense, to be laughed or angry about and then forgotten the very next day (like that Kony stuff or some video of a dead helicopter cat). It was something utterly inconsequential in the scheme of things we have agreed to hold dear (which, let's face it, is the real inconsequential stuff when viewed from the kinds of places we are talking about here). Nobody was outraged, nobody (so far) has written about how the "web 2.0" has transformed something here. Everybody was just looking at something to be had for everybody, almost regardless of where you lived (and if you were unlucky with where you live that was absolutely nobody's fault), it was beautiful (well, about as beautiful as a tiny black dot in front of the Sun can be), and now it's over. We all just enjoyed it. I wish there were more events like this. (photograph by NASA)
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