Second Thoughts

Somebody left an anonymous comment about the post regarding Google and copyright info, so I thought that I would respond. They brought up a few issues:

1) The end of the public library: since we can just “google it” to get any information we’d like, what’s the point?
2) Assuming the worst outcome for the first question, then there will be people who don’t have access to the Internet, and therefore cannot access important information.
3) How will we tell what is good information, and what is bad? Where is the quality control?
4) An artist might gain exposure from the wide audience that comes from the Internet, but what happens when that audience doesn’t want to pay for the art, making the assumption that it’s their “right” to access it?

So. I’d like to combine questions 1 and 2 into a single theme: with all this information, who says what’s good and bad? For example, I'm suspicious of self-publishing houses which allow anybody to publish and distribute a book (with very light editing help from the company), because there’s no quality control. On the one hand, it’s excellent for somebody to be able to ignore the "institution" of publishing which likely rejects a large number of talented writers because they aren’t commercially viable, or in alignment with what the publishing house believes, or whatever the case may be—in true utopian spirit, the idea bypasses bureaucracy (kind of) to allow free expression. But there’s a reason that I like a lot of the same books from certain publishing houses, or even certain editors: because they’re hand-picked. I know that if a book has gone so far as to be published, I can trust that it’s worth reading on some level. Editors provide an important service.

The public library comes out of this same quality control, since they simply stock the books that have already been approved for publishing. They also provide access to databases that are indexes of “approved” information, like encyclopedias, or an index of journal articles. And librarians curate their collections to make them as helpful as possible. In all these cases, the information has been hand-picked to some extent, or given a stamp of approval.

The same applies to sorting through the heaps of information in the Internet. I was talking about this with my father last week, and something he said was interesting and deceptively simple: while there is no longer a lack of access to information, there remains a premium on good thinking. To which I added, discernment. It may seem simple, but the ability to rapidly categorize information into helpful and unhelpful mental “piles” will be essential in a digital world of information. When something seems off about a website, one has to smell the rat and move on. There is a gray area that is emerging between institutionalized, “approved” content, and crap that anybody can make public: there is a lot to be had, understood, and gained from this gray area, and these qualities of good thinking and discernment have to be cultivated to make it useful: the ability to filter and predict and prioritize. All these things have always been qualities important to good research. And I do really believe that it’s useful, because there is a real possibility for free expression in this no-mans-land. Blogs, obviously, are a huge resource in this area as they begin to collect links and prioritize and make recommendations. The whole thing becomes a self-checking, better-by-democratic-opinion sort of web.

In response to the second question about people who can’t access the Internet, or can’t afford a computer: this is certainly valid. However, consider public libraries, which provide Internet access for free, and which I don’t think will ever be closed anyway: the important of print resources, beyond accessibility, is clear in the way that they provide checks and balances. One thing that’s scary about the Internet is the way that all information is abstract, can be untraceably altered, is not concrete and solid. Real books provide a check to that abstract information. With all information stored in one centralized place, as a professor of mine once noted when our university decided to destroy all Art Historical periodicals because they were available in an online database, one flirts with definitions of fascism. This is an extreme position, but it’s a point worth making. The opportunity for difference, I think, lies in the fact that all that centralized information is not controlled by one institution, but rather it is stored in widespread locations with lots of people checking and balancing. Consider Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which anybody can edit: on the whole, it is full of true, useful, well organized information. It is democracy at its best. (It’s also very interesting to take a look at the deletion log, which tracks the rapid and innumerable ways in which the encyclopedia is being altered).

Finally, the original source for this debate, and the party who has valid reason to object to all of this: artists. Sure, it’s good for an artist to have exposure, but with free information, how are they to collect on the sort of information that is creative? How are we to distinguish the information which is merely factual from the information which is artistic, of a wholly different value? I’m using a loose definition of information, but in this arena, it works: if something can be digitized, it is reducible to its simplest combination of ones and zeros, of binary code. Purely information.

To answer this we have to be specific about what sort of art we are talking about. For musicians and filmmakers, the process of digitizing their work is quite simple, and has already been done to limitless extent with music in mp3 formats. So that kind of art is easily distributed. But I think it’s quite fair to say that, at least for the independent musician, the vast circulation provided by the Internet has been a benefit, as I mentioned in the first post. Film, I suppose we would have to see. Books? To me, having paper in front of me is never comparable to reading on a screen, and I disagree that the next step is creating an Ipod for print. Word on paper have been around far longer than film or recorded music, both of which are more recent inventions. I find it hard to envision a world without books. And as long as they are physical things, actual artifacts, then the people who wrote them can make a living from their sale.

When we think about the fine arts, it gets a little trickier. Surely painting and sculpture are necessarily perceived “in person” as actual objects, at least in their classical sense. But people have been making conceptual art for over three decades, which shed the usual belief that the hand of the artist is a gifted commodity, selling the idea of what they’re doing, almost like a patent. Warhol made mass-produced objects, and called his studio a factory. Today people have begun making explicitly “digital art” which is meant to be experienced at a computer screen, who are embracing the new technologies. Even if one thinks that’s not true art, we will always have painters and sculptures who make work that doesn’t make sense unless it’s seen in person. One cannot digitize a work of art's "presence" and distribute it around the world.

So to say that an artist will starve if nobody pays them for their art, while a compelling point, needs to be examined a bit more closely. We have to come right down to the specifics of an artwork and how it transfers to the digital realm. Music is the most easily transferable, and really, I think the benefits independent artists have gained from the Internet’s circulation outweighs the money lost by some recording artists to file sharing. It’s not like people aren’t willing to pay for the music, anyway: Itunes has been a massive success. And those recording artists who object so adamantly aren’t starving. Nowhere do we hear complaints about file-sharing from small bands, at least not that I’ve heard, or from independent musicians who are, in my opinion, making the music that matters. Embracing the abilities of technology is the best solution: in the end, those that object are fighting what is, of course, a losing battle.