The pushback against the Digital Age has started. Or at least, I hope so. I was reminiscing yesterday about a piece of packaging I found in a shop around 15 years ago. It was loose, and I think it would have made its way into a bin, so I took it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but rather than being swept up and put into landfill, it found a place on my wall. It was, by today’s standards, rather tame, depicting an artistic, deco styled image of a woman’s head with long flowing hair. In subtle orange and muddy reds, I thought at the time it was beautiful. Yet I had a disturbing thought yesterday: Would I pick up or even glance at the picture today? You see, The Great Image Saturation Event has occurred in the world today. We are pummeled by the beautiful left, right, and center. There is no escape for our eyes as we peruse a new centralized internet, where the best images from every single corner in the world now sits before us on social media and news sources. This globalized ball of beauty hurtles ever onwards, giving artists snippets of fame before the ball turns, and a new name is in the limelight. FIrst it was digital photography that was adding to this ball, and now AI, which can produce images at fantastic speed. How much more can the internet be saturated? A whole lot more is the strikingly obvious answer.
Or is it? For myself, I want to pick up someone else’s garbage again. I want that thrill of finding something beautiful amongst the mundane. I want to decorate my house, and for people to come in and appreciate seeing what I have put up. But is this really still possible?
The only way to achieve this is surely by rejecting the digital age. Reject social media, reject the centralized news sources. Go back to local information. Information that is well suited to its environment. Because, surely, globalized news can’t really be applicable to every environment on Earth. We’re not all ready to conform to one set of universal values, and we shouldn’t either. There is beauty in variety, and variety occurs when we are closed off from each other into disparate groups.
Another problem, thinking about art specifically, as my story of the garbage art shows, people don’t always need the absolute best to be happy. Relatively speaking, people are happy with what they have unless they see something better. In my opinion, more art would be sold, and the distribution would be more even, if people only had access to their local markets. I am not an economist, so I can’t really talk about globalization in any depth, but if art is anything to go by, it seems that it is not necessarily always the answer.
There are of course many other problems arising from the digital age. As we become consumed by our phones, our relationships suffer. We don’t know how to talk at a dinner table any more. The addiction to new, bitty information is strong. Is this even affecting our brain structures, IQ, etc? It is not currently clear what the long term effects are, but certainly on a personal level, I find the reading of books to be laboursome now. If this is true across the board, then how exactly are children currently being educated for in depth learning? What is the effect on critical thinking. Furthermore, how does it affect our expectations of the world? Why have there been so many sensationalist leaders recently? Why is politics a personality contest? We seem to be becoming adapted for bitty expectations as we consume more and more bitty information.
Does it need to be this way? Is it possible to fight back?
Certainly, the first thing that needs to go is the app driven smart phone, and re-inventions like the Boring Phone aim to displace the new with the old. It begins to beg the question: Are we in a technology retract?
When electricity first came to the consumer, there were all manner of inventions that utilized it. But people eventually grew tired of the meaningless inventions. Are we today beginning to tire of our information addictions? I certainly hope so (as I write another blog post to upload to the internet).
Buy yourself some physical art here in the form of limited edition signed postcard prints.