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    Peter Lunenfeld – Dispatches from the front: Battling for meaning in the war between downloading and uploading

    There is no end to the ways in which meaningful culture is more meaningful than mindless production, no matter how participatory, argues Peter Lunenfeld.


    All animals download, but only a few upload anything besides shit and their own bodies. Beavers build dams, birds make nests, and termites create mounds, but for the most part, the animal kingdom moves through the world downloading, and then munching it bits at a time. Humans are unique in their capacity not only to make tools, but to then turn around and use them to create superfluous material goods – painting and sculpture – and superfluous experiences – music, stories, religion, philosophy. Of course, it is precisely the superfluous that then comes to define human culture and ultimately what it is to be human. Understanding and consuming culture requires great skills – ask anyone who has taught a child to read – but failing to move beyond downloading is to strip oneself of a defining constituent of humanity.


    The network technologies of the moment, which have been labeled Web 2.0 so often now that we might as well just succumb to it, offer great wonders, yet a hierarchy of cultural production persists.  Web 2.0 is seen as the triumph of participatory culture, but the reality remains that only 1% of the members of a web community upload material, while no more than 10% of the users comment on or modify that content, and upwards of 90% of the community remains content to download without uploading.  One reason for the persistence of this pyramid of production is that like countries or peoples, different media have their own, unique cultures. I would maintain that for the past half century, first America and then much of the West’s culture has been defined by the television, and television culture is defined by downloading.


    Television as a media system is defined by taking in images and sounds produced by others.  Whether by broadcast, by cable, by satellite; live, delayed, taped or time-shifted, it is all downloading. The challenge that the computer mounted to television over the past decade is not just an issue of one machine being upgraded by another – like vinyl records being replaced by compact discs, or VHS recorders by DVDs. Instead, the computer is a machine which can upload anything its users make and distribute them either one to one, or one to many. This is a radical break from the culture of television. But the computer’s capacity to simulate any other media device perversely imperils its potential, because the computer is also a machine that can be better at downloading than television ever was. It is this dualism that defines our moment and sets the stage for the secret war between downloading and uploading.


    This conflict is being waged throughout our techno-culture and affects the production and consumption of huge swaths of media and materials worldwide. The central question is how to contribute to the production of meaning rather than simply to its consumption. Meaning is a loaded word. In consciousness, everything has a meaning or can be assigned one, including the statement that meaning has no meaning.  In this context, I am not interested in discussing what philosophers like Martin Heidegger have called the fundamental question of meaning — “why is there something instead of nothing?” – but instead want to think about the meaningfulness of works of culture.  This impels us to create a hierarchy of meaning, judging some things to be more “meaningful” than others, sometimes going so far as to label them “meaningless” (though we know full well the impossibility of any thing lacking meaning).


    Creating cultural hierarchies can make citizens of a democracy nervous. Who is the critic to judge the meaningfulness of experiences to other people’s lives? Leave that sort of assessment to the individual, or to the market and allow for pluralism to reign. But the networked computer, or culture machine as I call it, has ushered in an era of exponentially increasing cultural production, which democratizes the ability to create at the same time as it impels us to create new ways of hierarchizing what we encounter. In an era of explosive creativity, we have to strategize ways of responding to the demands on our time and attention. Strategies like renouncing cinema, television, comic books, or the Web as inherently evil are retrograde (though each medium has had critics completely condemning them). Such a strategy ignores the richness and pleasure of contemporary work in favor of a fusty antiquarianism. The opposite strategy, a capitulation to whatever the market and the network throws at us is nothing less than a mindless immersion. The technocratic search for “efficient” use of contemporary media by using configurable and interactive tools to restrict what you see to what you define as your “needs,” results in tailored news reports and a numbing reinforcement of sameness. The possibility for serendipitous encounters with the new and challenging cannot be abandoned in the quest for time management.


    In the end, the issue is less of criticism than it is of curation – the marshalling of culture, the mindful juxtaposition of ideas, images, sounds and interactions to create more than the sum of their parts. Any definition of what is meaningful runs the risk of tumbling down a rabbit hole of philosophical debate. But I am willing to stake a claim on the idea of the cumulative as one place to start. Work uploaded into the world ought to have enough of an affordance to connect with other elements of the network to add to larger questions of meaning rather than simply shimmering there as nodes in the distraction machines. Just as no one will download mindfully at all times, it is an impossible request to ask people to only upload meaningfully. But setting the bar too high is preferable to not setting the bar at all. Fifty years ago, the categorizing of meaning was considered to be one of, if not the, chief calling of the critic. Of course, the advent of critical theories like post-structuralism and deconstruction put many of these positions in jeopardy. But in so successfully developing what is termed a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” these movements had the paradoxical effect of wiping out what theory saw as its enemies without necessarily replacing the overthrown regime with one more congenial to their interests. In the end, this allowed commercial culture to reign triumphant.


    Acknowledging that there are losses that follow every gain in technological change is not the same as blindly following the reporting cycle. The key issue is that the 21st century networked culture machines we call computers lead to a previously unimaginable level of info and object richness in the world. What the networked culture machine makes possible now is a hybrid intellectuality. Text can be linked to graphics, photos, and moving images in fluid ways impossible a generation ago. The combinatory possibilities of alphanumeric texts, still and moving images, aural components from music to spoken word, and even contextual environmental embedding, all of these and more offer a huge set of affordances for both the creation and reception of meaning. The sheer density of information and materiality of the contemporary moment is unrivalled in history.


    What is the point of developing these machines, networks, and affordances for the delivery and publishing of media if we don’t also develop some corresponding sophistication in their content and well as their use? There are limits to what mass culture can talk about, levels of subtlety, of language, and of thought and thoughtfulness. The question of technique is harder to pin down, as mass culture has such economic might that the newest and most powerful of tools and techniques are always open to it, but of course mass culture trends to turn these techniques into clichés within the turn of just a few business quarters. Can we imagine anyone other than a gifted artist making use of morphing technologies at this point and not reducing the audience to tears of laughter or pain?


    The late Kingsley Amis ruthlessly summed up his worldview with Lucky Jim’s observations, that there “was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” In a like manner, there is no end to the ways in which meaningful culture is more meaningful than mindless production, no matter how participatory.


    This essay is adapted from The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine, forthcoming from the MIT Press


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