Ephemeral artefacts
Mark Federman, Chief Strategist at U of Toronto’s McLuhan Program (where I spent one night a week for a year in the late 70s at a graduate seminar led by the master himself) has put forth a fascinating paper on the way in which the way in which we bind time and space is changing. He asks:
In our world of instantaneous, multi-way communication, everywhere is here and every-when is now. What is the nature of the artefacts that are characteristic of our pervasively connected culture?
He posits ephemeral artefacts as his answer: “An ephemeral artefact exists precisely in the present, and can only be experienced at the moment of its creation.”
There are lots of provocative ideas in this piece (I particularly like his notions of “interpassivity,” the dominance of touch on the Net, and the Net as an acoustic space), but I have questions about the primary one:
Mark looks to art as a precursor of the future and finds examples of artefacts that have both the characteristics to which he points: They are ephemeral and involve us both as performer and performance. But might they be simply oddities, not precursors? It seems to me that we’re trending in the other direction. As I look at the Web (which, granted, is not all of life or all of the world, dammit), it seems to me that many of its most important artefacts aren’t ephemeral. Some are short-lived — JibJab productions are good for a couple of days maybe — but Mark means by “ephemeral” things that exist only so long as we experience them. Aren’t many of the truly “binding” artefacts on the Web not ephemeral? For example, while with blogs there is no separation of performer and performance, blogs are persistent. They are our bodies on the Web, binding our selves through time. I think their temporality is absolutely essential to their nature and their success. So, am I not looking far enough ahead? Are blogs already yesterday’s news?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
yea, and I was so much older then, but I’m younger than that now…
Interesting – and ironic – question you pose there: Are blogs yesterday’s news? Actually, they are more like tomorrow’s news, with yesterday’s news (ie. the conventional mass media) REALLY becoming yesterday’s news.
But more to your concern: The paper considers dominant forms, that is, those that really drive a culture and society. It doesn’t mean that the old forms disappear, but rather, have less influence on the way our society is shaped. (This is an oblique reference to two of the four Laws of Media – Extension/Enhancement vs. Obsolescence. The other two are Retrieval and Reversal.)
Weblogs are an interesting case if we begin to look at the dynamics of effects (ie. the McLuhan “message”) rather than their contents. Weblogs are an externalization and amplification of voice, and as such, behave as an oral form, despite the fact that they involve text. As weblogs carry on coversations with each other, especially around a particular hot issue, their societal dominance is related not to their archival nature (literate form) but to their conversational nature (oral and participatory form.) Think of either the Trent Lott Affair or the Howard Dean Experience. The power of weblogs has everything to do with their nature when considered against a ground of ephemerality and active participation, rather than against a ground of persistence. That is, in my experience (not view; not opinion) what makes a weblog not just another web page.
Between ephemera and archives is the stretch of time that constitutes a self. Beyond its content, which may indeed be ephemeral, a blog persists as a place that is as close as we get to having a self on the Web. As a thought experiment, imagine that every posting we did was at a different url, with a different look, and with no links back to our previous posts. THAT would be ephemeral, but it wouldn’t be recognizable as a blog. The power of blogs has everything to do with their persistence.
I’m pretty certain that we’re saying the same thing except reversing foreground and background…
I agree – we are essentially coming at the same point from different directions. The persistent aspect of blogs has to do with the change in our understanding of mass media. From the paper: “A mass medium was once thought of as one in which a mass of people experienced the same thing at the same time from different locales. It was typified by broadcast – radio, television and the early incarnation of the Internet, whose first use as a new medium was the emulation of the old media. But now, we can further refine our understanding of mass media culture as it is emerging today – that which allows massive participation in the creation of cultural artefacts at different physical times, from different physical locales, with the individual perception of simultaneity and immediate
proximity.”
The persistent aspect of weblogs, that nonetheless give us the perception of having just been created the moment we first find them, exemplifies this new notion of mass media that is consistent with ephemerality (not that they disappear; rather that they are experienced only in the present, and they require active participation for their existence.)
I guess this becomes somewhat zen-like: What is the voice of an unlinked, unvisited weblog? If a weblog is posted on the ‘net, and there are no links in or out, does it make a noise?