Here’s a rare peek into the inner workings of the institute: our discussion about viral media that came out of a debate over what to do with the Gates Memory Project. I’ve excerpted from last night’s email conversation….
Ben starts by saying:
Genesis and entropy are both accelerated on the web. Within moments, you can get something out there and have everybody talking about it. But the life can drain out just as quickly. I think it’s fair to say that energy [for the Gates Collective Memory project] is waning, but by refocusing on a single goal, we can perhaps keep this thing afloat…
Bob replies:
absolutely do not want to stop yet; haven’t done enough to have any lasting impact;
Dan says:
Not to derail the conversation by dragging into the realms of the meta, but might the arc that Ben’s describing (an initial flair-up of interest, followed by declining returns) be interesting in & of itself? It seems like the internet is very good at blowing up interesting things at the moment (viz: the contagious media thing Kim forwarded), but it’s (generally) not very good at sustaining interest (or scrutiny). (A major & significant exception: when a community springs up around something.) Occasionally you get a “where are they now?” thread on Boing Boing or Slashdot or something, but that’s very much the exception & not the rule.
This is maybe something that’s important if we’re considering the future of books. The information arc of the printed book seems to be very different: if there’s not a media circus around the launch of the book, there’s a very slow pickup, lasting, conceivably, a very long time. Electronic media seem to be much more time-sensitive.
Bob replies:
EXCELLENT point!
Dan says:
But not a particularly novel one. Certainly someone’s done some thinking about this? I’m not sure where to start looking . . .
Kim says:
Some ideas of where to start looking:
Eyebeam’s Contagious Media Experiments
Exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Chelsea
CONTAGIOUS MEDIA
April 28 – June 4, 2005
Media Lounge
Review/preview of show
Dan replies:
This is kinda the opposite of what I’m interested in here. I think it’s great that the Internet spreads things virally, but these things burn out very quickly: the Peretti’s projects seemed “yesterday” a couple years ago. Nobody checks into blackpeopleloveus.com regularly – people visited once & got the joke (or didn’t). Do we really need a loving history of “all your base are belong to us”? It was funny – and certainly signifies a moment of our collective interaction with the Internet very precisely – but a museum exhibitions seems almost beside the point. You don’t put a pop song into a museum – and I say that with a full appreciation of pop songs.
To carry the pop song analogy further: in a pop-song world, can you have Bach? if you wanted to have Bach?
(I don’t think The Gates really fit into this sort of framework, because there were personal interactions with them. Ben – for example – can tell stories about the gates in a way that we can’t really tell (interesting) stories about the dancing baby.)
Kim replies:
Social critiques like www.whatisvictoriassecret.com which posed women in sexy underware barfing over the toilet really did say something about body image and the way the advertising industry manipulates women. And the Nike sweatshop emails forced Nike to address labor issues. These websites are not built to last in the same way oil paintings and poems are, but I do think they are a significant cultural commentary and a new form of activism. In this sense I suppose, the Gates do not fit, because they have no political goals.
We should also consider contagious media that parodies an over-hyped current event, a good example is this blog written by Brittany Spears’ fetus Don’t forget, the most popular website about the Gates was a parody (the Sommerville Gates). it followed this formula, went viral and got tens of thousands of hits.
I think the contagious media element is important for our project. The Gates themselves were temporary and the material we are gathering is, ostensibly, finite (i.e. Nobody is going to go out and take a picture of the Gates tomorrow). Therefore, we need to draw attention to the project now. I don’t think personal interactions or the potential for stories/complexity prevents us from making at least some part of this project contagious.
I don’t get the pop-song analogy. We do have museums for pop-music. Jazz, Motown, Elvis, the Beatles, they are not trivial and we still have Bach.
Ben says:
I agree it would be interesting to look at the project in terms of its arc – a web arc versus a print arc. It might be interesting also to consider this in terms of closed and exposed. Writing a book is a relatively solitary and contained act (unless it’s built on interviews and field research). But still, a work in progress is usually kept very private and tucked away. Only upon being published does it open up to the world. Our project, however, started with a large number of people and a fair bit of attention, but then gradually contracted to an inner core. Now we try to make sense of that dizzying encounter with the larger world. You could say that print books embody thinking before speaking, whereas the web fosters speaking first and thinking later, or not at all.
As for Bach, I think he’s pretty much impossible in a pop world, except as reduced to a pop song – the played-to-death cello suite accompanying a Lexus gliding across your TV. Someone today with Bach’s genius probably couldn’t impact the development of music in nearly as big a way. Maybe he would just become a scientist. And it’s true, we don’t really put pop songs in museums. Only one of the things Kim mentions is a place, and that’s a museum to a legendary person, not a song. I suppose there’s the rock and roll hall of fame, but that strikes me as going to the taxidermist’s and calling it a zoo. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a similar entombed quality to this Contagious Media Showdown Eyebeam is hosting. It’s proof that the “all your base,” “blackpeopleloveus” variety of web contagion is passé. Drag racing diseases isn’t subversive, it’s just referential. But I agree with Kim that there continue to be interesting and sometimes powerful instances of contagious media. But a big part of their power is that they come out of nowhere. The minute you announce that something is contagious, you kind of kill its coolness. I wonder if anything worthwhile will come out of that contest.
It’s interesting to analyze all this in terms of trying to make something coherent and lasting on the web. But I’m not sure we need to lob a contagious grenade of our own. What sort of thing are you imagining?
–end of email exchange, conversation continues in the comment field–
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
I think it is important to remember the we are the institute for the future of the book, not the institute for the future of the permanent and lasting work of high literary art. If we get stuck on how to make something last or if we try to determine what “deserves” to last, we are going to fail. We need to stay open to these forms of cultural expression however mediocre they might seem at the moment, because they are laying the groundwork for something we have not imagined yet. If we think of contagious media as the web’s version of marketing “junk” then we miss the point.
100 percent agree about staying open. But I’m confused – what kind of contagious are you talking about with regards to our project? Some kind of stealth bomb like the examples we’ve mentioned, or just something that people will click from far and wide to see? If it’s the latter, I don’t think we’re really talking about “contagious media” as such, just good stuff that people want to see.
I don’t doubt the power of viral media to spread – it certainly does. My reservation about it – and, to be clear, I’m playing the devil’s advocate here – is that this form of media transmission seems to strongly favor novelty over sustained thought. This is certainly great for entertainment. I think it’s a more complicated question as to whether if, after attention is attracted, that attention stays.
The pop song analogy: Ben maybe said this better than I can, but I’ll give it a go. What I mean by that is that the power of a pop song is in its fleetingness. For the past week I’ve been listening to some German band named Wir Sind Helden who make perfect catchy three-minute pop songs about I don’t know what because they’re in German. Right now they’re fantastic, but almost certainly I shall be tired of them by next week. I don’t know that they have lasting value, but they have value for the moment. I’m not talking about something like The Beatles: they have historical significance which they can’t be detached from at this point. The Beatles will never mean for me what they did for Bob because I don’t have that historical context. When that arises, you put them in a museum. But I think then they cease to be pop songs & become something different.
Walter Ong convincingly argues in Orality and Literacy that the reason you don’t have a second Homer in the West is because you couldn’t any longer. The coming of literacy had thoroughly transformed people’s minds in such a way as to make memorizing something as long as The Iliad impossible. The oral tradition had collapsed, and people didn’t have to memorize long works to save them: they could write them down. People had changed. In a similar way, while I don’t think there’s necessarily a barrier to writing music as technically complex as Bach’s, such music wouldn’t command nearly as much of an audience as Bach’s did over time: our musical spectrum is impossibly broader than it was at Bach’s time. (One of the funniest bits in Philip Dick’s novels is a future world where John Dowland’s lute music becomes incredibly popular.)
and . . .
Does viral media have political power? It does, certainly, but it seems almost a detrimental kind of power, and one that the right uses much more effectively than the left. If the right can claim that Al Gore said that he invented the Internet, their followers will parrot it (they still do), and claim this proves he’s a liar. Almost nobody will go into the sources of what he actually said, or the context within which he said it, or look at what he did do with technology. It’s not really a discussion so much as an easy way to dismiss something. Even better: Howard Dean’s scream, quickly cut loose from any political context, parodied to death through cyberspace & the real world, and used to conclude that the man was insane & unfit to be president. Or the doctored photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda . . . What happens, in general, seems to be a degradation of the political conversation, seizing on images and instants rather than reason. (Although of course we can argue that there never was an undegraded political conversation.)
I’m sounding like Adorno here, and I don’t know that that’s a good thing.
Kim said:
I think it is important to remember the we are the institute for the future of the book, not the institute for the future of the permanent and lasting work of high literary art. If we get stuck on how to make something last or if we try to determine what “deserves” to last, we are going to fail. We need to stay open to these forms of cultural expression however mediocre they might seem at the moment, because they are laying the groundwork for something we have not imagined yet. If we think of contagious media as the web’s version of marketing “junk” then we miss the point.
I don’t think I’m talking about “high literary art” (that’s why I was scared of sounding like Adorno), but I do think this comes down to the dreaded discussion of what a book is, and I think that’s very much what we’re about. I think, to my mind, the reason that the book is a valuable unit is because a book is, at its most basic, a piece of sustained thinking on something. I think that “sustained” is an important adjective. It doesn’t have to be sustained for very long – The Communist Manifesto, for example, is very short – but I think it has to be sustained. I’d go further and suggest that a book is unified by an author or editor, though I know that’s shakier ground.
I’m not trying to derogate new forms of cultural expression, but I’m not sure that “book” is a useful term with which to think about them. Lumiè re’s first experiments in film weren’t called books. It’s only now, a century later, that we’ve gotten to the point where we could conceivably construe film as being something that could be part of a book.
Ben writes: – what kind of contagious are you talking about with regards to our project? Some kind of stealth bomb like the examples we’ve mentioned, or just something that people will click from far and wide to see? If it’s the latter, I don’t think we’re really talking about “contagious media” as such, just good stuff that people want to see.
What I’m trying to say is that contagious media represents a mode of distribution on the web that seems worthy of our attention. It is similar to the “word-of-mouth” phenomenon that causes a book or movie to become hugely popular. Maybe we could call it “word-of-link.” I think contagious media can offer some insight into how we interact with, and what we expect from, web-based artifacts. In regards to our project, I think our suggestions for new directions are not necessarily going to yield a “stealth bomb,” but they have some qualities of viral media and, since we have no marketing budget, word-of-link might be something we should strive for.
I partly agree with Dan’s observation that: “this form of media transmission seems to strongly favor novelty over sustained thought.” I am not trying to argue that these things are books, but I do think they are interesting, maybe as pamphlets. And they offer the kind of witty spot-on commentary that sustained thought vehicles can’t carry off.
I agree with Dan’s idea that “a book is, at its most basic, a piece of sustained thinking on something.” But I don’t agree that “a book is unified by an author or editor.” I think the book can be unified by an idea, as it is with our Gates project. And, in the realm of the internet, it is possible to have a book that is unified by a network or by a search engine. The great thing about defining the book as “a piece of sustained thinking on something,” is that the terms “sustained thinking” and “something,” can be interpreted pretty broadly. According to that definition, this blog is a book; a long series of letters or emails is a book; an ongoing conversation with oneself is a book…see how quickly we can lose clarity on this. The difficulty in defining what a book is, when you take it out of print format, might be like trying to define what a human is when you take it out of the body. Is there a book soul? I mean–is the book a form of communication that lives in our consciousness and is able to take on various physical forms, or is it inexorably fixed to a particular form? If it only works as printed type on paper pages, then we need a new name for our institute. But if “books” are thought structures that humans make, then we are in business. Theoretically, these thought structures could be supported by many different formats and, it seems to me, we need to leave the question wide open for the moment, to see how the book incarnates in the digital medium. Dan’s idea that the internet is not very good at sustained thought is something we should think long and hard about–on the internet. ; )
You could say that our mission, at its most basic, is to do what little we can to ensure that that “soul” persists. Forms change and new structures arise. “Book” may eventually cease to be a useful term. It’s that ability to venture a “sustained piece of thinking on something” that we don’t want to lose in a digital society.
Another example, from Ong again: he spends a long time musing over why Socrates banned poets from The Republic. The reason, he concludes, is that to Socrates, teaching – but not writing – on the cusp of the transition to a literate society, the poets represented a pre-literate way of thinking, which would hinder his new logical (and newly literate) civilization. Literate people didn’t think the same way that oral people do; the two styles of thought, Socrates seems to have been arguing, can’t co-exist peacefully.
It’s not a huge jump to argue that we’re at such a transitional point right now, with print-based culture transforming into a more visual culture. Will the sustained thinking that print culture has encouraged get lost in a world of instant news and entertainment? Not entirely – poets are still around. (Everyone: go out and buy the latest issue of Circumference, the journal of poetry in translation that I design.) It’s obvious to us now that you can have print-based poetry, which presumably Socrates wouldn’t have imagined. But it’s also true that poets aren’t nearly as influential as they were before literacy. We might have good reason to worry about the future of sustained thought that’s not knee-jerk misoneism.