Eddie, 10/02

In our world of participatory culture, there is a divide. The longstanding virtue of Wikipedia – its democracy – is also its Achilles Heel: there is no authority in something where everyone is the authority. So exactly where does perfection and authority fit into our participation?

A quick glimpse at YouTube reveals the fact that user-created content is currently held at rather abysmal expectations. They are viewed without any hope for excellence or perfection, and are never considered deeply as anything of substance. They sit at one side of a wide river that separates them, the media boys, from the media men. Apparently, newfound abilities for the consumer do not automatically mean them being employed in a fashion as deep as they are wide. As we know by now, the longevity of the image has diminished as the number of producers has increased. When products of art appear en masse, each piece has a smaller share of attention. Even if the attention is sometimes of enormous intensity, it is that short lifespan which has locked the malnourished layman art into under-development. What purpose is there to produce art that is insightful if it will only be a temporary matter? If all that can be accomplished by participant art is that brief sprint of popularity, there is, indeed, no real incentive to create with depth. What takes the place of depth, instead, is gimmick. If anything is unusual enough, it garners attention and then spreads like wildfire. If gimmicks are the clever play of wit, it also means that they do not involve a great deal of skill, so the result is a situation where the most popular creators are of part luck and part situation with just a pinch of skill. People who take their art seriously will undoubtedly be quite unhappy with an audience that does not appraise work seriously.

This method of operation would be just fine, some would argue, since the majority of us are not experts in art. But should we not consider what possibilities our powers offer us? That we, as free and able artists and creative producers, should explore our productive powers and consider our responsibility to create something worthwhile to inspire and intrigue? Here we are, with the magic tool which grants people the power of the artistic elite and yet all we have gained in our culture is girth. We have already briefly seen YouTube, but there are countless other examples, such as the endless message boards dedicated to self-proclaimed novelists and scores of self-maintained websites showing off amateur painting or photography. On the Internet, anyone can be a creator of any medium they wish, yet that has yet to endow us with anything more than a flood of hobbyists. Statistically, the increase in participants should have brought an influx of talent, and should have brought even more people into a better understanding of what is good and what is excellent, but what has grown here is merely recreational pleasure without permanent and substantial maturity.

Of course, we need to bear in mind that culture can only build itself as tall and sophisticated as it is wide, so an ever expanding base of primary creators and viewers is natural and lays the essential groundwork for future growth. The matter I am calling to attention here is the subsequent need for people to ask for more and to seek out excellence on their own levels. We have the tools to build a bridge and transverse that river of divide, so now is the time to cross over and to stop making sand castles at the shore.