LJ Idol: Exhibit B -- Week 2: Um...
I'm going to talk about a passage of writing that has deeply affected me; that gave me shivers when I first read it, and has haunted me ever since.
The passage comes from Warner Communications' 1977 annual report to its shareholders:
Entertainment has become a necessity. The statement seems unsupportable: can entertainment be necessary in the sense that food, clothing and shelter are necessary?...the problem in the above statement is not with the word "necessary," but with the word "entertainment." As recently as twenty years ago, "entertainment"--diversion, amusement--would have served adequately to describe the vast majority of movies, television, radio, popular print and recorded sound. But today the word seems inadequate, outdistanced by events. The role of these media is now far more various and crucial than the pleasurable passing of time. In their mechanical operations...the media [have remained] essentially the same. Yet in their personal and social usefulness, they are utterly changed...The pace of world industrialization that has steadily accelerated since the 19th century is widely believed to have effected a severe challenge to individual identity: an increasingly efficient and standardized world jeopardizes personal freedom, importance and opportunity, with a consequent sense of disenfranchisement of self...Having allowed technology to create the problem, man has begun using technology to redress it. With the exponentially increased availability of all forms of communication, the media of "entertainment" have been pressed into service to provide the individual with models of experience, opportunities for self-recognition, and the ingredients of identity...The movement of information--at many rates of speed, to many kinds of people--is the business of Warner Communications. And the phenomenal growth of our company, along with other leaders in the field, reflects a marriage of culture and technology unprecedented in history, and a commensurate revolution in the human sense of self.
Before I explain myself, I must acknowledge that this passage may be, at bottom, just pretentious nonsense--verbiage some Warner accountant conjured up to fill blank pages. In the annual report, the section above is headlined with a quote from Marshall McLuhan--and the whole thing reads like a half-digested gloss of The Medium Is The Massage, McLuhan's famous manifesto on how mass communication reshaped the course of humanity. In 1977, Warners had just spent $32 million to acquire Atari, Inc., then on the brink of making the 2600 VCS; they had also invested heavily in the QUBE cable TV system, the prototype for all future interactive television systems--high-risk, high-technology ventures that were unusual for the company. Both would prove to be financial failures in the short term (in 1984, after major initial success, Atari was hemorrhaging money, leading to a $40 drop in stock price; by that time QUBE was all but out of business, having racked up $875 million in debt). Both were also visionary experiments ahead of their time (today, the video game industry is worth $74 billion; and QUBE was the prototype of TiVO, Apple TV, and every other digital box under your television set--not to mention the incubator in which both Nickelodeon and MTV were developed). In other words, the above passage can be understood as the Warner Communications Corporation bloviating futuristic rhetoric to assuage investors' worries about high-profile tech gambles--no deeper meaning implied or required.
And yet: if you feel an eerie sense of displacement reading the above, you're likely feeling the same thing I feel. It's the displacement of encountering attitudes that permeate our present moment in their first, embryonic form.
Consider that the process of commoditizing ideas and feelings that they describe is now more pervasive than ever: you only have to read the news and hear, for example, of the acquisition of Lucasfilm, owner of Star Wars, by Walt Disney Corporation (just as in 1977, or even more so now, a "leader in our field")--then think of the above, and you can get the creepy feeling that this is all part of a program that has been orchestrated and carried out now for a very long time.
Have you ever loved--really just loved--a song? Or a scene from a movie? Or a story? Have you ever waited in line to buy a Harry Potter novel, or been to a midnight premiere of The Avengers, or downloaded Mumford and Sons or Nicki Minaj or for that matter an old Beatles track? Have you ever come home from a job you don't really enjoy and curled up with a story or a poem or a video game or a comic book or any creative work at all, just to escape the grind of daily life for a precious hour or two and check back in with the self you treasure most, the self it seems like the rest of the world wants to keep you from experiencing? That's exactly what they were talking about, over thirty-five years ago: a disenfranchisement of self to be redressed by technology, sold to you, the consumer, at an objective profit.
They are saying, in effect, that hopes and dreams, the most private desires, our fundamental happiness, are an endlessly renewable resource to be mined and turned into this fiscal year's revenues. You, me, all of us: our imaginations are, by design, a target market to be exploited.
I do not think this is evil. I certainly do not think this is a conspiracy on the part of the media conglomerates, the government, or anyone else. Warners, Disney, News Corp, all of them are simply doing what businesses do: earning money, distributing artists' and creators' product to a wide audience, as efficiently and profitably as they can figure out how to do it.
And it is, finally, a fair exchange. We get an even return in value for our dollars, euros, whatever: a momentary escape from whatever is unhappy in our lives.
There is no evil here. But to read this idea laid out in the bland, cheerful language of a business plan is...unnerving.
The passage comes from Warner Communications' 1977 annual report to its shareholders:
Entertainment has become a necessity. The statement seems unsupportable: can entertainment be necessary in the sense that food, clothing and shelter are necessary?...the problem in the above statement is not with the word "necessary," but with the word "entertainment." As recently as twenty years ago, "entertainment"--diversion, amusement--would have served adequately to describe the vast majority of movies, television, radio, popular print and recorded sound. But today the word seems inadequate, outdistanced by events. The role of these media is now far more various and crucial than the pleasurable passing of time. In their mechanical operations...the media [have remained] essentially the same. Yet in their personal and social usefulness, they are utterly changed...The pace of world industrialization that has steadily accelerated since the 19th century is widely believed to have effected a severe challenge to individual identity: an increasingly efficient and standardized world jeopardizes personal freedom, importance and opportunity, with a consequent sense of disenfranchisement of self...Having allowed technology to create the problem, man has begun using technology to redress it. With the exponentially increased availability of all forms of communication, the media of "entertainment" have been pressed into service to provide the individual with models of experience, opportunities for self-recognition, and the ingredients of identity...The movement of information--at many rates of speed, to many kinds of people--is the business of Warner Communications. And the phenomenal growth of our company, along with other leaders in the field, reflects a marriage of culture and technology unprecedented in history, and a commensurate revolution in the human sense of self.
Before I explain myself, I must acknowledge that this passage may be, at bottom, just pretentious nonsense--verbiage some Warner accountant conjured up to fill blank pages. In the annual report, the section above is headlined with a quote from Marshall McLuhan--and the whole thing reads like a half-digested gloss of The Medium Is The Massage, McLuhan's famous manifesto on how mass communication reshaped the course of humanity. In 1977, Warners had just spent $32 million to acquire Atari, Inc., then on the brink of making the 2600 VCS; they had also invested heavily in the QUBE cable TV system, the prototype for all future interactive television systems--high-risk, high-technology ventures that were unusual for the company. Both would prove to be financial failures in the short term (in 1984, after major initial success, Atari was hemorrhaging money, leading to a $40 drop in stock price; by that time QUBE was all but out of business, having racked up $875 million in debt). Both were also visionary experiments ahead of their time (today, the video game industry is worth $74 billion; and QUBE was the prototype of TiVO, Apple TV, and every other digital box under your television set--not to mention the incubator in which both Nickelodeon and MTV were developed). In other words, the above passage can be understood as the Warner Communications Corporation bloviating futuristic rhetoric to assuage investors' worries about high-profile tech gambles--no deeper meaning implied or required.
And yet: if you feel an eerie sense of displacement reading the above, you're likely feeling the same thing I feel. It's the displacement of encountering attitudes that permeate our present moment in their first, embryonic form.
Consider that the process of commoditizing ideas and feelings that they describe is now more pervasive than ever: you only have to read the news and hear, for example, of the acquisition of Lucasfilm, owner of Star Wars, by Walt Disney Corporation (just as in 1977, or even more so now, a "leader in our field")--then think of the above, and you can get the creepy feeling that this is all part of a program that has been orchestrated and carried out now for a very long time.
Have you ever loved--really just loved--a song? Or a scene from a movie? Or a story? Have you ever waited in line to buy a Harry Potter novel, or been to a midnight premiere of The Avengers, or downloaded Mumford and Sons or Nicki Minaj or for that matter an old Beatles track? Have you ever come home from a job you don't really enjoy and curled up with a story or a poem or a video game or a comic book or any creative work at all, just to escape the grind of daily life for a precious hour or two and check back in with the self you treasure most, the self it seems like the rest of the world wants to keep you from experiencing? That's exactly what they were talking about, over thirty-five years ago: a disenfranchisement of self to be redressed by technology, sold to you, the consumer, at an objective profit.
They are saying, in effect, that hopes and dreams, the most private desires, our fundamental happiness, are an endlessly renewable resource to be mined and turned into this fiscal year's revenues. You, me, all of us: our imaginations are, by design, a target market to be exploited.
I do not think this is evil. I certainly do not think this is a conspiracy on the part of the media conglomerates, the government, or anyone else. Warners, Disney, News Corp, all of them are simply doing what businesses do: earning money, distributing artists' and creators' product to a wide audience, as efficiently and profitably as they can figure out how to do it.
And it is, finally, a fair exchange. We get an even return in value for our dollars, euros, whatever: a momentary escape from whatever is unhappy in our lives.
There is no evil here. But to read this idea laid out in the bland, cheerful language of a business plan is...unnerving.