Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Artifacts (2 of 2)

Episode Date: January 16, 2014

Social Media theorist Nathan Jurgenson wants us to understand what is truly revolutionary about ephemeral photographs and platforms like Snapchat, Fred Ritchin says we are going to get our minds blown “After Photography” and Finn Bruntun explains why we need to preserve our transition from Analog to Digital.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Artifacts, Part 2. We have so many photos. People are just taking so many to Instagram, to Facebook, wherever. They're piling up. I mean, yeah, technically they exist forever, but nobody's looking at them the next day. They might as well be temporary. You know, let's face it, most photography was becoming Snapchat. Nathan Jergensen is a social media theorist. As an academic, he studies how we use services like Facebook and Twitter.

But currently, he's also doing research for one of these companies, Snapchat, the fast-growing platform for ephemeral photographs. So these are photos that you take that are going to self-destruct. One of these companies, Snapchat, the fast-growing platform for ephemeral photographs. So these are photos that you take that are going to self-destruct. You put a timer on it, and as you're viewing it, you're viewing them with the knowledge that they are going to disappear. They're going to go away. People are flocking to platforms like Snapchat, Nathan says, because traditional social media services, the ones with feeds, profiles, and timelines, just ask too much. Time is weighing very heavy on us right now because dominant social media take our present and they ask us to record it and it builds up. We have these profiles that are

growing and they're kind of weighing us down. Who we were in the moment, in the past, is just there on the screen. And when we're out somewhere, dominant social media, they ask us to view the world as always a potential document. And I think ephemerality is precisely a rejection of that. Most of our social interactions have always, they've always been ephemeral, right? That's been the default. And then social media came around and said, what if we take everything we're doing and just record it and save that forever? So every conversation you're having at a coffee shop over the dinner table, there's a recorder on, right? And then we're going to keep that forever

and like archive that. That was a very radical way to understand human sociality. A lot of people who use ephemeral apps are just enjoying letting things go. It's not that the thing they let go needed to be secret. It's just a type of interaction that is like normal interaction. It's just not recorded. It's just not a big deal. We shouldn't always have to put the present to work to be part of this recorded, permanent identity brand. It's just about rejecting that. It's not about doing anything that you don't want

anybody to see and that needs to be kept secret. And I think that's the hang up, why people just go, well, anything digital is going to be safe forever. And they just completely miss the point. Now, I should point out here that the design features of platforms like Snapchat can easily be circumvented. You can, for example, take a permanent picture of the ephemeral snap on your screen with a camera or another phone. But according to Nathan, our fixation with security and privacy is blinding us to what's truly revolutionary about ephemeral media. Traditional and dominant social media were organized around the traditional notion of the photograph, which is an art object. It's a document of the present. It's a thing that you can hold, even in the digital

versions of it. Let's say it's Instagram. That's the ends. Everything happens around that object. You can do faves and hearts and likes and retweets and comments, and all of that happens around this photo object. And in ephemeral social media, the ends is just left to fade away. And that very fundamental unit of analysis, the unit of organization for almost all of our social media, that object just really becomes the means. And the ends is then the communication. The entire history of photography, every new technological invention has been about making more photos. And I think that ephemeral social media, Snapchat in particular, is really the first technological invention in the history of photography

that's about there being fewer photos in the world. And I think one of the great advantages to injecting some ephemerality into photography, into our lives, into social media, is to make the photos that we do choose to keep forever relatively more important, right? It's like we've printed too much currency, too much visual photographic currency, and it's inflated, and it doesn't have any value. So let's maybe print less. This way, the photos that we do choose to keep forever can really be more permanent, can really be more special. The transition from analog to digital has created a number of serious philosophical issues

for those who make images and those who consume them. Fred Richin, a professor and author, has been writing and speaking about many of these issues for over 30 years now. I wrote a piece in 1984 for the New York Times Magazine on the digital future of photography as well as film. And what concerned me then was would photography in the future be credible? If they could be so easily manipulated and seamlessly manipulated, would anybody believe anything about what's going on in the world beyond the local neighborhood in which they live? This piece

angered his editors so much he actually had to stop writing for the magazine. He was told it was unfair to force the reader to think more than six months into the future. Eventually, though, the world caught up with Fred Richen. He's internationally recognized today for his writings on digital imaging. I've had him on a number of my programs over the years. The following is an excerpt from a conversation we had in his noisy office about his book After Photography. A lot of people are skeptical of photography right now. They don't believe the authenticity of it automatically. If you looked at a picture from the Vietnam War of a girl being hit by napalm,

you knew that girl was being hit by napalm. You knew that that girl was suffering. You knew there was something wrong about that. If you see a similar picture today, you say, oh, is that from that side or this side? Who's pushing it? Is it propaganda? Did they change it? Who's publishing it? What do they want to get out of us? What do they want from us? And the girl who's suffering somehow is secondary or tertiary in the discussion. Somehow we don't even care about her. She's just kind of a reference point, a signifier. She's not real. She's not there. And what happens finally to us as people is it dehumanizes us because the suffering of the person is less important than the image.

The person in the image hardly exists anymore. To me, that's one of the fantastically unobserved moral failings and political failings of contemporary time that we don't recognize that change. We don't recognize what's happened. Everything's a reality show. It seems, though, that you are suggesting

that a true digital future can solve some of these issues. Can you explain how you see that working? Well, in many, many ways. I mean, if you have 100 people with cell phones outside, if something happens, you'll get 100 versions. It becomes cubist of the same subject. So by being cubist and having those 100 different perspectives, it's very hard to refute it. There is a real girl being napalm because 100 people are saying it in 100 different ways. The authority of the one has eroded. The Time magazine photographer, it's eroded. It's finished.

But it's the 100 people with the cell phones on YouTube or wherever it would be. When the baby falls off the table on YouTube, we believe the baby fell off the table because some amateur did it. It wasn't a professional, kind of slick, sophisticated, manipulating kind of... Media event. It was not a baby falling off the table media event. It was not a photo opportunity in the same sense. So I think there are many, many, many strategies.

You know, like I've argued in the book, for example, that involving everybody who has something to say, that's a much more interesting way of doing journalism, a way of doing media in generally, to try to help us all figure out who we are, what we are, where we are. It's not just the individual creator, author, star, branded, hyped, and so on, but it's us intelligent people together, feeling people together, trying to figure it out. You know, we're smart enough to do that. But you need a political will to do that. You need to resist to do that. You need to feel that the world is more important

than the media. And once you start to understand that and do that, these things are very, very easy to fight back. And the digital makes it all possible because you can basically footnote a photograph. You can say, okay, I was there. I'm the guy on the right. Click on me. I'll tell you what was really going on. There's all kinds of ways that you can do here. We're so upset about Photoshop. But on the other hand, if scientists in terms of global warming say that in 50 years, this is what it's going to look like, we can make pictures of it, photograph it, so it doesn't happen. I mean, the point to me is not to photograph after the apocalypse. The point to me is to prevent the apocalypse. It seems that you're suggesting that digital photography, far from giving us a less true picture of the world, actually has

the opportunity to give us a true understanding of the world. A truer understanding of the world. I think analog is really continuous, continuous tone. That's what analog means. And the discrete segments of the digital, the fact that you can jump around, is a different worldview. Within a Newtonian worldview, the famed Cartier-Bresson photograph

of a man jumping a puddle leaves the reader confident that he will land on the other side. In a subatomic quantum universe, it remains a matter of probabilities. You can jump around the quantum leap. The digital allows all these multiple perspectives, multiple, multiple ways of looking at it, and that's what we mean by multiculturalism,

that's what I hope we mean by multimedia. It's multi-perspectives. So you could play with history. You could play with time. You could play with the future. You know, again, in very much like a quantum physics where you can live time forwards and backwards. You can die before you're born, you know, like Borges in fiction.

You could play with these ideas, because that's how we dream, that's how we are, and this kind of material, practical, concrete, one after the other kind of thinking, is, is really limits us tremendously, and this digital opens us up, you know, that, that there's an impact already of these new ways of thinking. But we're just not at the point yet to have a kind of a conscious, deliberate conversation about it, because it has to kind of emerge and come up in us and then figure it out. And then one day we're going to say, my God, where did this come from?

And then we'll look back and say, for decades and decades, we've been experimenting with this, playing with this, being changed by this. We think of ourselves one way. The media itself has to be an extension of that and push us into new ways of thinking about things and about who we are. We know more and more that we are code-based. Animals are code-based and so on. And so I think one of the things that the digital media is opening up to us

is to understand ourselves differently instead of the outside appearance at a level of code. And so at a level of code, you know, all us and animals and so on and so forth are going to have tremendous similarities that we're used to thinking of as differences. And I think that the fun of that is to reimagine ourselves. And the fun of that is to reimagine ourselves to the point where we don't see the other as the other, you know, that we don't understand, we're afraid of, we want to kill them, we want to have wars with them, we enslave them, we eat them, but to see them as part of us,

and us as part of them. I don't think it's an accident that we came up with a code-based medium at the time that we came up with DNA. That's one of the extraordinary excitements about digital media. In terms of photography, photography means writing with light. There's all kinds of light. Light now, you know, used to be at a certain speed. Light slowed down. We could slow it down. We could kinds of light. Light now used to be at a certain speed. Light slowed down. We could slow it down.

We could play with light. It's not the same sort of thing anymore. Writing itself is subjective. Writing itself means it's your personal impressions, your opinions, your perspective. It's not this objective reality that we thought of photography as being. I think that's healthy that we see it as subjective, as interpretive, as not objective. It goes back to the root of the word. This is where the revolution starts.

The revolution hasn't, for the most part, started. The revolution so far is repurposing, efficiency, simulation, but it's not really begun. And what I anticipate with delight is for the revolution to actually get going. And we reimagine, rethink ourselves and the world using these extraordinary new media that are just waiting for us to take advantage of, to use, and to help us figure out who we are and where we're going. In the transition from analog mechanisms to digital mechanisms, one of the biggest problems that we've been having has been precisely the precedence that we give to the artifact, to the digital machine, to the digital system. We focus so much on preservation questions

around how future generations will be able to access this data or use these machines. And that's significant, and I don't mean to downplay its significance at all, but like all information systems throughout history, these machines are socially embedded. They're things whose uses and functions and even, you know, the data types, the metadata, we can get very technical with this, are all things that exist in a continuum of human use,

in the way that our society was, in the way that it felt at that time. And that part of understanding why they worked the way they did, why we adopted them the way they did, has to do with what we believed and the way in which we experienced the world. Finn Brunton is an assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. Recently, I dropped by his office to talk with him about Alan Turing and the evolution of computer memory. But we're going to have to save that audio for another day. Because right now, I want to share with you Finn's amazing idea on how we could and why we should preserve for future historians this transition from analog to digital.

Even more, I think, than many other kinds of history, understanding the way in which a technology shapes our sense of ourselves and our sense of the world, our sense of who we are, even more than other modes of history, I think that is very difficult for us to recover, very difficult for us to understand. Completely know, completely setting aside cosmology or the sciences or the sense of the world, just our ability to have a sense of who we are as bodies, as people in a society in relation to technologies, I want us to have ways to be able to go into those modes, re-experience them and recover them, bring them back. In the 1950s and 60s, there was a physicist and nuclear engineer named Alvin Weinberg,

who was one of the people who lived at the secret city of Oak Ridge working on nuclear technology. And he was fascinated with an idea that he called the learning reactors. That as they improved on the progress of nuclear reactors, each one that was decommissioned in order would be left as a fossil by the freeway out in the desert, so that as you drove along a particular route, you would actually see one by one these systems evolve and grow and change,

the fossils of the nuclear age. And I really like the idea of having settlements around the world that can live in various different technological epochs by choice. So imagine like something akin to the Amish, but like the Amish spaced out by say 50 years or a century, all of them persisting. They could sort of maintain particular eras of human life and human relationships with technology so that you could actually kind of go in and explore what that was actually like and understand their experience and their sense of the world. Would you be able to break it down though

like for the people who had four megapixel digital cameras versus the people who had 16 megapixel cameras? I mean like couldn't you see that like settlements would work for each one of those? I think they would and I think you can actually get this as fine-grained as you want it to. Yeah recently there was a study about the the power of high resolution images to include information that may not be visible to the human eye, such as the reflections of the faces of photographers in the pupils of the people being photographed. When you look at the move towards gigapixel imaging, you can see the way in which those

images are fundamentally different. They're so full of data, they're not really visual anymore. They're actually something that's much more useful for computation to run particular kinds of pattern recognition on than it is for humans to look at. That's like a qualitatively as well as quantitatively different mode of the image. And you can, I think you could, especially in the ways in which things have been accelerating, I think you could, in fact, have, like, Settlement 2002 versus Settlement 97. And in each case, the experience of the network,

the experience of the system, the experience of, yeah, things at the level of cameras and things at the level of the written word would be so distinct, and distinct in ways that we can't understand because we have lived through them. But being able to visit them again, being able to visit them as prior orders of time, would reveal that to us. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's theory of everything. This installment is called Artifacts, Part 2.

It featured Nathan Jorgensen, Fred Richin and Finn Brunton. The sound design was done by Bill Bowen. For more information, including links and images, visit us at toe.prx.org. This is where you can subscribe to the Theory of Everything podcast. And you can find Benjamin Walker

on Twitter at TMIBWalker. Radiotopia from PRX