Authenticity in New Media
From Peter Lunenfeld’s unpublished manuscript and his virtual lecture and class discussion, The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld argues contemporary issues in the computer, which he refers to as a “culture machine,” and raises questions about the role of designers in this silent combat. Lunenfeld argues that uncritical downloading (consuming) information causes meaningless uploading (producing) of knowledge in the explosion of new media culture. In a case from Twitter, Lunenfeld coins the term “continuous partial production” from Linda Stone’s phrase “continuous partial attention” in order to explain inverting conditions in new/multiple media culture.
Lunenfeld resonates a notion of “unfinish: continuous partial production” in the emerging network society. Lunenfeld piques my curiosity to ask questions; where does authenticity come from, what is authenticity, and how can I see authenticity correctly in these uncompleted conditions?
In a perspective of mindless consumerism, Lunenfeld labels the unbalanced portions between uploading and downloading behavior as a “cultural diabetes.” Lunenfeld concerns himself with the fact that “sticky culture is more sticky than a fan-based Teflon production, no matter how participatory.” Although we are in a swirl of “open sources”, we need to be aware of where the root of sources is, in order to appreciate a being of origin and situate ourselves in “disrupting the flow of media that surrounds us.”
Where does authenticity come from?
Humans reproduce things effortlessly. Lunenfeld mentions “togging” behavior—we compromise ourselves to be anonymous in the cultural flow and let something else control ourselves. Technology has made precision in multiplication the domain of the machine, forcing the essence of human creativity to retreat slowly from the hand to the head. The benefits of this retreat are fruitful sources, but they release functionality from human control. The most important issue of freedom of control is letting technology overrule the human mind and creativity. This smug, unexamined assumption is blinding us to a more fundamental shift. In a contemporary environment, the transforming agents are nano-technology, the global-network, and the virtual-information explosion.
In Design Culture, Paul Saffo, a future forecaster, claims “human culture has been shaped by a dance of two opposing forces: memory and forgetfulness. Memory gives us context, while forgetfulness provides an opening for invention and originality. Successful creativity occurs when the two are balanced and originality is set within the larger context of tradition.” In the Phaedrus, Plato expressed the fear that writing would make human memory lazy. In fact, “memory” became the central tool after the invention of the printing press and “movable type,” the interactivity between human and memory though printed material. The appearance of printing as a medium provoked a shift from use of the mind as storage to the mind as processor. Every information innovation enhances human creativity through communication, processing and memory.
What is authenticity?
Authenticity requires human-oriented endeavors. Now we are on the border of an information revolution that is a very different kind—movable information along with an emergence of audience. “Infinite” audience interaction triggers a hyper-dynamic universe of connections, relationships, and abstracting tools. Already, we are in “infinite” remembrance of information. All can be stored and nothing can be forgotten. With digital technology, duplication comes from effortless clicks and a boost electronic junk mail through the global network. Digital reproduction and replication extends rather than extinguishes the root. The emergence of incomplete recall and interaction may be more likely to extend and redefine authenticity.
The history of the “culture machine” became a pattern of multiple points of authenticity with patterns of copying and pasting spreading out from them. Saffo persists “I think we will rediscover a preindustrial fact: origin is not a point but a continuum, and the process of originality is much more linked than we imagine.” This phrase makes us consider that an agent of unlimited memory is an agent of unlimited unity of deeply interconnected relationships. For the greater notion of authenticity, we would be better to examine open-boundary for multi-individual to multi-unity. A designer can be intertwined with an enthusiast group, an unexpected event, or a meta-thoughts visual archive.
How can I see authenticity correctly?
Lunenfeld states “What an author produces is open to revision and those who used to be readers or listeners or viewers can become users, through appropriations remixes and creative reuse. The idea that everything is essentially an iteration can be terrifying because it encourages an endless tweaking rather than a commitment to the discrete project with a beginning and an ending.” Reconsidering a notion of authenticity in the new media culture supports Lunenfeld’s perspective and raises questions about how designers can facilitate a notion of authenticity in this new culture with technological aids.
Oded Ezer, a graphic designer, declares his position “I do not see myself as a scientist or an artist, just as a typographer who wants to break barriers.” For future practice, Ezer will experiment with the concept Biotypography, through which he aims to produce new “transgenic creatures” by fusing typographic elements with, say, ants or human sperm. With another concept, Typoplastic surgery, he envisions letters being grafted onto the human body, like decorative limbs.
Saffo’s phrase, “origin is a continuum” needs to be shifted to “authenticity is a multiplying multiple continuum” in 2009.
Nothing is new. The new agency of wasteful reproduction alters the notion of authenticity. We need to be aware of this new tendency and situate ourselves in the new flow as active providers rather than passive onlookers. The quality control of authenticity is a critical concept that designers diligently review in order to promote a new notion of reliability. The designer’s quest for attribute control in these shifting conditions has already started the understanding of an exploding continuum of new cultures. New roles of designers may facilitate the human context of sense and control in infinite reproduction with the assistance of new agency. That, I think, would be the most authentic role of the designer in this contemporary digital era.
References:
Lunenfeld, Peter. The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. Unpublished Electronic manuscript. January 2009
Lunenfeld, Peter. The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. Virtual Lecture from Los Angeles, CA and Discussion in Raleigh, NC. January 29, 2009
Saffo, Paul. The Place of Originality in the Information Age. Design Culture. 1997
Ezer, Oded. Work and Interview in The International Design Magazine. January/February 2009
