Feast of Fools

Your article on Creativity, Computers and Copyright reaffirms three concepts that are usually unvoiced, but underlie geekdom: 1 - That the geek experience somehow supplants all previous culture and creative expression. Previous measures of literary worth, the skill of a composer or the talent of a film director don't apply to new media simply because it's on a different platform. Hence piss-poor blogs, flash-rendered animals dancing to looped samples and ultimately the Crazy Frog. I have some suspicion that this reflects the relative youth and limited cultural education of a generation of engineers.

2 - That the process is more important than the result, cooler still if it involves a new computer and coolest if blue LEDs are involved. This is endemic in technologists - from the desire that every item in our house should have a network connection, to the idea that the order in which you click on things in a webshop is somehow patentable. Though that latter example sits badly with the Open Source crowd, it's bourn of the natural tendency of computer engineers to focus on the means rather than the end. Here, complex license schemes are the means and the end remains vaguely defined and as far off as ever.

3 - That creativity is an unlimited resource, only held back by the limitations of the distribution network and these damn tools. If we could only put video cameras in the hands of every person on the planet, and provide universal access to the results, thousands of new film makers will be discovered. This is a fallacy that has surfaced with each technological step in media - from satellite television to web blogs.

The only grain of truth is that we're steadily approaching the event horizon of a million monkeys - though as yet Shakespeare has not been sighted.

Keep up the good work,
Andy Toone

I agree en masse, though it's really #1 that caught my eye. The transmission medium of the internet seems to confer hilarity on jokes which would get anyone down the Comedy Cafe of a Friday night stoned to death with lumps of beer-soaked table. And despite what Andy says, I don't think it's limited to the relatively youthful; indeed, it's often the old-enough-to-know-better. I wonder whether the uninhibitive power of the internet is being taken as an excuse to laugh at jokes we would otherwise have more taste/self-respect than to be seen to find funny. Or is it actually that people switch off their taste mechanisms in some way when confronted with e-media? After all, the correct responses have not yet been ingrained into society.

It does feel to me like a juvenile thing. Almost all cultural expression on the internet is childish*, and there's a definite sense of teenage rebellion about it - with the added overwhelming crowd conformism that teenagers tend to want as well. Which is all very well when the user groups are made up of twelve-year-old girls with pink LiveJournals, but the effect it has on perfectly sophisticated adults is just amazing. Put it on the internet and people's internal censors just seem to disappear. The papers go on about chatrooms, but what about the web, where rathergood.com won a Webby and hordes of discerning fangirls and boys spend hours reading fiction that wouldn't get published in Reader's Digest?

That sounds painfully snobby, but I really don't understand why it's OK to rubbish the dregs of lowest-common-denominator culture offline and celebrate it online. I'm not saying you can't like it; nobody's got immaculate taste and mine is bloody awful. Just don't talk about it like it's cool.

*I said almost, don't start.