Christine Rosen’s The Age of Egocasting features a compelling narrative of the great capacity of personalization technologies to encourage “some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption”.
I find however that her conclusion falls short of the promise of the study. “Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed.”
The fetish is convincingly linked to personal technologies in the article, but I do not find the definition of the peril quite as compelling. Rosen quotes early 20th-century critics of technology, while ignoring whether their vision applies or applied to the time elapsed in the meanwhile. This is very relevant, because what matters in this struggle is not whether we’ll be able to renounce the new technology (we won’t), but whether art will be able to transcend it (it may).
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin was for example warning of a negative consequence of cinema: severing the link between the actor and his audience. This understanding of a new technology was very valid, and indeed, the position of the actor has changed dramatically between theater and cinema. Rosen quotes Benjamin: “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.”
However, Benjamin did not foresee the creation of a new art form and of a new artist, the filmmaker, who emerged to direct this identification, and who introduced authorship in the movements of the camera. Art was created where technology had initially only offered a means of mechanical reproduction. This is not a weak point in Benjamin’s essay, merely a tribute to humankind’s great capacity to come up with art on the basis of technology that initially seems sterile.
That said, I’m not extremely positive either about the possibilities to create new art forms when not only technology is moving at a dizzying pace, but corporate entertainment giants are actively trying to shape our desires into a force for consumption. Actual artistic use of video technology has yet to prove its existence. I’m not talking about using video in installations (Bill Viola?): that’s something else entirely. I’m talking about an art form that is shown on TV. TV is a particularly difficult medium in this regard, because of its very limited capabilities, its cost, and the potential for financial gain which makes it so attractive to utterly non-artistic, purely commercial management.
This might be my main disagreement with Rosen’s very interesting egocasting concept: I don’t see technology as the main factor encouraging those age-old, ugly human characteristics, I see greed.
It might be interesting now to try to see how cinema showed it could also be art (nouvelle vague?), so that we could start guessing how personal technologies will be similarly repurposed. There remains the possibility that the individualistic component is fundamentally in opposition to the necessarily social nature of art.
The Age of Egocasting
Christine Rosen’s The Age of Egocasting features a compelling narrative of the great capacity of personalization technologies to encourage “some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption”.
I find however that her conclusion falls short of the promise of the study. “Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed.”
The fetish is convincingly linked to personal technologies in the article, but I do not find the definition of the peril quite as compelling. Rosen quotes early 20th-century critics of technology, while ignoring whether their vision applies or applied to the time elapsed in the meanwhile. This is very relevant, because what matters in this struggle is not whether we’ll be able to renounce the new technology (we won’t), but whether art will be able to transcend it (it may).
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin was for example warning of a negative consequence of cinema: severing the link between the actor and his audience. This understanding of a new technology was very valid, and indeed, the position of the actor has changed dramatically between theater and cinema. Rosen quotes Benjamin: “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.”
However, Benjamin did not foresee the creation of a new art form and of a new artist, the filmmaker, who emerged to direct this identification, and who introduced authorship in the movements of the camera. Art was created where technology had initially only offered a means of mechanical reproduction. This is not a weak point in Benjamin’s essay, merely a tribute to humankind’s great capacity to come up with art on the basis of technology that initially seems sterile.
That said, I’m not extremely positive either about the possibilities to create new art forms when not only technology is moving at a dizzying pace, but corporate entertainment giants are actively trying to shape our desires into a force for consumption. Actual artistic use of video technology has yet to prove its existence. I’m not talking about using video in installations (Bill Viola?): that’s something else entirely. I’m talking about an art form that is shown on TV. TV is a particularly difficult medium in this regard, because of its very limited capabilities, its cost, and the potential for financial gain which makes it so attractive to utterly non-artistic, purely commercial management.
This might be my main disagreement with Rosen’s very interesting egocasting concept: I don’t see technology as the main factor encouraging those age-old, ugly human characteristics, I see greed.
It might be interesting now to try to see how cinema showed it could also be art (nouvelle vague?), so that we could start guessing how personal technologies will be similarly repurposed. There remains the possibility that the individualistic component is fundamentally in opposition to the necessarily social nature of art.