MK
@mkay
MK
@mkay
Inexpensive and user-friendly digital tools for manipulating text, images and sounds — think Photoshop or GarageBand — have dramatically broadened access to the means of cultural production and blurred the lines between amateurs and professionals. But the question is not just how many people engage in cultural production — it’s how people engage.
... See moreHere we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance.
... See moreThe whole idea of social networks was networking : building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.
TikTok enables and invites the pointed, witty, playful, allusive, zany and endlessly inventive combination of video, music and text. But the creative energies of its more than one billion users are circumscribed and channeled by the architecture of the platform.
TikTok’s spectacular success in enlisting consumers as producers depends on making
... See moreFor most, the pleasures of digital cultural consumption are uncoupled from the exertions of curatorship. Today’s digital consumers are no longer being fed a limited diet of standardized cultural products, but they are still being fed. Consumption may be personalized, but it would be a stretch, in most cases, to call it self-directed — and it is
... See moreCultural production is ever more finely attuned to attention, which is ever more pervasively measured and monetized. Commerce and culture are locked in an ever-tighter embrace.