(Source)
Kevin Fanning is writing about the end of the Internet (or the end of the old Internet. The cosy one.) and he points tangentially to an article on Things Magazine that discusses the crack-cocaine of visual communication. They link up some sites I look at. Show some images I find half-familiar.
Things Magazine, of course, is more guilty of this than most; its posts provide such a glut of of things that I can rarely even scan them, let alone click through. And yet it does so with a certain knowingness that manages to get them off the hook. Given posts like this, there’s an almost reckless abandon in their dedication to do it better than anyone else.
I read:
The democratisation of creativity has the flip effect of vastly speeding up the amount of time we spend looking at things, appreciating the craft and the process. An image like this is gobbled up and spat out in seconds.
And I open the image. And I look at it, and I love it. And I realise that I have a problem. What I want is to prove this article wrong. But on any other day I’ll kill this tab, and never think about the image again. Never see it, never miss it. I have no place for things like this. This image deserves more than a two-second impression on a hundred thousand monitors. Such fine things should not be so casually used.
So I’ve hit this impasse — to close the image, nod at the article, close it too. Close whygodwhy, go back to work. Or write a half-formed piece about indecision which is not offering a solution, is merely a recognition that these sites I visit are like pleasure-inducing electrodes and I am the rat repeatedly pawing the trigger. And convincing myself that this is in some way doing something.
I move the tab aside and leave it there for a couple of hours. Then save it to my desktop, where I will delete it in a few days without a second’s thought.
This is why I love and hate the web. Even excluding all twitters about what you are having for breakfast, there is still so much to look at. But what of it is yours? It is the work of Russian scientists and New York graphic designers from the ’50s. Floating and without context. You have sweated over not one thing. And I am sweating not at all to read it.