"Social networking, file sharing, blogging: in these environments, language has value not as much for what it says but for what it does. We deal in active language, passing information swiftly for the sake of moving it. To be the originator of something that becomes a broader meme trumps being the originator of the actual trigger event that is being reproduced.3 Th e “re-” gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting—have become cultural rites of cachet in and of themselves. If you can alter through the mass of information and pass it on as an arbiter to others, you gain an enormous amount of cultural capital. Filtering is taste. And good taste rules the day: Marcel Duchamp’s exquisite altering and sorting sensibility combined with his fi nely tuned taste rewrote the rules. Since the dawn of media, we’ve had more on our plates than we could ever consume, but something has radically changed: never before has language had so much materiality—fl uidity, plasticity, malleability—begging to be actively managed by the writer. Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How diff erent it is today, when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash, pumped into online text- mangling engines, spammed to thousands of e-mail addresses, and imported into a sound-editing program and spit out as music—the possibilities are endless. You could say that this isn’t writing, and in the traditional sense, you’d be right. But this is where things get interesting: we aren’t hammering away on typewriters. Instead, focused all day on powerful machines with infi nite possibilities, connected to networks with a number of equally infi nite possibilities, writers and their role are being signifi cantly challenged, expanded, and updated. Clearly we are in the midst of a literary revolution. Or are we? From the looks of it, most writing proceeds as if the Internet never happened. Age-old bouts of fraudulence, plagiarism, and hoaxes still scandalize the literary world in ways that would make, say, the art, music, computing, or science worlds chuckle with disbelief. It’s hard to imagine the James Frey or J. T. LeRoy scandals upsetting anybody familiar with the sophisticated, purposely fraudulent provocations of Jeff Koons or the rephotographing of advertisements by Richard Prince, who was awarded with a Guggenheim Museum retrospective for his plagiaristic tendencies." Kenneth Goldsmith
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:07:17 +0000
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