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20 Jul 08

Computer says get a life – and we have | Simon Jenkins - Times Online

Simon Jenkins ponders the seeming paradox that while music cd/ record sales plummet and prices for individual recordings drop as well, live concerts sell out at premium prices. He ponders other, related phenomena, too -- readings by writers, lectures, live performances of any kind: all seem to get more attention (and MONEY) than the products themselves.

He concludes and argues that people are willing to pay for what they want, and what they want is the real, authentic thing (i.e., person), not another technologically mediated simulacrum.

Two things: one, if he's right, this has dire consequences for visual art, unless the visual arts want to devolved strictly into performance art; and two, for those of us who are terrified of public speaking/ public performances, this isn't comforting news. Some of us like the internet because it preserves our sanguinity (if that's a word).

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article4276451.ece - Preview

socialcomputing socialtheory reality face_time business art_reception arts

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after
the internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. There
will be a novel way of downloading into the ear or eye, a new web phenomenon
or interactive device. Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone,
innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming
plain, even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s
answer should lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in
reality television, reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the
immediate, the active, the present, the live.
Recorded music became overnight what it had not been since the invention of
recording: publicity for live rather than live being publicity for
recording.
11 more annotations...
- What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the
  products of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for
  free. What can be sold is that genius in the flesh.
- Nor is the “rise of live” confined to high-profile music, art and sport. The
  fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music
  festivals.
- These are not financial extravaganzas and pay their performers little or
  nothing, but they draw big crowds to socialise and meet, or at least hear,
  celebrity performers. They generate turnover and employ people. The
  musicians and writers who are their staple input will soon earn more from
  live activity than from mass-produced versions of their work.
  - Ok, I do have a problem with this assessment: if these festivals aren't really making enough money even to pay the performers, what's in it for the performers? Elsewhere Jenkins suggests that performance will pay the bills, yet here he references festivals that draw on free talent. Will that talent make money "in the future" (how far off, anyway)? Is that something to bank on? It's quite a gamble, imo... - on 2008-07-20
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- when a poet’s work can be
  instantly disseminated on the web, the only real income will in future come
  from the gift book market and public recitals. The festival and lecture
  circuit, well exploited by retired politicians, may yet be many a writer’s
  chief source of income.
- Lectures – surely the most archaic form of public entertainment – now cram the
  London what’s-on schedules. Popular debating series such as IQ2 regularly
  sell out at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.
  - Just as with music (and with the Pope, in the next paragraph below), these crowds are getting all this entertainment and experience for free. So where is the business model? (And I merely ask because Jenkins points out that the internet's making so many products *freely* available has wrecked a couple of older business models -- such as CD/ record sales.) So if "live" presence is an alternative to the internet's culture of "free," where is the business model if the crowds we're talking about still aren't paying? Or, in the case of music festivals, the organizers charge the crowds (who pay for tix), but don't make enough money to pay the performers? Hmmm? - on 2008-07-20
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- Cathedrals are booming thanks to the fame of their architecture and choirs.
  - THIS I find very compelling, and something to think about. I worried earlier about visual art, and about how it can compete unless it wants to be "performance" art.
    
    But here's the deal: if the art is *housed* in a building that is practically a performance -- i.e., that attracts an audience by virtue of its famous architecture -- then the art can use that sort of "live" or "reality"-based popularity as its frame or as a stepping stone to access public consciousness. - on 2008-07-20
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- One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human
  communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross
  Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by
  campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by
  campaigning old style, from the back of a train.
  
  Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming
  around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that
  people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly
  present on their territory.
  
  The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and
  raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the
  letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined
  the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show
  business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it.
  Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh.
- The reason why public figures such as Clinton and Tony Blair can command huge
  sums for “personal appearances” is not that people are eager to hear their
  wisdom. That is available on the web for free. The reason is that people pay
  to be in the presence.
- Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while
  ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise
  what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock
  of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the
  market supplies them.
  
  I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They
  crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see
  those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want,
  they will pay for.
- where is the money being made?
  For that’s where we should be”.
- The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology
  but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood. Live is live.

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Computer says get a life – and we have | Simon Jenkins - Times Online

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