The Art of Life in the Age of Digital Reproduction

While not a member of the Net Generation (the 88 million Millennials for whom social networking is a birthright) myself, I have many friends and co-workers who qualify, and I am constantly baffled by their ease and eagerness to narrow- and broadcast their lives through digital media and with post-privacy transparency. The audience size doesn't matter, it can be narrow or broad, but cast it must be, even if it is often mundane. And yet, it is one of the ironies of such "ego-casting" that the status updates, which become critical life signs, the activity metrics of one's public life, do not begin with "I" but mostly appear in third person on Facebook and Twitter and the likes. This is because all these outlets treat the amateur publisher as a dramatic person per se: "Anthony is happy." – "Tim is working on an economic stimulus plan." – "Sarah loves Tea Leaf Green." When the Net Geners aggregate their social media publishing output into one FriendFeed, the effect becomes fully obvious: here we have the constant flux, the permanent Now as manifest and yet as fragmented as it can be. "It ain't why, why, why, it just is," Van Morrison sang, and another famous Irish artist, James Joyce, based on the concluding free-flow monologue of his Ulysses, would likely agree with the inevitability of "the river of life" as a never-ending "stream of consciousness" that affirms nothing but the fact that one is alive: "Yes."

For the Net Geners, the stories of their lives become more important than the lives lived. It is not the experience itself, it is what they can tweet, blog, Flickr about it. An event has not happened if it is not being shared. The narrative of life is the narrative of life. Life is an ongoing drama that must be dramatized. Engagements announcements via Facebook relationship status changes, travel itineraries via Dopplr, rants via blogs, moods and emotions via Twitter, instant gratification via GPS apps – or all of that cross-posted and mutually amplified across different locations and time zones, onto desktop and handheld. The seamless and fully immersive conversation is an imminent act of self-branding – what you click is what you get.

A few months ago, Emily Gould, who had made herself a name as Digital Demise Cassandra with her exhibitionist account of web exhibitionism in the New York Times Magazine ("Exposed"), wrote a piece for Technology Review in which she sought to contrast new media author Clay Shirky with Walter Benjamin, two brilliant thinkers from very different generations: a daunting task because the relationship is "complicated," as both of them would probably state on their respective Facebook pages. Gould used the bold juxtaposition to depict a fairly pessimistic picture of the Net Geners as a cohort of hyper-connected individuals who are ultimately blogging alone. In her eyes, Shirky is an Internet triumphalist who is far too optimistic about the social web's implications on our social lives: "You get the sense […] that he's somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage"

Tellingly, she finds Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1936, much more relevant for the assessment of today's "new age of technological reproducibility." Benjamin writes: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. […] One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." Gould concludes that "Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ('Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!'), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on – talking, being introduced to new people by friends – are threatened."

She misses the point though. While Benjamin rightly observed that the mechanical reproduction of a piece of art may lead to the decline of its 'aura,' the mechanisms of the social web propel the exact opposite: they grant a 24/7 continuum of time and space, an ever-lasting, ubiquitous (tele)presence that has perfected our ability to constantly produce 'aura' rather than destroying it. The web has democratized content, and art has made way for the art of life. When the Net Geners spill their beans through digital means, they are all about 'aura:' the allure of a life told in real-time, as a highly interactive application that turns all input instantly into output and renders the actual obsolete in favor of the staged, eventized, and narrated. Someone once said the US went directly from barbary to decadence without civilization. Similarly, one could say that the Net Geners go from experience directly to expression without reflection – it is indeed a read/write web. Context trumps content, and the appeal of social trumps everything.

Is that a negative? Who knows. What's certain is that Twitter, Facebook, and et al have inexorably altered the culture of human interaction. It will take future generations to craft a fair judgment – and ultimately, it may not even matter. In the meantime, it is helpful to assume that "Everything Bad Is Good for You" (Steven B. Johnson). Chances are you have no choice. If you want to have a life in this new "Age of Digital Reproduction," you better get your own personal social media platform in place.

Also read: Steven Levy on "The Burden of Twitter" in this month's WIRED