The Commodification of Text
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007Blogs aren’t that interesting anymore. Actually, it’s more accurate from a marketing perspective to say that blogs have become or are quickly becoming mainstream.
I feel rather lucky to have followed the earliest bloggers. I myself am an early adopter of the medium though none of my blogs were ever “successful” as success is commonly measured. They did, however, give me a chance to practice my writing and communicate with my friends and family through important times. For those reasons, I will likely always have a blog of some sort and for now it lives here, and this one isn’t going anywhere. I just don’t write here nearly as often as I used to on Sacking Rome.
Several trends are beginning to interest me. One, with the mainstreaming of blogs we are seeing new levels of text commodification. It’s almost as if the excitement around text itself, or at least prose, has fizzled out in favor of new mediums such as on demand video, games, music, and social networks.
There does appear, however, to be one new entrant on the text frontier. It’s what I call spasmodic, terse broadcasts of useless information that somehow matters a great deal. Twitter exemplifies this service. My description of this service is not to say that the medium itself is useless or not important. On the contrary, I was absolutely blown away by what the service represented - nothing short of the closest thing to global telepathy in a network-based emulation of spritual connectivity that we have right now. It is precisely the mundane nature of the messages on Twitter that makes it such a fascinating application.
But I digress. Back to the new mediums. (I use the Anglicized plural of medium here to distinguish the word from the loaded term “media” and to demonstrate fealty to McLuhan’s assertion that the “medium is the message.”)
Marshal McLuhan was more prophetic than he would have ever realized when he made his two most interesting, in my opinion, observations.
The first is that with the commodification / mainstreaming of text has come the next evolution of the human societal mind: post-text, or post-literacy, as he calls it. He says of this evolution
“we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”
So, he’s not entirely optimistic about this transformation but the new post-literate culture that he envisioned can be seen coming to life in our video games, social networks like Facebook with its viral fetishes and, offline, a renewed resurgence in religious fundamentalism and xenophobia.
The second is really an offshot of the first and it is that the dominant medium of society (or even any individual) shapes the cognitive channels of the mind (whether collective or individual). For the last 500 years of Western culture, text has been the dominant medium.
It is mind-boggling how quickly that dominance is being dismantled by Generation-Y and the stragglers of Generation-X. It’s very possible that Generation-X will be the last American literate generation. That is not to say that future generations won’t be able to read and write. What it means is that that ability will no longer be the defining characteristic of intelligence, education, or incentivized behavior in society. Thus, new patterns of thought will emerge in the next 20 years that are utterly alien to all previous generations still alive.
