People of the Screen?

It's been a little over a week since Kevin Kelly's article "Becoming Screen Literate"appeared in the New York Times Magazine. I generally like Kelly's work - he blogs about technology on The Technium, posting thoughtful material about what he calls his "paradoxical relationship with technology." His Cool Tools list is the go-to place for unusual gadgets. And his Wired article in August 2005 titled "We Are the Web"was one of the first to articulate ideas around what's since been dubbed a Web 2.0 ethos. He described the shifts between a static Web and a more social space, calling them a revolution. "At [the revolution's] heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing," he explained, adding, "And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history." So far so good. With "Becoming Screen Literate," however, Kelly seems to take a giant step backward! Why? For three reasons:

1) The article charts the growing prominence of visual culture and the lessening power of the literary, and while some of his observations are astute, as is his vision of the future when we'll have what he calls "full-blown visuality," news of this shift is emphatically not new. Described as "senior maverick at Wired," Kelly instead seems waaaay behind the conversation here.

2) Kelly writes that "we are becoming people of the screen," and the emphasis in his essay centers on the growing ubiquity of screens. But screens are not at the center of the revolution - networks are. We are becoming not just people of the screen, or even people of the network, but collectives of many networks. The power behind emergent media practices is precisely how they so easily mobilize people to behave both individually and collectively. Kelly told us this three years, but seems to have forgotten it.

3) Kelly also - inexcusably - presents the dramatic shifts taking place as if they are driven by some kind of natural technological progress, ignoring the nexus of political, economic and ideological influences that contribute to large cultural changes. He also leaves out the power base that maintained near total control over media during the last century, suggesting that it just took a while for somebody to figure out a series of tools for people to use to produce their own media. I know it may not be very scintillating to read about the history of media with reference to clunky terms like "ideology," but we face a moment when battles over who gets to manipulate images are being waged. I see these issues every day within the university context where the fear around copyright violation and the confusion around fair use are stifling both students and faculty. We have to address these issues together, and Kelly, as a senior maverick, shouldn't let us ignore them.