Toy, Mirror, Art
Progression through the stages of our relationship with a medium.
Welcome back, friends. Thanks so much for continuing to read along with me here. By my count, this is edition 25. And you are still reading! I also want to shout out to my friend, Diana Holder, who has been working with me on the editorial and logistics side of this for a bit and contributed to today’s article. Thanks for all you do!
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Alright, back to your regularly scheduled content.
Last week, we talked about the notion of “the song of the summer” and how our annual search to figure it may be more of a reflection on us than any particular song itself. We thought about some lessons to draw from our past, present, and future selves and hopefully came away a bit more self-aware than we started.
As we think about how music has changed in the past few years, one clear catalyst is the rise of the smartphone, and notably the phones that arose after the launch of the iPhone. The iPhone forever changed the music landscape by combining the full functionality of Apple’s MP3 playing device with the smartphone.
I remember when I got my first Apple iPhone, around the time of the iPhone 3G. My iPod (now called an iPod Classic, 4th Generation) had died the previous summer, and I had been without a mobile music player since. I was using a Samsung BlackJack as my phone and had been for a few years. While the BlackJack was technically a smartphone, it was the integration of the iPod into the smartphone that changed the game of mobile media consumption.
Today, largely because of these happenings and Apple’s great (and infamous?) success with their App Store, Apple is the most valuable company in the world.
At each successive step, as I would get these new devices, someone would remark, “How do you like your new toy?”
While today we look back and see the massive implications of the changes that were happening (and some people saw them at that moment), most looked over these developments. I held out with my BlackJack for a while, thinking, “What’s the big deal?”
The sentiment that these devices were toys didn’t last long.
For a while, each step in that chain was powerful, unlocking features that had not existed before. I watched each release with bated breath, just waiting to see what was next. With this particular type of technology, it felt like each release upended the world created by the last.
But, as time went on, I stopped paying as close attention to the updates. I remember in 2004-5ish when I first had that iPod; what a revelation it was to sync all my music and carry it with me. But today, we take that for granted. It’s invisible; it’s just something we all expect to have with us now. Late last year, AT&T was running a deal, so my wife and I upgraded our “older” iPhone 8 models to iPhone 12s, and while the camera got better, the apps load a little faster, it’s been a fairly invisible upgrade.
The place where it is still visible is how we can now create so much content with these devices. I carry around in my pocket the ability to at any moment shoot 4K60 footage (really fast, really high resolution) that even my multi-thousand dollar Canon DSLR can’t shoot. Not only can I shoot footage, but I also have a plethora of apps that allow me to stitch elements together to create stories. Then I can publish those stories for anyone to see.
These technologies, which started as a novelty, then became background noise. But by becoming commonplace, they have unlocked the ability for people to create with them that have not had access to the means of production before, enabling lots of new creativity.
This dynamic has existed for a long time but was first described as “Toy, Mirror, and Art” in Paul Levinson’s article by that name in 1977. In his article, Levinson examines the use of film since its invention as an example of how innovations proceed through 3 stages.
Toy
When most new technologies and media are introduced, the focus is on the media itself. Levinson notes:
…All new technologies may gain first admittance into society as court jesters and Trojan horses, which their physical presence clearly visible, but their potentialities poorly understood.1
One of the clearest examples I think we could all agree on is the Internet. At its inception, it was a way to connect information. Think a little further to the early days of YouTube. As the internet started filling up with not just text or photo-based content, YouTube stepped in to house the mass of videos floating around. If you’re old enough to remember those early days of co-workers or friends crowding around a computer screen, then you probably remember most of the content was cat videos or “fail compilations”.
…new technologies have made their entrances like the brash new kid on the block, in a flexing of muscle and raw technique that transcends and for all purposes becomes the content. In a sense, then, the most important content—or popular culture—of a new medium is the medium itself.2
So at least at the beginning, the novelty was the medium itself. We weren’t interested in the content, just the fact that we could all share in it together.
We’ve touched on how all media contain other media, and this pushes that a bit further: when it comes to new technology, in the beginning, the new medium itself is the primary content it carries. Only with time does the new medium begin to serve its real purpose.
Mirror
All media, in some ways, reduce reality. To make content out of our experiences, we must reduce the experience to something that the medium can share. Different media approach this work in different ways. New media may have, in the end, a more pleasing way to reduce reality to our current cultural and societal preferences. Still, at first, it is inevitably different from what we have been experiencing. Media entering the “mirror” phase of their life corresponds to their usage becoming ubiquitous enough that the ways that media reduces reality become acceptable to overlook.
Thinking back to YouTube, somewhere along the way, like a child actor who broke the plane into adulthood stardom, YouTube grew up and no one seemed to notice. Before we knew it, anytime we encountered a question of “How do I…”, we hopped on YouTube and found our answer. It was no longer (only) an odd collection of funny videos; it was educational, entertaining, and slightly better produced than before.
The superficial amusement and curiosity characteristic of the earlier gimmick films were replaced with the deeper emotions of fright, sorry, and relief—emotions that one would expect in a replication of a real-world interaction.3
The content began to connect us in a new way—no longer as a gimmick, but something that could bring people together in a deeper way. We had experts at our fingertips, but many times those experts were likely “average Joes” down the street. We found genres and groups that connected us to others like us out there, making the big wide world feel a little smaller.
Art
The final jump – and a stage that Levinson notes several times is not a jump that all media make – is their use in creating art. To make this jump, the ability to edit in the medium has to make it to a large enough audience for that mass experience we just talked about to become acceptable.
Levinson lays out how this lines up with several other paradigms of human development, including McLuhan’s own orality/literacy/electricity paradigm.
Levinson, being the forward-looking scholar he was, notes:
Other technologies, such as radio and television possess the ability to restructure reality and create art, but are limited by convention and economic pressures to simple reality–mirroring… Experimentation with video editing, computer character generation, and so forth may also be a source of potential art.4
The “convention and economic pressures” that Levinson notes can be clearly seen as we think about the rise of video editing with modern smartphones. As a person that could be considered a professional in video production, I can see how what culture accepts as “content” in many of the new video media enabled by smartphones is different from my earlier tastes of what was acceptable as a professional. To a certain degree, the widening of access to editing tools changes our expectations of the content, allowing for changes that bring the medium back into focus. No longer with art are we as interested in making the medium invisible.
I don’t think in 2005 when YouTube emerged on the scene anyone thought it would be a place for creatives and artists. Now, you can find well-produced, high-quality content on anything from product reviews to short-form shows to the weird world of watching people play video games.
So what do we take from all this? A few thoughts:
As we consider new media and feel the tendency to be skeptical because they aren’t serious enough, remember that all media start this way for the most part.
We can be mindful that, for those of us who are “professionals” in creating certain types of media, the broad access to the means of manipulation of that media will likely change what’s acceptable in a way that offends our tastes and that’s likely ok. All media that make it to the art stage undergo these transitions; we can be mindful of our own predispositions to “look down” on people who are coming to the game new.
We can be mindful of how these shifts promote and obscure different types of content in the way the rise of the daily newsletters “created” the need for pseudo-events to fill their pages, as we talked about a few weeks ago:
So the next time you feel tempted to look down on a new media that “the youths” are obsessed with, take a moment and realize how all media begin their lives as toys, waiting for their audience so they can be taken seriously.
And with that, see you next week.
Notes & Further Reading
Technically the article is behind a paywall, but I found it posted here for free.
Learning Cyberspace, 78
Learning Cyberspace, 76
Learning Cyberspace, 79
Learning Cyberspace, 84