Required Reading if your in on the Furture of Creativity
In college I majored in “Media Arts” but I studied film.
I had one 200 level class that included some of that egalatarian Donna Haraway cyborg nonsense but other than that it was all production, criticism, and industry studies.
It used to bother me that the name of my degree wasn’t “film” but the more I think about it the more it might someday pay off. What I’m getting at is that if art schools, business colleges, or journalism departments knew a damn thing about how the Internet is changing everything, they would be teaching this book.
Here are some of my favorite passages from Exposure, a collection of essays and transcripts borne out of the 2003 meeting influencers of media and technology in Helsinki.
Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain. Only a very few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials.
Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology in its stateliness. Technology advances in the lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real world con-
ditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will get further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch is permanent.
The MPAA needs to read this book but then again, so do artists:
…digitised information has no “final cut”. As we return to continuous information, we can expect the importance of authorship to diminish. Creative people may have to renew their acquaintance with humility.
I wouldn’t get too comfortable with your perfect, unalterable, and totally individual vision because these days there is always going to be some 15 year old kid with iMovie ready to bastardize it.