Here is another letter from my good friend, the ever wise, Michael Wolff addressed to young designers in India. But of course universally relevant.
Dear Reader,
A longer letter than usual, I hope the Editor will forgive me.
First, I hope you’re well and happy. And second, I wonder if you’re as discontent with ‘content’ as I am.
‘Content’ is one of those impersonal words like ‘consumer’ or ‘diet’. I think it means the stuff that we watch, read, consume, connect with, think about, know about and talk about. It’s quite a puzzling word. ‘Contents’ used to mean a list of what you might find in a book, and ‘content’ meant that you were feeling calm and happy with life.
Now it’s more likely to be used by a medic to describe what’s in your stomach if you’re being examined in a post-mortem, or by airport security to describe what’s in your suitcase.
In
the world of media it’s used to describe what’s published or broadcast. But
who’s is it? Is it intellectual content already in my mind, or is it something
that someone has the rights to, and wants to put into my mind? Where does it
live? For every programme broadcast there are millions of different ways in which
people see it. What one person writes is not what another reads. What one
person says is not what another hears. So who really owns that kind of content?
It’s now 11.30, on bank holiday Monday, the 3rd of January 2011. Three things, or bits or bytes of content, have already agitated my brain during the last 24 hours, and have lodged there. I’ve turned each one of them into content inside me – they’ve become some of my own content of the day.
The first was on Woman’s Hour, live on BBC Radio 4 and not on iPlayer, ‘Listen again’, or in a podcast. I listened to a live discussion that Jane Garvey had with Susan Maushart about her book: “The Winter of Disconnect.” Susan had pulled the plug on all the screens in her home for six months. She described the radical effect that this had on her family. It seemed to me that it had ended the isolated and solitary world in which her family members had come to live with their own screens and iPhones, and in which they’d forgotten how to share music and life together. It enabled them to rediscover their own community as a family. Susan also described her relationship with her iPhone, as a relationship of compelling, seemingly rich, but ultimately lonely dialogue with a world of virtual connection.
I was shocked as I realised how I too sometimes slide into a kind of sensual solitude, sometimes sharing my discoveries and experiences with others, nearly always after the event, and often forgetting what I’d seen or heard altogether. There’s far, far too much to know, so sometimes you have to get out of the shower of content. It’s a shower that can pour endless knowledge, information and drama over us, from billions of tiny nozzles, all the time.
Is the news really the news, or has it become a kind of editorialised series of press releases? Why do I feel so easily interested and almost addicted to the stories selected to be the news? Stories that often start and vanish with no explanation. Sometimes these are stories of global importance, sometime they’re stories of astonishing triviality. I can easily stop reading a boring book or walk away from a film or play, if I dislike watching it. Why do I find it harder to stop watching almost anything on television or listening to almost anything on the even more compelling radio?
For me the most distressing thing on television, probably in my lifetime, were the two episodes on the first days of the Iraq wars. Before the invasion we saw ‘Desert Cloud’, with its own logo and music. And then we saw ‘Desert Storm’ with another set of logos and music. Both seemed like episodes of a poorly branded commercial tv series – a profoundly tragic, and possibly criminal war, reduced to an impersonal and sententious soap opera. If this is content, then we should shun it. But I didn’t. I watched this grotesque ‘quasi series’, just as millions of Americans and others did, somehow immunised from the reality of the terror that was actually taking place.
The second thing that agitated my brain was some research, commissioned by ‘Free Sat’ and carried out by Exeter University. I was shocked at the increase in the amount of hours we, in the UK, watch TV; I was interested in the various categories into which we seem to fall by making the different kinds of selections we make in our watching choices, and surprised at the amount of time we spend talking to others about what we’ve seen. It doesn’t seem to leave much time for anything else. Apart from eating and sleeping, dreaming, making love and doing whatever we do called work, this research implied that there doesn’t seem to be much else to life other than watching TV and its content, and then talking about it.
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep
The third, and by far the most satisfying thing that agitated my brain in the last 24 hours, was seeing Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in a marvellous movie – The Big Sleep, at the National Film Theatre, with my daughter. Raymond Chandler’s writing and William Faulkner’s screenplay are extraordinarily brisk and finely tuned. The whole thing is a feast of talent, wit and style. Sharing this with my daughter, who often shares films with me, was a delight.
Even though I realise that so much of my life is, like anyone else’s, ultimately experienced alone, I realised just how much I value the helpless laughter and great excitements and even unexpected fears and other kinds of adventures that I have with friends. For me it’s only with friends that ‘content’ becomes valuable. What I think I know is all unnecessary weight to me, unless I can use it to be useful to other people. Seeing great art, like cave paintings or the work great actors and painters and writers, is only useful to me when it enriches my life and so my relationships with others. These days in particular, the quality of many films from around the world is extraordinary. The talent in the cinema now seems to me to outstrip the talent in any other form of art. But for me it’s always more powerful when it’s shared with friends.
On television too, programmes like the exceptional films made by Witness. The Witness call to action: “See it, film it, change it” is compelling and, as far as I know, their documentaries are only shown on Al Jazeera. But as moving and as important as I think all the Witness films are, they represent a minute fraction of what television stations put in front of our faces. Many more people seem to prefer to look back at a wildly romanticized past than to face some of the more shameful realities of the present.
When I read books, always in isolation, I feel both the excitement that great writing stirs in me and, at the same time, the claustrophobia of solitude. I’m always bursting to share what moves me. Just as with learning, if it can change and deepen my ability to relate to others, then I’m enriched and changed by it.
When
I read Gabriel Marquez’s great novel Love in the time of Cholera, it was a
transformative experience for me. That someone else in the world recognised
glass windows that could smell like soup or vice-versa was wonderful. More
importantly, the relationships that this book revealed and described were rich
and intimate. The whole book remains a moving and profound inspiration to me.
After completing it, I was left with the frustrating feeling that I didn’t really know how to know people. I knew better how to see them as content.
Sometimes you choose precisely what you eat, and sometimes you accept the hospitality of others without judgement or discrimination. It’s the same with content. Sometime you choose what you’re interested in and sometimes you join in with someone else’s interests.
I can’t remember why I watched The Sopranos. Did I choose it or did someone share it with me? Did I decide it was a masterpiece or did I agree with someone else’s point of view? It was the same with The Simpsons and Dr Katz and probably the same with everything. It’s only through sociability that content brings value into my life.
On reflection I do believe that all those three are masterpieces.
Choosing and enjoying your own intellectual menu in private is, I think, a kind of technology-driven epidemic, with pandemic potential, and a destructive new aspect of normal social life for many. It’s making social life anti-social. Pushing out into conversations with anyone, and constantly prizing my closing mind open into unfamiliar territories of the tastes and the influences of other’s self-expression, is far more enriching for me than simply choosing what I like, because I already I like it.
It reminds me of not liking oysters for many years, before I’d even tasted them. It also reminds me of the people I misjudged in my first impression of them, who then turn out to become my greatest friends. That moment when you decide that you’re really not interested in a programme or a film or a book, before seeing them, is a kind of self-denial that diminishes anyone. The price of missing a miracle is far higher than the price of trusting your judgement. Life is a dance without the right steps. Taste what you’re offered fearlessly and be willing to dance. I think it’s better to trust your open mind than to trust your judgement - a judgement that can only be created from your past.
There’s so much to see and do and eat and read, how do you choose now, and how will you make your choices in the future? For me, now, I‘m interested in everything, so I don’t do a lot of choosing. I listen to recommendations and often find myself with a programme or a book or a film or a conversation and then see what happens and what I feel. As for what I’ll choose to do or watch in the future, I think it’s like any aspect of the future, no one really knows what will happen, what technology will bring, or what kind of content there will be to choose from, even five years from now. All we really know for sure is that our planet will be warmer.
Will we all be able to have un-shiny big screens in our homes on which we can choose to display perfect digital reproductions of great paintings from any of the world’s collections?
Will internet daters have full size floor to ceiling screens on which they can have virtual speed dating, liberating them into a wider idea of social life and relationships?
Will Wikileaks spawn many new sites that use existing private technology publically, and bring about the irreversible end of privacy?
Will a new activism, using photography, television and participation, like ‘Witness’, restore biodiversity to a more inclusive world?
Will there be a ‘new generation of ‘un-embedded’ journalists who will bring an open mind to our press, if newspapers survive?
Will we become so obsessed with our interactive gadgets that we lose interest in anything other than being glued to their unlimited content?
Will we need social lives or will we expand by looking at other people’s lives in ‘series’ that become more and more intimate, and in which we can participate in the details and the outcomes?
Will the four-wall-screen in Ray Bradbury’s story, where there’s a permanent and continuous family series in which people live as permanent voyeurs, become a reality as TV sets get bigger and bigger?
Will content transform education and free humanity from being taught that our future is simply an extrapolation of the past?
Will there be an effective backlash against globalisation of content?
Will future media with a new quality of integrity change us and enable us to change how politics, business and work are transacted throughout the world, to benefit all people and eliminate conflict and poverty?
Will our variety of nations and cultures and languages endure, or will technology, content and our potential connection with other planets, turn us into a single peaceful and interdependent humanity?
I hope that many people will want to turn the current overwhelming volume of ‘content’ down, without losing the richness that education, art, creativity and enlightenment brings. I hope too, that many more people will want to focus on their personal fulfilment and on the enrichment of their own lives with their families, colleagues and friends.
Most of all, I hope that I, and you, spend less time sitting down, watching mass-produced content on a variety of devices in private, and more time talking and walking and being together making our own content.
Till the next time.