A Semi-Scathing Critique of Glazier

I want to explore Glazier’s idea that we need to examine "the multiple possibilities of making in this [digital] medium...[emerging] from the study with wires tangled in our hair, pixels in our spirit, happy to find that physical interaction with the intangible that makes it making.” (Glazier, 179)* I see his point that we need to make within the medium, or “get into the guts” of it, and have seen the importance of that myself when I have done a lot of conceptualizing and pre-planning for an animation beforehand only to find it impossible to then construct within Flash. Despite this agreement, I do not agree completely with Glazier on the materiality of digital media or with his view that digital mediums are inherently good. Though the interactivity available in digital mediums clearly makes them material in some ways, I do not think that digital mediums have equal materiality to print text.

My main problem is that we as a culture are not critical enough of technology. We have almost always universally received technological innovations with open arms and our historic (and largely current as well) gaze toward technology has been one of subservience and blind optimism. The relationship between emerging technologies and an ever-growing monolithic capitalist stranglehold on…well…everything…is pretty clear. During the Cold War, Americans were essentially told that upgrading their car each year or replacing their washing machines much more frequently than could ever be necessary was a blow against communism. The people propagating technologies have always been the creators and producers of the technologies. Our lack of critical response has put us in a situation in which most people are convinced they need a laundry list of creature comforts to exist and to be happy, when statistics of mental illness or physical and sexual abuse would certainly point to the fact that we are not. It strikes me as very odd that Glazier includes a paragraph on “the present social condition of the disposable environment [showing] a troubling lack of focus on the material” in which he uses that position to ADVOCATE for digital technologies, describing them as “[givers of] alternative and multiple ways to ‘make’ the world” and raising said technologies to the height of necessity by implicating them as the answer to it being “culturally necessary…to broaden ways of seeing.” Though I agree that digital mediums offer new and important ways of seeing, I completely disagree that this means that the larger sociopoliticocultural vision will be affected in anyway and think his view reeks of the progress narrative. Stinkystinkystinky. Additionally, it is difficult for me to understand how he can suggest digital technology as a solution to “the present social condition of the disposable environment” and it’s “troubling lack of focus on the material” when, according to National Public Radio: “computers and computer monitors in the United States are responsible for the unnecessary production of millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In U.S. companies alone, more than $1 billion a year is wasted on electricity for computer monitors that are turned on when they shouldn't be." This is of course without taking into consideration the chemicals used in production that are largely relegated to the drinking water of people the computer-users of the developed world are permitted, and actively encouraged, to ignore.

Beyond this major dilemma, I am also just not convinced that digital media has the same level of materiality as a book or a painting. I can’t take notes in the margins of an animated writing. You need to understand, I take books so seriously, and treat them so intimately, that I make a weird, fuzzy distinction between "academic" books and “intimate” books and keep the more academic reads on the book shelf in my office and my favorite, most intimate books on a rotating media shelf in my bedroom where I can easily bring them under the covers with me. No animated writing smells as amazingly loved as the super old, leather bound copy of Sons and Lovers I found at a friend’s moving sale for a quarter. And I don’t want it to…if digital texts started to have smells I would begin to suspect the presence of something highly Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-an is more like it). I think digital mediums are important and should be explored, but I do not think these technologies are going to save the world and I still think I love books way more than I will ever like digital texts. I love books. I will defend books as an indigenous species, along with the mix tape and the LP. And you may wonder why I never use fonts in my animations...I'm defending cursive handwriting, too!

Edit: Also, I didn't think about this until I read the news today, but up until now, the internet was limited to speakers of languages that utilize latin-based alphabets. That would seem to suggest an definite LIMIT on different "ways of seeing" (if we think about languages as containing perspectives and ideologies) that has existed throughout the entire history of teh Internets, one of the primary digital mediums for experimental literature.


*I only reference the quotes I use from the text here because I am using a version of this article that I found on the internet because for some reason my Adobe Acrobat is not letting me open the files from e-reserve and other things stored in D2L. :(