Ramblings on a medialess future

The word media here is used to mean the plural of medium, not in the context of the mainstream media.

The proposition

Each generation sees itself at a media crossroads. I was part of the first generation of Indians that had free access to a liberalised television media landscape. Mine was the first Indian generation whose monied classes came home from school to watch Swat Kats on Cartoon Network, then Hey Arnold on Nickelodeon, then Nikhil Chinappa’s MTV Select, and later late-night cable-operator bootlegged broadcasts of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dhadkan. Simultaneously, in a world that was increasingly being taken over by computers, some among us became part of the Winamp -> Napster -> mp3 compilation CDs -> Limewire & Kazaa generation.

The generation after mine is one that has not only always known the internet, but has also very likely always had the sort of internet connection that supported streaming. Plus, thanks to smartphones and accessible high-speed internet, access to quality entertainment now extends beyond just a fortunate few.

The next will be the first generation that is not only at a media crossroads but also at the cusp of seeing boundaries between media dissolve. Allow me to explain. Even a text-based website like this one isn’t all text. It’s text + images + audio/video behind an interface (your smartphone, how the website is designed, etc.). Besides, your experience of this text-based website started long before you landed here. I have shepherded you through your journey to this point, starting perhaps with a 1000px x 1000px image on Instagram, passing through a ‘link in bio’, then a grid of images corresponding to the Stranger Fiction Instagram page, then here.

A strong argument can be made that Instagram is in itself a medium. You can surely argue that a well-designed Instagram page is an artform. Think of how different people you follow on Instagram choose to use this constrained form of expression. Most Instagram feeds are a hodge-podge, such as Stranger Fiction. Some have a uniform aestethic. Some are primarily video-based, others primarily IGTV-based, others still primarily post stories. With Instagram as a platform, you’re getting to experience one mixed-media display per person you follow, plus the AI-generated mixed-media infinite collage that is your feed.

This opens the door to several possibilities. Lots of people have for a decade been talking about the democratisation of artistic expression meaning virtually anybody (with means) can reach out to several thousands of people with whatever they have to say, without an arbiter deciding what is good enough to be published. But what this also means is no arbiter is required to define the rules of the game (apart from, of course the moral ones). We could soon be living in a world where the strict boundaries between books and songs and videos and pictures dissolve. Where every new thing that’s published is a medium unto itself, and everything exists on a continuum from plain text to open-world immersive gaming experiences.

The caveats

Now there are a few checks I’d like to place on my reverie-tripping. Firstly, there’s a real risk of it seeming like I’m painting some sort of artistic techno-utopia. I’m not. I'm pushing no value judgement on whether this boundaryless future is good or bad; in fact, technology is amoral. It’s how we use it that matters.

Secondly, I feel like I’m not addressing our attention-deficit age sufficiently. Having a conversation about how our online consumption of content is evolving without talking about the Attention Age is akin to the problem of the spherical cow in scientific conversation: the risk of making an assumption that renders the problem easy to solve, but the solution meaningless. Here’s what I see happening with our attention spans. We are beginning to express our discomfort with how little considered reading we do. We are beginning to wonder how we reached a society that both non-ironically and nonchalantly describes itself as post-truth. We are beginning to express our discomfort with how little control we have over our own brains: unable to watch movies because they’re too long, but instead watching Seinfeld reruns for eight hours straight. Unable to read a book, instead endlessly scrolling through the cesspool that is Twitter, increasingly angry with this person or that group before we lose faith in the world all over again and angrily retweet a 300-word paper-mill style editorial about the dismal state of the world. We’re reaching a tipping point with the amount of power we have given the world’s largest advertising companies over our lives.

That said, it’ll have to be a deliberate act of choosing, first on an individual level, then on a cultural level. Meanwhile, there’ll continue to be enterprising creative types who will vie for our attention, and the ones that win will do so by serving us new forms of content that break through the clutter, not only because of smart marketing, but also because their ideas are fresh, and their art satisfies that age-old criterion for good art: comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. Best case scenario, we all meet halfway and enjoy an age of wild artistic experimentation.

Thirdly, and finally, it’s impossible to talk about media and the arts without talking about commerce. And it’s impossible to talk about commerce without talking some macroeconomics. Without getting political, it’s safe to say we live in challenging times. Stripping that truism of its political implications would mean to just state the plainly obvious: there’s a great deal of economic uncertainty, record job losses, and therefore understandable risk aversion and self-imposed austerity. How do we talk about a positive future for the arts when people are afraid to spend their money? Here I will do something I wish I did more often: I will be cautiously optimistic. Downturns don’t last forever, especially when they’re driven by extenuating circumstances like a global pandemic. Besides, one of the many things this pandemic has showed us is the fragility of our intricately balanced lives. Jobs are easily lost irrespective of the colour of your collar; worse, they’re often callously taken away from those who need them the most. It has shown us that while those in ivory towers are merely inconvenienced by situations such as these, the financial impact is truly calamitous for the less fortunate. What it has also shown us is that the hippies were right: what drives us is connection to our fellow beings. That the worst thing modern society has done to us is alienated us from our fellow human beings, making us incapable of forming meaningful connections, yet missing them, aching for voices other than our own, yet rejecting any that say things different from our own. That once roti kapda makaan are taken care of, there is real merit to asking the question: what of the void within? Jai Maslow! It’s true that situations like these mean people have lesser money to spend, but what is also true is that they will continue to spend it on things that give their lives meaning. Art is one of things (Netflix, Spotify, an internet connection that allows access to YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and sites like Stranger Fiction.)