Glass Generation
There's never been a phrase more evergreen than McLuhan's "the medium is the message." The tools and technologies that extend our bodies and minds are the vessels for the things we make, and take on the shape of that vessel. Even though we have a tendency to decamp from other technologies and sometimes completely abandon them, they are still effective tools for making "messages". The key to any good technology is its capacity to be generative (e.g. building blocks, pencils, paper)
Electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets are not generative by nature as they do too many things and have a proclivity to distract rather than focus. As an artist, I see electronic devices as more of a secondary processing tool to apply random elements and to inject certain unique messages inherent in the digital medium. However, the primary elements might be paper and three colors.
Every new work now incorporates digital tools at some level and sometimes the final product will be digital even though the original plan was analog, with the original relegated to a study or maquette. Sometimes the digital version serves as the maquette for works done with traditional materials. Digital devices have increased the creativity quotient exponentially, but not without certain trade-offs.
The interesting thing that we may never think about while using electronic devices is the tactile experience, and how it may affect cognition. I find I read differently when holding an iPad for some reason: it is heavy and rigid, not light and flexible. When reading on a computer screen I am manipulating a mouse, which is less of a distraction, but since I can type more efficiently on a physical keyboard, I have a tendency to write simultaneously as I am reading. This happens less on a tablet for obvious reasons; typing while holding a heavy slab is almost ridiculous in its poor usability. (Tablets will need to be completely voice-activated to make them more usable as an input device)
The digital realm is unique in that it lacks tactile depth and texture. There are ways to simulate the experience of texture in the brain by fooling it, but there is no substitute for the tactile. The piano is tactile, but a facsimile of one less so. Touching a keyboard on a glass surface does not remind me of a physical keyboard, although I can conjure it in memory at will. Glass as a material when made into a flat surface serves as a barrier: Like a window, we can see out of it but we don't feel temperature or moisture of the air and also functions as a noise suppressor. While completely transparent, glass is making other things more opaque, as we may experience on a tablet device. We understand music in a different way if our only piano keyboard is a piece of glass and a sample of a sound, as opposed to a heavy key that requires energy to press. How the world is displayed before our eyes is never the complete picture for our brain, as it needs the sense of touch.
Photographs are a simulation of texture, but a photograph of a rough surface can only artificially conjure the tactile experience in the brain, in the same way that a visualization of an orange can conjure the memory of its flavor. Digital devices only offer second-hand access to the sense of touch or texture. You can see texture in a photograph, but the action chain is never complete, regardless of the resolution, or if you are tricking the brain with 3D glasses. (Again, glass is a barrier)
Digital devices also change the way we use our biomorphic nature: piano keyboards work best if both hands are used, both in the sense of being more facile and giving the mind complete horizontal access to musical phenomena and understanding. Making music on a tablet using swiping gestures (which are admittedly generative in their own way, and can produce their own "messages"), is an uncanny feeling, similar to shouting at someone through a pane of glass, and having to gesticulate to get your point across. While you can use both hands on a tablet it is still a small device (20% of the size of an 88-note keyboard) and regrettably may be reducing the understanding of music accordingly.
As a musician, I am always ready to move on in terms of the instruments that we use to make our art, and I am an ardent fan of lots of new music that have parted ways with the traditional piano. I am forever conjoined with physical instruments, but have no emotional or nostalgic feeling for them (at least as of yet). I can move on to electronic music and come back to them anew and feel the unique power of them.
Young children have really become entranced with tablet computers, which is not surprising. They have almost the same physicality as a hardcover children's book: relatively large and very thin with lots of pictures--but they cost 100 times more. While the current meme may be that they are the "'iPad Generation", inequality makes this supposed technological epoch less of a possibility. Until tablets are as affordable and accessible as children's books, they will not be a milestone, and it is not likely given the ecological implications: Electronic devices are resource hogs and take lots of energy to produce, and have a short lifespan. Books and paper were panned as "tree killers", but pale in comparison to the insult to the planet electronic devices produce. Paper books have a natural ubiquity, and if you lost your copy you could probably get it at the library. While digital media is becoming more resilient as its redundancy (back-ups) increase, DRM (digital rights management) will keep accessibility under glass, which again redounds to the idea of glass being a barrier to full expression in one's domain.
It's interesting that when you search "tablet generation" or "iPad generation", the top hits are for the latest generation of the device. Young children are in some ways caught in a palindrome or synchronicity of technological evolution, that is essentially all artificial and a complete coincidence, but is wildly portentous, and a collision of medium and message. It is perhaps the first sign of the singularity, where humans and machines easily consort with one another.
So far we have not been able to stanch technological progress, and a new manifestation of "glass" is on the horizon. Google Glass will be both a new vista and a new barrier for society.
In another decade when we search "Glass Generation" we will get the same feeling we're in another techno-generational palindrome.
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4/7/2025:
"'Glass Generation' is a term, sometimes used interchangeably with "Generation Alpha," to describe children born after 2010, who are seen as both more transparent and fragile due to the pressures and information overload of the digital age."
