Shiny New Objects

 

Social media is about beginnings—at least initially for young people. But once you’ve established a way of working and have a body of work you don’t have any really new (technological) beginnings. You can begin new pieces but can’t have any entirely new experiences. There will be new ideas in the flow, and those, at best, can be perfectly good beginnings for your own life.

All the social media platforms that will be created in the future will be an access point to new pop culture, but perhaps won’t be as critical to creativity as time goes on. If you've been creative long enough creativity becomes platform-independent. Words are just words and that is the medium for the message. I can copy text originally typed into Wordperfect 5.1 in 1994 and use it in a social media posting, but it's still plain text with some kind of text encoding that was from 30 years ago and the characters look exactly the same. Even some of the content I produced then seems shiny and new but both the text and the ideas are from a generation ago and it shouldn't matter if they are used in a text message, an e-mail or in a social media platform. The idea that the medium will somehow shape it into a different message is an interesting one and I'm trying to understand the distinction.

This also relates to AI which is from 70 years ago. In that case all the new mediums will shape it because it is shape or platform-independent. Text from 30 years ago then becomes grist for completely different messages.