Death of Gutenberg Pt. I

I disagree with Kevin Kelly’s myopic exultation of visual media in his Idea Lab article "Becoming Screen Literate" in the NYTimes Magazine’s recent Screens issue. While he makes some keen comparisons between print media and visual media, he ignores the glaring differences that make visual media a more distrustful mistress. While the manipulation of information can be accomplished both in text and on screen, the ease at which it can be accomplished varies greatly, and usually to the detriment of historical truth.

Kelly suggests in his article that visual manipulation should be seen as a creative past time, a sport that can bring together people across distances and timezones. He views the subjective recreations, paraphrases and reimaginings of video to be on par with similar practices in text, saying “In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases”. In Kelly's logic, what could possibly be the ethical repercussions of a practice that can be connected to something as rich in tradition as our literary cannon? It’s easy to point to examples of art and creativity in visual editing and pat ourselves on the back for our inventiveness. But what effect does this harmless new sport have on our larger collective conscious & memory?

What Kelly fails to address is the dark underbelly of our progression toward screen dominance—the blurring of the lines between what is real and what is not real. . .Kelly speaks of a future in which visuals will be annotated much like books. The many textual devices that allow for tangential information and borrowed ideas to be cited within the narrative will never exist for visual media the way they do for text. Textual citations don't disrupt the narrative and don't create a false reality in which borrowed information is mistaken for originality, or objectivity. How will this be done in the lazy, fast paced world of visual imaging where the focus is on appearances and not on accuracy? Unlike in books the video editor's job is output. He is disconnected with the visual authenticity of what he is creating, whereas in books and newspapers, the editor is expected to check and double check that what is being put out is real...