Democracy ‘R’ Us

The cover story the April 18 issue of Dose (find the issue here) deals with the rise of the blogger and tosses out a few interesting statistics. For one thing, on average, a new blog goes online every second. And the blogosphere is sixty times bigger than it was in 2003. And the number of posts that contain the word “blogosphere” is 231,570… uh… 231, 571. Blogs are occasionally even on the news when they break a story that the mainstream media has missed. Most importantly, anyone who has access to a computer and the internet can start a blog. Hell, it took me three minutes to get one up, minus the content, of course. And I’m not exactly a technological wizard.

The improved economics of technology is bringing the average consumer greater and greater potential creative power. Just look at the iLife suite for the Mac. You can use the new iWeb to start up a blog or you can plunk down a few music loops in GarageBand and create the semblance of a song in less than an hour. And iPhoto allows you to futz with your pictures and fix them up quickly. Not to mention the power of iTunes that can turn you into a DJ in no time. (Compare lining up thousands of songs now vs. stacking maybe seven vinyl singles or albums on a turntable.) Finally there’s iMovie and iDVD that together allow you to edit your own digital movies and then burn them to disc.

Meanwhile, just look at what digital cameras have done to the cost of making a first-time film. Now you don’t have the enormous expense of film stock. And a decent home computer loaded with expensive software can do the post-production. So a movie like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow can be made mostly on a desktop. Meanwhile, seasoned but rebellious directors like Richard Linklater can go out and shoot a film with a hand-held digital camera and then add animation in post-production to give us the film Waking Life as well as the upcoming A Scanner Darkly. Sure, there’s some initial investment, but it’s nothing compared to the tens of thousands just to get film stock for a short feature.

But if TV’s your thing, there’s hope for you yet. Get thee to reality TV. There anyone can be a star – providing they have personality, or, if they’re unfortunate enough to be interviewed by The Daily Show staff, they don’t even need much of that. In fact, natural is good because American Idol would be nothing without the initial episodes filled with people who believe they can actually sing. Believe me, in the end they’ll take anyone on TV – even someone like me. After all, the cable niche industry just keeps on growing and they need on-air staff to fill those time slots. Mind you, the pay in cable isn’t what it once was if you had worked for the big networks.

What might occur to you, though, is that if you and everyone else is making movies, starring on TV shows, creating digital heavy metal, blogging their asses off, then who’s paying to hear see or read what you’re creating? Who’s the audience if everyone is suddenly an artist? (And – ahem – who’s going to pay me to write this?)

A more subtle point is why should we pay to have something someone else made when they’ve done it with a technology we feel we’ve mastered (or might someday master when we get around to it)? Why should we pay for the artistic creation when we are artists ourselves? You see where I’ve led you to now, right? It’s interesting that our reluctance to pay for digital artistic products is coinciding so neatly with our own access to that technology.

And where all this leads us is to the art form that I’ve practiced for decades now – poetry. Not only do poets have very small audiences, usually consisting only of other poets, but many poets (or people who call themselves poets) don’t actually read any poetry by other poets. They’re perfectly within their rights to do that. There’s no binding contract to know the history or current state of the art. But I’d like to suggest that this is the future of all the other arts. When writing was an elitist technology capable of dazzling a crowd, it was a vital part of culture. But with general literacy came the decline of poetry as a cultural force. When a technology becomes democratized, it loses its power to amaze. So I’m not suggesting that we are facing a dystopic future as posed in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” We aren’t going to suddenly find our great artists hobbled by restraints for the sake of equality. But they could well be lost in the glut of creative production as everyone gets into the artistic game.

Now, there is some small window of hope. Dose notes that only 55% of bloggers are still posting three months after they’ve started their sites. Meanwhile, the theatres aren’t exactly flooded with local neighborhood film productions. It could well be that people soon realize that creating things isn’t easy, and after the initial rush of appreciation, there isn’t much to drive you unless it’s the thrill of creation itself. Most people, on the other hand, just want the attention. Whether it’s a blank page or canvass or screen the artist has to face, the technology is there, but it should come with a label reminding you, “Content not included.”