The invention of content delivery, pt 1

A while back, the con­cep­tual writer Kenny Gold­smith wrote some­thing really high-concept:

with the rise of the web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy

I actu­ally can’t find the orig­i­nal 2007 blog post where Kenny wrote this — the link above takes you to . But luck­ily, he refor­mu­lated it in July in a com­ment on Ron Silliman’s blog:

As I’ve said before on the Poetry Foun­da­tion, with the rise of the web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy. By that I mean, writ­ing has encoun­tered a sit­u­a­tion sim­i­lar to what hap­pened to paint­ing upon the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy, a tech­nol­ogy so much bet­ter at doing what the art form had been try­ing to do, that in order to sur­vive, the field had to alter its course rad­i­cally. If pho­tog­ra­phy was striv­ing for sharp focus, paint­ing was forced to go soft, hence Impres­sion­ism. Faced with an unprece­dented amount of dig­i­tal avail­able text, writ­ing needs to rede­fine itself in order to adapt to the new envi­ron­ment of tex­tual abundance.

When we look at our text-based world today, we see the per­fect envi­ron­ment in which writ­ing can thrive. Sim­i­larly, if we look at what hap­pened when paint­ing met pho­tog­ra­phy, we’ll find that it was the per­fect ana­log to ana­log cor­re­spon­dence, for nowhere lurk­ing beneath the sur­face of either paint­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy or film was a speck of lan­guage. Instead, it was index­i­cal — image to image — thus set­ting the stage for an imag­is­tic rev­o­lu­tion. Today, dig­i­tal media has set the stage for a lit­er­ary rev­o­lu­tion. In 1974, Peter Bürger was still able to make the claim that “[B]ecause the advent of pho­tog­ra­phy makes pos­si­ble the pre­cise mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion of real­ity, the mimetic func­tion of the fine arts with­ers. But the lim­its of this explana­tory model become clear when one calls to mind that it can­not be trans­ferred to lit­er­a­ture. For in lit­er­a­ture, there is no tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion that could have pro­duced an effect com­pa­ra­ble to that of pho­tog­ra­phy in the fine arts.” Now there is.

Ninety per­cent of me is so sym­pa­thetic to every­thing that Gold­smith says here. And it sounds famil­iar, right? Dig­i­tal tech has rev­o­lu­tion­ized read­ing, spun off all sorts of new writ­ing process, and poses the poten­tial to con­tinue to rev­o­lu­tion­ize writ­ing. I agree with all of this. 

It’s that ten per­cent of me — that part that thinks about the nine­teenth cen­tury more than I really ought to, which is also the part that takes analo­gies way too seri­ously — that can’t let it go. Not for the claims, but for the anal­ogy used to make them — 

web: writ­ing :: pho­tog­ra­phy: painting

— which I love for its rhetoric, its purity, its light­ning flash, but can’t accept as an his­tor­i­cal analysis. 

I think the anal­ogy can be fixed by chang­ing one word. Instead of “writ­ing,” say “pub­lish­ing.” Even though I know Kenny means “writ­ing,” that he, like me, is really con­cerned first and fore­most with writ­ing and less with other kinds of media, I want to say that he really means “with the rise of the web, pub­lish­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy.” Let me explain why.

First, paint­ing is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from pho­tog­ra­phy in ways that writ­ing is not dif­fer­ent from the web. As Kenny points out, the web IS writ­ing — an unprece­dented amount of text. The web is not only writ­ing, but writ­ing belongs to the web in a way that paint­ing does not and could not belong to pho­tog­ra­phy. For Gold­smith to keep “writ­ing” and “the web” dis­tinct, he’d have to define “writ­ing” in tra­di­tion­al­ist lit­er­ary terms he wouldn’t want to accept, or “the web” in terms that like­wise make it quite for­eign to text, and he can’t do that either.

It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that pho­tog­ra­phy didn’t only pose a cri­sis for paint­ing, but for all of visual art. That’s where Goldsmith’s con­cep­tual pre­de­ces­sor Mar­cel Duchamp comes in with his ready-mades. Pho­tog­ra­phy also trans­formed the­ater, jour­nal­ism, book­mak­ing, adver­tis­ing… There’s no rea­son to sin­gle out painting.

Like­wise, writ­ing isn’t the only kind of cul­tural pro­duc­tion that’s been upended by the web. Tele­vi­sion, movies, still pho­tographs, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion — every­thing that fits under the increas­ingly wide ban­ner of “con­tent deliv­ery” is affected by the web accord­ing to much of the same logic that the web has been affect­ing writing.

In short, “the web” is not a medium — at least not in the same sense that pho­tog­ra­phy is. It is a con­tent deliv­ery sys­tem, that not only rep­re­sents and repro­duces con­tent but also stores and deliv­ers it. For most peo­ple, this change in con­tent deliv­ery has offered remark­able change, but has not posed a cri­sis of the same sort felt by painters and sculp­tors and play­wrights in the wake of pho­tog­ra­phy. It’s not writ­ers who face a cri­sis, but publishers.

So, then:

web:publishing* :: photography:visual culture**

*in the 20th/21st cen­tury
**in the 19th/20th century 

Maybe that isn’t quite the light­ning bolt as Goldsmith’s orig­i­nal for­mu­la­tion, but I think it’s closer to the truth.

(See more in Part 2)

3 Responses

OldChinaHand says:
November 10, 2009 at 7:46 am
More to come in Part 2?
Are you really sure you want to con­fuse things fur­ther? I don’t think you mean what you think Gold­smith thinks he means.
But then, I’m not a pro­fes­sional writer.
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Linked: On The Internet, Writing Has Met Its Photography – Novelr - Making People Read says:
November 10, 2009 at 8:26 am
[…] full analy­sis is avail­able on Snark­mar­ket. I’ve no idea how Tim Car­mody finds things like this. Cat­e­gory: Linked […]
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The invention of content delivery, pt 2 « Snarkmarket says:
November 10, 2009 at 1:18 pm
[…] Kenny Gold­smith writes that  with the rise of the web, writ­ing has met its photography […]
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