This posting at Design Observer by Momus has set me thinking about a lot of things:
… It would be easy to portray the progress of computers (this year they can do type! Now the web's doing radio! Hey, it's eaten TV!) as something rapacious, a sign of the enormous ambition of digital culture to be our number one metaphor for reality, our window on the world. And rapacious it certainly is, putting entire media industries out of business, stripping away craftsmen and middlemen alike. But that doesn't prevent digital media from exhibiting a certain nostalgia for the very things they're replacing. For instance, I've noticed computers getting strangely tender, lately, about paper.
Marshall McLuhan, were he around to witness it, would be nodding his head sagely at this weird digital nostalgia for the pre-digital. One of McLuhan's big ideas was that every medium, at the peak of its power, is inclined to forget that it's no more than a metaphor, a representation of reality. In its hubris, the medium wants to be reality. …
… Every new medium wants to be transparent, invisible, and everything else is opaque. … (Arjen Mulder, Mediamatic, 1999)
If transparency is all about power and ambition, opacity (the "revelation" that former media were in fact limited, metaphoric, media-like) can be winning, cute, full of flavour. For what is flavour but limitation? What is flavour but situation; the refusal to be everywhere, the failure to represent everything? The consolation prize for not being the Universal is getting to be the Particular.
… computers are freeing paper to be white stuff with marks on it. … The real thing, tired of trying to represent the whole world on its frail white pages, is currently having a great time just being itself. Paper has retired and is finally getting to spend some quality time with its family. And meanwhile we're paying warm tribute to its unique, irreplaceable qualities in the very medium that emulates and replaces it.
Computer-generated "paper metaphors" Momus links to: Pop-Up Computer, Parappa The Rapper, Paper Mario, Katamari Damacy, Pepakura Designer, Mojib Ribon, Hokusai Manga Construction Kit, OSUG. Five Star sites — hours of exploration ahead here.
