The relationship between the individual and popular culture in the internet age is almost unrecognizable when compared to just a couple decades ago. If you could personify those relationships and put them in a family photo, the neighbors would all speculate as to whether the pre-internet age slept with the gardener or the postman.
It used to be that if you wanted to create or consume something there were certain gatekeepers you had to engage. Music, movies, stories, and visual arts had to be obtained from an official source, there was a physical representation of the thing that you owned, it could be shared, but only with one person at a time and at the cost of you not having the thing yourself.
If you wanted to create something and get it to the masses, you had to engage those very same gatekeepers to ask them if they approved of your creation and were willing to pass it along. This process was slower and more bureaucratic, it kept people out of the process who might have otherwise created wonderful things. It also meant that others were often involved in the crafting of any consumer product, art became a product of committee creation.
While those processes still exist today, their power is diminished. Anyone with a computer or a smart phone and a connection to the internet can create anything they want. You are limited only by your own imagination and your ability and willingness to dispense the time and effort to make something. Most of us in the first world have access to the technology and distribution paths to make and spread our creations to a larger audience than we could have previously imagined. Once created, your movie, book, image, or rambling think piece article can be shared instantly with thousands, sometimes millions of people. It really is astonishing how quickly you can go from zero to warp nine.
Case in point, when I was roughly ten years old I used to write and draw little comic books made from folded sheets of paper stapled together. Those comics were hand drawn, unique works, only one in existence. When I wanted to share them with my friends I’d have to physically carry them from one to the other, watching their faces alight with entertainment or, more often, bemused disappointment. In twenty years there are roughly ten people who have seen them (thank Krom). I simply didn’t have the tools to get those creations to any larger audience than those at my immediate disposal.
Things have changed tremendously in the intervening time. As an example of the evolution of our interconnectedness see the below image.
If you’ve spent any time on the internet, and I have reason to believe that you have, you’ve seen similar images, they’ve been all over the place lately. More commonly images of dogs, the aggressor exclaiming bare-toothed ‘borks’ and their scared companion sheepishly expressing their fright. They are silly, empty-calorie entertainment.
A combination of meme browsing, sleep deprivation, and “Star Trek” inspired the above image’s creation sometime this morning. I posted it on Imgur (a popular image hosting site) as well as my personal Twitter and Facebook, then went about my day in the assumption that I might briefly entertain my family, friends, and a few internet strangers.
Then I started to see it reposted on pages I follow by other people with whom I have no connection. While my post languished in Imgur’s user sub, this new post had been shared almost a hundred times. A few hours later I received a notification from Imgur that the post had received enough activity to be placed on their front page, practically ensuring that it would be seen and shared by an untold number of people. Calculating the total spread at this point is an impossibility but I can tell you that at the time of this writing, the image had been seen almost 7,000 times on Imgur alone.
What began as a joke between my partner and me has now gone viral and is being shared and enjoyed by more people than I’ve met in my lifetime. While I don’t have the emotional connection to this small piece of lazy creation as I did to those early childhood comics or to the stories and articles I create today, there is a certain high associated with seeing something you created being accepted and appreciated by those faceless masses.
It was only after I started seeing others share it that I became acutely aware of another way the internet has changed our relationship with art (as loosely as I use the term in this instance). Those poorly drawn comics of my youth had my name on them, even if they didn’t, I was handing them to people personally. There was no question of ownership. In the case of the above image, those first shares were unassociated with me, the poster copied the image from the source to their computer and reposted it, there was no link to my Imgur submission, no way to tie it back to me. It was a sheer coincidence that I even knew, a friend let me know they had seen it elsewhere, and I’ll admit that for a brief moment I was a little hurt.
I had so quickly lost control of a creation. It had entered the wild west of the internet, I had opened Pandora’s box, and there was no way to regain any sort of control. The pain was brief, this image is in no way a representation of my best creative efforts but I learned a valuable lesson about protecting my work, about ensuring that I receive credit for the things that I create, at least those works that are important to me. Had I had any foresight before posting, I might have marked the image with some signifier that it was mine so that even when it was shared sans any link back to me, there would be evidence of my involvement.
I’m reminded of a short story by Andy Weir entitled “The Egg.” Over the years I’ve encountered this story online a handful of times, there are visualizations, short film adaptations, and copy/pastes. Due to Weir’s recent fame for authoring “The Martian” it’s moderately common knowledge that he wrote this short story as well, but prior to the release of the novel I had read and enjoyed his story several times without the knowledge of his involvement. Such is the nature of the internet. While this vast, lightning speed connectedness has democratized creation, it has also made it easier, even likely that works take on a life of their own. They become a part of the public domain at least in the court of public opinion.
It begs the question, should we collectively be better about including the source when we share something and, as consumers, should we be better about demanding the source be included? The answer to that question will vary from person to person and from work to work. Perhaps knowing the source of a meme like the one above isn’t all that important, but had the same thing happened with a story or article I had written it would have been devastating.
There are even those communities who would argue that origin or identity of the creator is irrelevant, that works should stand on their own and that in fact, tying them to an individual dilutes the work by association. 4Chan (a retched hive of scum and villainy, but also an incredibly interesting social experiment) in particular values anonymity over all other things, taking credit for a post or even providing identifying details like age or gender is seen as a cardinal sin. There is certainly a place on the internet for people like that.
But one has to wonder if our ravenous appetite for content coupled with our increasingly short attention span hasn’t made us mindless gluttons concerned more with the tastiness of a dish and the speed at which we can acquire the next one, swiping and upvoting, then moving on with no regard for creator or chef. How long before that attitude begins to leak into other works, visual art, film, and prose?
Moving creativity away from gatekeepers and into the hands of the people has increased creative integrity and opened doors to artists who otherwise might have been kept out of the game, but that flooding of the market also created a buffet of content. We no longer value art in the way we once did because it is so easily obtained. If we don’t make an effort to appreciate and appropriately reward those creators for their efforts, we may see the extinction of the independent artist and a return to the dark ages of content creation wherein the only artists able to survive are those who go in the front door.
Or maybe it’s just a meme that I don’t need credit for and I’m extrapolating unnecessarily. I don’t really know, but it’s something worth thinking about.