the new tides
Monday, March 20, 2006
Bill Gates thinks we’re wrong about all this.
Perhaps better known as the founder and Chief Technology Architect of one of the world’s largest media companies, Gates also founded and someday hopes to profit from his ownership of one of the world’s largest visual content companies.
A recent announcement by Gates illustrates an interesting opposition in his own conception of the ways that his companies are interconnected with the broader culture. Microsoft, a company that makes immense profits primarily by selling to large companies (and to large companies that make software purchasing decisions on behalf of individual consumers) is successful, in the company’s discourse, because it enables and promotes individual agency and creativity. Where do you want to go today?
Meanwhile, Corbis, also pursuing a business plan that primarily depends on its ability to sell to other large companies, was characterized last week as functioning in a different cultural category from the capillary system and the tides: "It will be like it is with e-zines and bloggers," Gates said at a Corbis marketing meeting. "In photography, you'll have the whole array of stuff that's just up there free, and then increasing levels of quality. The whole spectrum is being figured out. We're at the highest-quality end of the spectrum."
And, presumably, at the furthest end from individual uses and interwoven cultural practices of the new media economy.
Built into his statement is the presumption that clients who actually do things with images share his vision of what Corbis-style quality means, and that the interconnectedness made possible by contemporary technology will not rearrange commonly accepted hierarchies of quality, taste and aesthetics.
In a culture of participatory media, are mass media becoming more “real” than in the past? The cultural influence of visual realism is deeply embedded, whether expressed in contemporary television genres, advertising campaigns for skincare products, or cultish photoblogs. But the ebb and flow of the realistic and the fantastic has functioned throughout the history of mass media and photorealistic technologies of representation. It seems inevitable that people who make things with photography will soon resist the neo-proletarian chic of the photoblog: “Too flickry,” they will say.
So the guidance we take from Gates is this: a sense of quality legitimized by institutions is a little less important, we think, than a sensibility about that which is hard, that which is easy, and the self-awareness needed to make the right choice between them.
posted by fogged @ 11:51 AM
