Page 162 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet162other form. My wife and I love the paintings he creates on paper at school, but storing all those masterworks has proved impossible.Easier to access, easier to create, easier to store, easier to manipulate, easier to change and easier to distribute are the great advantages of digital technology.Do my wife and I understand that shifting to a tablet will inevitably shape the kind of artwork that our little Picasso produces? Yes, of course, we understand that the medium influences the message. For instance, he tends to produce more rocket-related images (and fewer cat portraits) when working with paper than with pixels.But we are absolutely OK with these tradeoffs — and we can’t wait to see what kind of new directions his creativity will evolve in as his computer skills become even more pronounced in the years ahead.Little Hugh’s experience reflects continued societal shifts. Indeed, the advantages that a tablet offers for my four-year-old son (easierto access, easier to create, easier to store, easier to manipulate, easier to change, and easier to distribute) parallel advantages that other advanc- es in technology offer to other artists around the world. The value of more rocket-related images as opposed to fewer cat portraits notwithstand- ing, one would be naive to pretend that the changes wrought by the Information Age have always improved our overall culture.Consider for example how the rapid growth of cheap / DIY online video is changing thecultural institution known as Hollywood. Over the last five years, YouTube and other similar online video portals have grown radically in popularity, particularly with younger viewers. This rapid de-centralized growth may eventually threaten the entertainment industry on whichso much of Los Angeles was built. As Tad Friend explains in his recent “Hollywood and Vine”3 essay in the New Yorker:“Nowadays, YouTube is almost alarmingly professional. It has millions of channels devoted to personalities and products, which are often aggre- gated into ‘verticals’ containing similar content. The most popular videos are filmed by teen-agers and twentysomethings who use Red Epic cameras and three-point lighting to shoot themselves.And the platform’s stars behave in ways that are contingent upon a camera. For instance, they act. One of YouTube’s most visible shows—currently featured in magazine and subway-car ads every- where—is an action series called ‘Video Game High School’ that would be right at home on MTV.”So it wasn’t entirely surprising that some ofthe most eager participants at this summer’s VidCon,4 a conference celebrating YouTube, were those who’d been displaced from the platform’s dynamics: adults. Indeed, the conference felt like a May-December romance. Onstage at the Anaheim Convention Center, as the proceedings began, sat Jeffrey Katzenberg, the sixty-three-year-old C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation. In the audience were more than a thousand middle-aged spectators—producers, agents, ad execs—as entranced as Katzenberg was by YouTube’s smorgasbord of “snackable content.”Impact of technologies on the cultural landscape