Wasting Time on the Internet (16 page)

What I witnessed at MoMA was institutional critique, being performed not by artists, but by the museum's visitors. While I was there, I noticed something odd happening in front of
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
and other paintings in the museum, something that signified radical shifts in the nature and structure of the museum itself brought on by technology. Instead of reverently standing there in front of Picasso's masterpiece, scads of visitors were turning their
backs on the painting, snapping selfies, and uploading them to social media. I noticed that more visitors were paying attention to their devices than to the artwork on the walls. In every gallery, benches intended for the quiet contemplation of modernist masterpieces were co-opted by smartphone users hunched over their devices. While technology originally claimed to enhance the viewer's museum experience with one-way audio guides—those high-toned narrators walking you through the collection instructing you how to view the art—today technology works to destabilize the work on the walls. Instead of the official voice of the museum on people's headphones, now it's Beyoncé, NPR, Spotify, or any number of different podcasts.

This shift, driven by technology, is happening everywhere in culture now, from the massive open online courses (MOOCs) in higher education to crowdsourced knowledge bases like Wikipedia. In the museum, the artwork—along with the museum's once unassailable top-down museum narrative—for most visitors has become secondary to the experience of actually being there. The art on the walls is the pretense that draws people to the museum, but once they get there, they're elsewhere: on their smartphones, facebooking, instagramming, vineing, tweeting, periscoping, texting, facetiming—everything, really, except for paying full attention to the art on the walls. The artwork now often acts as a backdrop, evidence that proves to the world you were, in fact, there. Museums in general are alive and well—the Metropolitan Museum of Art reported a record 6.3 million visitors
in 2014—but the function of the space has been transformed into a social rather than artistic one: a town square, a place to gather, a place to party, a place to dance, a place to hear music, a place to eat, a place to drink, a place to network, a place to be seen on First Wednesdays and Free Fridays.

Back in college in the late 1970s, I was never the kind of person who brought high-end audiophile equipment into the dorm. In those days, kids would show up to school with speakers the size of refrigerators, chunky solid-state receivers, and turntables that resembled chrome-plated turbine engines. They would set this stuff up to be blown away—literally—hoping to re-create the iconic 1978 Memorex ad in which a shaggy-haired dude in dark shades holds on to his chair for dear life as a hurricane of sound coming out of the speakers threatens to blow him straight back. Inevitably, these people had mediocre taste in music; they were more concerned with how their music sounded than with the music itself. Being a bit of a punk rocker, I tended to go in the opposite direction, listening to crummy lo-fi umpteenth-generation cassette tapes and scratched vinyl, which I played on a cheap all-in-one console that had a turntable, cassette player, radio, and two bottom-end speakers the size of Pop-Tarts boxes. It suited me just fine. I was raised on the tre
bly sound of AM radio squawking out of transistor radios: for me, if the music couldn't sound great coming out of tiny speakers, then it wasn't worth listening to. Later, when CDs came out, I plugged a Discman into that system and the CDs sounded no different than my LPs and cassettes, which sounded no different than the radio. All I heard was the music.

Little did I know that in the digital age, my listening habits would win out. In an era when music went portable, music went lo-fi. In order for it to soar across our networks and quickly settle on our devices, music had to lose a good chunk of its sound due to digital compression. While most of us can't really tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD—particularly when played over a portable device through tinny white earbuds—not everyone is thrilled about this. For years, Neil Young has grumbled about our digitally degraded audio experience, complaining that even our CDs are compromised. According to Young, they contain only 15 percent of the recording information found on the original analog master tracks. MP3s take that down to 5 percent. He even went so far as to make it the theme of a recent roaring half-hour jam called “Driftin' Back,” which, like many Neil Young songs, is a paean to how much better things were in the past. “We live in the digital age,” Young moans, “and unfortunately it's degrading our music, not improving.”

What happened to the other 95 percent? It was knocked out by the compression it took to make MP3s tiny enough to fly across the networks. Uncompressed digital formats were
full resolution: you got 100 percent of the sound but they were unwieldy and huge. In the 1990s scientists witnessing the explosive growth of the web began working on a solution that would create listenable audio files that would be small enough to be streamed or downloaded quickly. They used a technique they called lossy compression, in which redundant or unnecessary information was eliminated (hence the technological etymology: “loss”). When you rip a CD to MP3s, the encoder that converts your disc is a lossy one, removing all the sounds that are either humanly inaudible or are so close together the human ear can't discern one from another. The compression is a sleight of hand, resulting in a venetian blind version of the song: the missing pieces are then bridged by your ear and brain's natural ability to fill in the missing gaps, resulting in the illusion of full and continuous sound. In lossless compression formats like FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)—good for downloading but not for streaming—the original, uncompressed data is re-created from the compressed version.

When MP3s were in development, the lossy technique was being tested on big, bombastic tracks like late 1950s Nelson Riddle–arranged Sinatra tunes. And they were sounding pretty good: there was so much going on in them that the missing information was unnoticeable. But one day, a scientist working on the compression algorithm was walking down a corridor in the lab and the radio was playing “Tom's Diner,” Suzanne Vega's sparse 1981 a cappella song. He stopped and wondered how compression technology would
sound on something this stripped down. He saw it as a litmus test for the technology: if an unadorned and unaccompanied human voice like Vega's was not noticeably altered when compressed, then anything else it was applied to would also pass. After some tinkering, it worked and as a result, the song earned Suzanne Vega the awkward title Mother of the MP3, presumably an appellation she never asked for.

Recently a doctoral music student named Ryan Maguire did a project called “The Ghost in the MP3” in which he took all of the audio that was removed from the MP3 compression on “Tom's Diner” and re-presented it as his own composition. Apropos of its title, it's an eerie thing. It's as if Vega's song was chopped into small pieces and then flung into outer space. You can still vaguely discern the structure of Vega's song but it's been disassembled and scattered, awash in faint echoes and lots of reverb. Shards of Vega's voice, interspersed with random digital glitches, come through loud and clear, then suddenly vanish without explanation. The overall feeling of Maguire's piece is indeed ghostly, like listening to the inverse of Vega's song or perhaps an avant-garde ambient remix of it.

Still, Neil Young is right: we're missing most of the richness from our listening experiences. But the surprise is that many people don't seem to mind. The marks technology leaves on our cultural artifacts—as ugly as they may be to some ears—become Proustian madeleines that plunge us down involuntary memory tunnels. From Phil Spector's 1960s Wall of Sound, to the chunky Fairlight synthesizers
in eighties pop music, to the recent blur of Auto-Tune, entire generations get hooked on these musical tropes. Jonathan Berger, a music professor at Stanford, has noted that his students actually prefer the sound of MP3s to higher quality formats because they signified the sound—they call it the MP3s' “sizzle”—of their generation. This particular sound of MP3 compression is as much the hallmark of their youthful audio experience as the cracks and pops of vinyl were mine. When CDs came out, the sounds of LPs—skips and pops—were often dropped in as both nostalgic and ironic gestures, warming up the icy digital format. Sometimes, CDs began with the sound of a needle dropping onto a vinyl record, a reminder that new technologies are haunted by the ones that precede them.

The MP3 is the latest in a long line of compressed artifacts and technologies. For most people, the pleasures of portability—remember Apple's enticing tagline for the first-generation of iPods, “1,000 songs in your pocket”—have outweighed the full-spectrum listening experience we've lost. Meanwhile, Neil Young tried to remedy his 5 percent problem by developing his own audio format and player called Pono, which restored the full spectrum of missing audio in a semiportable way. It was met with mixed reviews at best: one focus group in a blindfold test couldn't tell the difference between the Pono and the iPhone, and when used with headphones, the sound of the MP3-based iPhone actually won out. Streaming music services aren't much better. In order to deliver their music swiftly, they have to compress
it. Neil Young recently pulled his music from services like Spotify, claiming that “streaming has ended for me . . . It's about sound quality. I don't need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution . . . When the quality is back, I'll give it another look. Never say never.”
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In the late nineteenth century, visual art set out to shatter romantic preindustrial notions of coherence. In an age when industrial products were being spit out piecemeal on an assembly line, how could one ever again depict the world as unified? So, in his still lifes, Cézanne painted all sides of an apple at once, putting an end to the idea that the world can be seen from our—and only our—point of view. Instead, all objects and ideas are open to multiple interpretations, a Pandora's box of possibilities. The ante was upped by the cubists who, taking Cézanne one step further, went from one individual seeing an object from many angles, to the many eyes of a crowd seeing many objects from many angles. Their shattered picture planes represented a fourth-dimensional way of seeing, with all perspectives represented simultaneously. Theirs was a networked vision, harnessing the power
of the crowd as opposed to the isolation of the individual. In this way, cubism anticipated common computing ideas from crowdsourcing to “hive minds” and “swarm intelligences.” They also were inspired by cinema, in both its experiments with rapid-fire montage and its mechanical mass distribution of imagery. In his book
The Language of New Media
, the historian Lev Manovich has eloquently written about how cinema is hardwired into the DNA of computing. Alan Turing's Universal Turing Machine, for instance, was operated by reading and writing numbers on an endless tape, similar to the way a projector reads data from celluloid film. It's no coincidence that one of the earliest computers, built in 1936 by the German engineer Konrad Zuse, was run off of discarded 35 mm movie film.

Similar to the cubists, the Italian futurists began incorporating primitive forms of animation in their paintings. Giacomo Balla's painting
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash
(1912) shows a dachshund's feet blurred in a whir of motion. In fact, everything in the picture that is moving is depicted as such: the leash is like a series of ghostly threads waving multiple times through the air; the person's feet walking the dog consists of dozens of flying shoes; even the dachshund's tail is spinning out of control. Futurism celebrated motion-based technology, depicting frame by frame the speed of the motor car, the rhythmic pounding of the assembly line, and the
rat-a-tat
of the machine gun.

It's not a far cry from Balla's early twentieth-century oil on canvas depiction of motion to today's animated GIFs.
The GIF, like the lossy MP3, is a low-resolution format, known in computing terms as jaggy, named for the jagged-edged pixels you see when you zoom in on a lo-res image. Like flipbooks, animated GIFs are made by sequencing a series of still images, hearkening back to the earliest days of cinematic animation technologies like magic lanterns or zoetropes. The best animated GIFs are like pocket cinema, with narratives and punch lines, all unfurling in a matter of seconds, then infinitely looping. And because they have no sound, they have to express strong ideas entirely through visual images, the way silent films did in the early part of the twentieth century. Their brevity, too, has echoes of Edison and the Lumière Brothers, whose reels were often no longer than thirty seconds.

The animated GIF is haunted by earlier technologies like painting, cartoons, and cinema. Yet creating animated GIFs is a modern-day craft. Even today, there is no real shortcut to making a dazzling animated GIF, which still must be constructed more or less in a hands-on way. They're meticulously woven, frame by frame, much as they were two decades ago, which might help to explain why they're still cherished: the collaboration between human and machine has kept animated GIFs alive as a sort of technological folk art.

There's a theory that the moment something verges on obsolescence, it's also on the cusp of revival, ready to reincarnate itself into new forms and uses. For example, when the horse was rendered obsolete as a mode of transportation, it
found a new role in recreation. Or, in a cellular age, when everyone carries a clock in their pocket, the wristwatch evolved from timekeeper to luxury status object.
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And while magazines were once a source of information, today many have come to resemble highly produced coffee-table books, more to be browsed than read. In a similar way, just as the GIF was on the verge of being rendered obsolete by streaming video, it was taken up as an artisanal craft by a small community of GIF builders, who quietly refined them from a jaggy way of communicating information into an art form. Their jumpy lo-res frames had been transformed into lushly looping image streams, depicting a tremendous amount of rich information in an insanely compressed form. Whereas in the beginning they were used to convey actual messages, that task had been usurped by streaming video and Flash, so they were free to become playful and artistic, functioning very much the way that image macros do—visual devices for quick and punchy commentary.

It was at this point that they caught the attention of Tumblr founder David Karp, who was so dazzled by the new generation of animated GIFs, that he opened up his platform to them, spurring an explosion of them. Today, Tumblr claims to have twenty-three million animated GIFs uploaded to it each day, and Facebook, which recently started supporting the format, says that five million animations daily
are sent through its messaging app. Like emojis, they can convey a great deal of information in a compressed format, the proverbial picture worth a thousand words.

An animated GIF is what McLuhan termed cool media. All forms of low-resolution imagery are cool; all forms of high-resolution imagery are hot. Hollywood is hot; animated GIFs are cool. A hot medium does a lot of the work for you. In the cinema, you're presented with gigantic images in the highest resolution available. McLuhan claimed that as a result cinemagoers are passive spectators; with hi-res there's not much left to the sensual imagination. All the blanks are filled in for you; you just have to sit back and enjoy. Narrative complexities are carried particularly well in hot media. A sweeping story coupled with beautiful cinematography displayed on a gigantic screen is what we think of as an optimal film-going experience.