Last Sunday, I did a most unlikely thing. I went to see someone deliver a PowerPoint presentation. On a Sunday. And it wasn't raining. Usually, a sunny Sunday in San Francisco is not something to be trifled with, but at the urging of a friend I went to watch the keynote address for this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. The guest of honor was noted futurecaster and big-picture technology thinker of considerable esteem, Kevin Kelly.
Kelly is probably most well known as the founder of Wired magazine. But there are a lot of Internet-cred activities in his history. He said that he's been online since way back in 1981. As such, he was instrumental in founding The WELL, one of the earliest online communities. Another large part of his mystique is related to the fact that Andy and Larry Wachowski made his book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, a required read for all of the actors in the original Matrix film. Apparently, Kevin is also quite a fan of documentary filmmaking and one of his many blogs is devoted to this topic alone. Presumably, this would be why he was invited to speak at a film festival. The other eight blogs (!) cover off on all of his primary fields of expertise and interest, as well as the assorted personal factoids.
Nonetheless, the real meat of this here post was supposed to be his "State of the Cinema" address. And in keeping true to form, he let loose a big, honking idea on the assembled. And this thesis was a thought-provoking one. Essentially, it is thus: humanity is at a profound moment, a moment that will be defined by the migration of our written tradition to a video-based record-keeping and knowledge-transfer system. With a future that is being built right now, we will have a searchable inventory of untold billions of still and moving images. These will catalogue in some considerable detail the singular enormity of human life on this planet and its myriad interests. Much as our computers--and ourselves--already function as honey bees in a hive, our new and emergent capabilities with video become will relate our experiences as a giant digital-video tapestry, one that we all add a few stitches to. As this happens, we will concurrently also be developing a more efficient method for sharing the aggregated knowledge of humanity.
This is not unprecedented. Some hundreds of years back, human knowledge transfer went through a profound shift from an oral tradition to a written one, from "orality" to "literacy," as he would have it. This transition period was accelerated dramatically by the invention of the printing press. It was also expanded systematically over the years. This great epoch is currently reaching its fulcrum of utility with the seemingly infinite search and storage capacities afforded by the Internet. But this capacity is also one of the primary drivers in the shift Kelly is predicting. Given that the search, storage and distribution functionality of the Internet is now paired with the inherent profundity of literally billions of cameras photographing so much of our world so often, we will all essentially be working on the discrete components of one giant flippin' movie. Or, as Kelly put it in a related interview.
"I'd say we're in the Gutenberg shift; that is, a shift of a similar scale as was the transfer from oral culture to a literate culture based around text, and now we're going from that to this culture based around moving images. Which has been happening for a while, but now it has been accelerated with new levels of tools. We're going from being the People of the Book to being the People of the Screen."
This begs an obvious, but tough, question. And for once I was glad to hear someone other than myself stand up and ask it. If we are migrating our history and traditions to video, then what concurrent effect will this shift have on humanity? Moreover, is this shift even a good idea? We can look backwards and see that the printing press led directly to a period of such radical knowledge expansion that it is known simply as The Enlightenment. But we cannot look forward and see with clarity whether a shift to video will have a similar effect. Or if it will turn us all into future-world Beavis and Butthead clones. What we do know? We know that books (and reading) work as a means of accurately relating large-scale truism. We know that video also can work in this capacity. But we also know that we don't always demonstrate a tendency to use it for the highest and best goals of humanity. Ultimately, our experience with video is still too new, and our tools too primitive, to consider our video-driven future and to know how that experience will change the way we use our brains.
Mr. Kelly didn't pretend to know the answer to that one either, but he did mention that there were pre-enlightenment scholars who lamented the loss of the oral tradition. That these fine folk felt--and perhaps with some degree of accuracy--that there was a nobility to the spoken word. Being a good storyteller and communicator was an essential tool of scholarship. Moreover, they lamented that this oral capability would slowly die off if the written word was elevated to the top slot. Nonetheless, even with this history to consider, we can only wait and see how the next great shift changes the landscape of written language as we currently know and use it. Moreover we can only wait and see where this transition takes the whole of humanity.
I do, eventually, want a Holodeck though.
Daniel Turman
PS. Strange, but given that there was a videographer recording the whole presentation, and given that it was Kevin Kelly, and given that he was talking about this idea of emergent visuality, is it really too much to expect that someone is his camp would have uploaded at least an excerpt to YouTube or one of his nine blogs already?
