memyselfandhim

There was an interesting article in the Times last month critiquing the different mobile phone apps available for use in various museums in New York City. As the piece noted, apps could be incredibly useful for making a richer experience at a museum, perhaps being able to offer “historical background or direct you through links to other works that have some connection to the object” or “provide links to critical commentary.” But at this time the apps are largely inchoate.

Distressingly, the one app that seemed most advanced, The Brooklyn Museum’s, was also the most unhealthy, anti-art, and anti-intellectual. Among other inanities, like letting people make tags for objects, e.g.

“Monet’s “Church at Vernon,” we learn, is tagged “blue,” “dreamy,” “hazy”

it offers a “like” feature where you vote on an object you like by clicking a heart. And you can view how many “likes” various objects have garnered. It’s hard to think of anything less appropriate for a binary response than art, yet, bizarrely, this is what the museum is encouraging.

As Douglas Rushkoff pointed out in his lecture on Program or Be Programmed at the Institute of General Semantics Symposium (which I also lectured at) this past weekend, one of his “commands” for the digital age is “You May Always Choose None of the Above.” When so much of our lives is spent in mediated environments, we are forced to operate, and indeed, ultimately think, within the parameters of those environments. As is plainly evident, most of the user interfaces leave us with few choices, and often just two (like or dislike, yes or no) - life itself takes on the limited environment of a multiple choice test. What about kids today who spend nearly all of their hours in these mediated environments? What happens to an undeveloped mind that is more often than not confronted with a multiple choice or “yes or no” paradigm? It’s not a stretch to anticipate a paucity of creativity and imagination.