Catch a falling mag and put it in your pocket

[imomus]

It's amazing how quickly iPhone / iPod Touch apps are evolving. It reminds me of the early days of Macintosh, when everyone was coming up with new extensions and control panels (they'd load across your screen with app-like icons, or billboards popping up on a highway), or the early days of the web, when there seemed to be a new gimmick for loading a webpage every week (for a while we were all making our pages flash like lightning as they loaded up). Apps, though, have the potential to be much more useful than either.



Already, musician friends are thinking in terms of iPod apps the way they once might have thought of releasing albums on labels. Who needs a label when an app could be a worldwide delivery system for people interested in your music? Or how about keeping up with Japanese magazines? I've already mentioned Nakatree Viewer, a free app that lets you look at the paper ads for magazines that hang in Japanese subway cars.



Nakatree Viewer began as the ad sheets themselves (typically showing a modified version of the mag's latest cover), then added pop-up QR codes allowing you to access some of the content of the magazines. Now there's talk of the Viewer actually taking you to online versions of the magazines, either reduced versions (like Courrier Lite, a standalone application for one mag) or full ones.



At a time when magazines are dropping like flies, giving them a new distribution platform is giving them the chance of new life. Whether the iPhone is the ideal reading environment for magazines is another matter. I have a digital subscription to The Wire, but prefer to read it on my big computer, or on paper. But when Apple releases its iPhone-OS tablet computer -- rumoured either for next month or early next year, depending on who you believe -- who knows?



Now Nakatree Viewer is joined by a similar app, Pick-Up Museum Cafe, which allows you to see posters for the art, design and museum shows currently on in Japan. The shows themselves, of course, will never be shrunk down to pocket-size. Or will they?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Technology does not cause the problem; it is inert and without motive or intention. If there is a problem, then it is undoubtedly 'caused' by a number of incremental factors; advertising, unconscious ideology, etc. If people don't want to grow up and take responsibility for themselves then they won't, and the State will provide them with all the distractions that they need to not have to. I guess this comes down to the individual level.

Again, sorry, I realise I'm not saying anything you probably haven't heard a thousand times before. Is it boring and old-hat to talk of the State now? Are we 'over' that one now?

Incidentally, what do you mean by a cliche? Is a a bad thing to pull out a cliche? If we cannot talk cliches, what does this imply for discussion?

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Well I think the problem is that we're talking about technology and you're dragging out the old luddite arguments about technology stifling "real" creativity, or whatever. I mean, even if you say you're not making that argument, it certainly sounds like are. But I think it's an entirely different topic altogether. People can and do produce conventional crap under the guise of creative genius in all media, high-tech or low-tech. So what's your argument? That high-tech gadgets exacerbate/accelerate the problem? That they don't do enough to solve the problem? I don't think I'd get behind either of these arguments if you made them, but at least we'd be talking about the same issue.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, I didn't really intend to construct an argument. That would probably involve being assured of my position, and I'm certainly not. But I still like to air ideas, even if it does mean looking like a luddite.

If we take a photographer like William Eggleston; William Eggleston could not be William Eggleston these days (in other words, if he was to emerge now, he would not become well known in the way that he is) because his style has been territorialized by the masses. With the advent of the digital camera/camerphone, everyone is shooting like Eggleston. But what makes Eggleston great is that his shots come from a genuinely skewed and idiosynchratic view of the world, even if they do appear rather mundane at times.

It feels like we are sold the illusion of creativity. You have individuated because you have a flickr page. I don't know if there is even a problem here; maybe the illusion of creativity is a positive advance, maybe its all that most can hope for: we can't all be Eggleston.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Of course Eggleston couldn't be "Eggleston" these days. Nor could you be "you" these days (i.e. whatever you were 10, 15, 20 years ago). I'm just not sure that, with technology, we're actually losing anything that we haven't always lost with the passage of time, i.e. the ability to be exactly what we were, back whenever.

Who is "selling" the "illusion of creativity"? Is it Apple? Are we still talking about them? I think Apple sells their computing products as tools that make many types of creativity possible, not as wonder devices that will make you into an awesome artist. I don't think I've ever seen an ad or promotion for Apple products that comes even close to doing such a thing.

And I'm not sure a flickr page means anything more than that you want to store/share photos with others. I don't see flickr going out of their way to promote their service as something which inherently makes its users into creative heavyweights.

[(Anonymous)]

With Eggleston, its more the point that technology has allowed a type of creativity to be territorialized. It has become very easy, and more democratic. But Eggleston was an unconventional individual. So we see a million people who shoot like Eggleston, but its largely just facade. We become aware that, as a nation (I can only talk about Britain here), we are becoming much more creative; lots of creative magazines, photographers/ illustrators everywhere, etc. It looks like, from the outside, we've reached the kind of society that those involved in Fluxus dreamt about.

But what they were largely getting at was mindfulness. The ability to slip and slide between categories, to not get caught in mindless assumptions and conventions. Yet it seems that the tools of the creative life (which, at one point in time, would have been viewed as the mindful life) have been territorialized and recuperated into the mindless flow of events.

No-one is selling the illusion. Noone is responsible. How does ideology build up? Apple don't sell ideology (i think), but they reinforce it and contribute, if only incrementally, towards it.

It could well be that the makers of Flickr have absolutely no idea how their invention will impact on society. Its down to the critical theorists to explain it to them years later. How they sell their site doesn't necessarily seem to matter here. Also, a Flickr site can be many, many things; at best perhaps, a way to share and store photos.