Digital Culture (review)

In the film Bye Bye Brazil (1979), a ragtag carnival troupe makes it way through the backlands of northern Brazil, trying to find towns where television hasn't ruined their audience. Ostensibly a road movie, Bye Bye Brazil is really a cautionary tale about how media never really die but rather take on new, unexpected, and too-often-inexplicable roles in the lives of the people who use them. In his plainspoken and wide-ranging masterwork, Charlie Gere explores the rapidly evolving media ecology of Digital Culture.

Gere's first triumph is a deep and wide overview of capitalism's historical drive of machinery and management toward the digital. The typewriter, the adding machine, and the loom put math into the service of money. Along the way Gere rehabilitates Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. Shannon sought to maximize the technical and semantic effectiveness of a signal by minimizing entropy and noise with built-in redundancies. Anyone who has thought twice about buying cheap speaker wire for a hi-fi or tried chatting on the phone after an eventful trip to the dentist recognizes Shannon's genius. But with the infestation of French theory into communication studies programs during the 1970s and 1980s, Shannon's work became an unsavory relic that merited half a lecture of barely disguised derision before Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and de Saussure took the stage. Gere reminds us of the elemental connection between Shannon and structuralism—a quest for mathematical precision in human communicative action.

Shannon's research was quickly put into the service of cold war communication and computation technologies, born of paranoia and nativism. But those very technologies directly facilitated our booming wave of handheld gadgets that distract and amuse somany. Gere delights in the irony but wonders out loud who else gets the joke, dark as it is. Moreover, Gere argues, we live in digital nature, an almost invisible ecological system of machines streaming flows of data. "All we can do," he writes, "is to map the changes we see in the hope of maintaining our grasp on our rapidly changing situation" (p. 10).

This book should be of particular interest and usefulness to instructors of communication arts like graphic design and electronic music. Gere does a lovely job of discussing how the bleak social conditions in Europe after the failure of the 1968 demonstrations gave rise to punk and its attendant "style."He argues that the graphic design strategies of the punks epitomize how they artfully composted the naive symbolic optimism of 1960s counterculture into a joking nihilistic aesthetic of noise and filth, intended to upset the straights who held all the loot and the power. Their art looked and sounded shitty on purpose.

And yet Gere takes this argument one step too far in his subsequent discussion of popular electronic music. Giorgio Moroder wasn't influenced by Kraftwerk; he explicitly repudiated their cold fetish of the machine with sexy, musical Eurodisco featuring a black goddess cooing her way to climax. Kraftwerk does deserve a sound beating, however, for giving us the thumping nuisance one endures on twenty-first-century dance floors. Noise is not music. For a book that provides such a compelling archaelogical dig on the origins of digital technology, Gere is far too lean on the detrimental effects consumer electronics have had on artistic craftsmanship. Talent is not democratic. Nor is the hard work of developing your chops. Conceptual art stank before the computer, and smells worse cooked in a black box. We now have legions of graphic designers who never learned to draw by hand. We now have legions of musicians who never learned to play an instrument. We are living in the Showtime BBQ regime of culture production: set it and forget it.

There are a myriad of electronic-music composition programs, many of them free online, that allow "producers" to completely automate composition, performance, and a mix. The computer crunches the numbers and spits out a middling racket of high-gloss beats and blips, barely...