Is the increasing computerization of society healthy for the traditional arts

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Is the increasing computerization of society healthy for the traditional arts?

Viewpoint: Yes, the increasing computerization of society is healthy for the traditional arts because new technology provides artists with better tools and greatly increases the exposure of their work within society at large.

Viewpoint: No, the increasing computerization of society is not healthy for the traditional arts, and in fact it threatens the creative process that drives artistic expression.

Every year, the pace of change in computer technology gains speed. Before the machine age, the computer was merely a concept, traceable through ideas dating to medieval times, or perhaps even to the ancient abacus. Then, at the end of World War II, with the development of ENIAC, the first truly electronic computer, the computer age was born. Thereafter computers loomed large in the popular imagination, but few people had direct experience of them. Most computers were large, expensive, cumbersome machines owned by businesses, universities, and government agencies.

The role of computers in daily life began to grow with the development of the personal computer (PC) and microchip during the 1970s, but even in 1982, when Time named the PC "Machine of the Year," only a fraction of Americans had PCs in their homes. The computer was then in a position like that of the television 40 years earlier: its time was coming, and just as televisions suddenly swept American homes in the 1950s, sales of computers boomed throughout the 1980s.

As more and more people began using PCs, the power of these computers increased apace. This phenomenon was due in part to Moore's law, a standard informally adopted by the computer industry after engineer and Intel Corporation cofounder Gordon E. Moore stated in 1965 that the power of computer chips tends to double every year. Moore later pulled back from his optimistic prediction, changing the figure to two years, but the growth of computing power has tended to occur at a rate halfway between his two estimates: for a period of at least four decades beginning in 1961, the power of chips doubled every 18 months.

With the growth of computing power, computers could do more and more tasks. Increasingly more complex programs, designed for ever more powerful systems, made it possible to create on a computer everything from spreadsheets to visual art to music. The increased linkage of home computers to the Internet, a movement that reached the take-off point in the early-to-mid 1990s, greatly accelerated this process. By the end of the twentieth century, the computer affected almost every aspect of human life—particularly the work of artists, architects, composers, and writers.

Today's architect relies on computer-aided design (CAD) programs that enable the visualization of structures in three dimensions. Musicians regularly use computers for composition and playback, acting as their own producers by changing the quality of sound and the arrangement of simulated instrumentation. Visual artists use computer graphics in creating and enhancing their works, and the traditional darkroom of the professional photographer has given way to the digital camera and the PC. As for writers, their work has been affected immeasurably by a range of computer developments, from the simplest word-processing software to complex programs that assist in the writing of novels or screenplays.

Such is the situation, and the responses to it are manifold. On the one hand, these developments would seem to be purely, or almost purely, salutary for the arts. This is particularly so with regard to CAD and word processing, which provide the architect and the writer with tools that make their jobs much easier by eliminating such time-consuming tasks as drawing countless elevations or retyping a manuscript over and over. On the other hand, there are many who say that the use of computers as an aid in creating visual art or music or in writing novels encourages laziness on the part of the artist. In addition, there is an almost visceral concern with regard to the pace of technological progress, which seems to be undermining the human element in art as in much else.

Before the dawn of the industrial age in England during the latter part of the eighteenth century, people lived much as they had since ancient times. There had been varying levels of political order, and differing degrees of societal advancement in the arts and other endeavors, but the technology of daily life remained fairly much the same. Farmers plowed the ground using draft animals domesticated thousands of years earlier and took their crops to market using vehicles with wheels, an innovation that dates to approximately 3500 b.c. in Sumer. For cooking, heating, and lighting their homes, people used combustion technology that had developed in a few specific stages since the late Stone Age, but even the most advanced stoves and lights of the time still relied on the combustion of easily consumed materials such as wood.

The birth of industrialization changed everything and forced a complete rethinking of all ideas about progress. Since approximately 1800, people in the western world have become increasingly accustomed to the idea that the technology of the past no longer suffices for the present, but this awareness has not been won without a great deal of discomfort. For proof of the degree to which this uneasiness has permeated the human consciousness, one need only cite the vast number of books, movies, and other forms of art—Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Terminator films, or Radio-head's acclaimed OK Computer album—that depict technology as a sort of Frankenstein's monster that threatens to subjugate its creator.

Concerns about technology and the true meaning of progress are legitimate, and the argument that computers may serve ultimately to blunt the human imagination is unquestionably valid. Defenders of the role of computers in the arts, however, point to the advantages machines offer when manipulated by a human creator. Technological progress is almost inevitable, and as long as it is possible to use an easier and presumably better way to do something, people will do so.

It is in the nature of the restless human imagination, particularly the restless western imagination, to push boundaries, in the process surging beyond what most people find agreeable. In music, for example, the composers of the romantic era in the nineteenth century exhausted the limits of tonality, leaving the composers of the twentieth century to search for new musical meaning in atonality. Likewise, visual artists passed the frontiers of realism by the latter half of the nineteenth century, opening the way for movements that took art progressively through impressionism, expressionism, and abstraction. The same occurred in the literary arts with the end of the traditional novel and the development of experimental modes of narrative and nonnarrative.

Although the heat of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century battles in the arts has long subsided, one may with good reason ask whether the arts have truly benefited from the changes wrought by figures such as Arnold Schoenberg in music, Pablo Picasso in painting, and James Joyce in literature. There are strong positions on each side of the current controversy regarding the use of computers in the arts. Only a few aspects of this controversy are certain: that computer technology will keep changing, that people will keep finding new ways to apply the technology, and that many will continue to question the role of computers in the arts and other areas of life.

—JUDSON KNIGHT

Viewpoint: Yes, the increasing computerization of society is healthy for the traditional arts because new technology provides artists with better tools and greatly increases the exposure of their work within society at large.

Are computers, and the increasing computerization of society, good or bad for the arts? There are many who say no—that computers, by providing an aid or crutch to artists, take the creativity out of their work. Furthermore, these critics say, computers have had a deleterious effect on society, bringing with them dehumanization and a simple, gadget-driven world in which people, expecting "quick fixes" and instant gratification, are not willing to invest the time necessary to support and enjoy the arts.

The opposite is the case. The arts can be shown to have benefited extraordinarily from advances in technology. The term arts, incidentally, is used here in the broadest sense to encompass not only the visual and tactile arts, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, and the performing arts, such as music, drama, dance, but also the literary arts. That most listings of the arts fail to include literature says a great deal about a deep underlying societal incomprehension concerning the arts—an incomprehension that can be improved with computers.

Information and the Discerning Consumer

Computers help spread information. So do all means of communication, especially electronic communication. The more sophisticated the means, the more information can be disseminated. Because of the Internet, more data—more experience of the world—are more widely available to more people than has ever been the case. No longer is ballet, for example, the province only of wealthy patrons. A computer user with access to the Internet can find dozens of ballet Web sites and most likely can even download electronic files showing great performances.

That consumers have become more discerning through the use of computers has helped improve that most democratic of art media, television. In the 1970s, with the rare exception of programs such as All in the Family, situation comedies were forgettable at best and inane at worst. By contrast, television of the 1990s and 2000s was and is populated with exceptional programming, even in the arena of sitcoms—shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, and Frazier, all of them noted for witty repartee and clever insights, rather than the slapstick and sexual innuendo that passed for humor two decades earlier.

What has changed? The audience. Today's viewers, because of accelerated development of information technology, are much more discriminating, and much less easily amused, than were their counterparts 20 or 25 years ago. If the modern viewer does not like what is on television, there are many more outlets for expression, such as Internet message boards devoted to a particular show, which provide television executives with a ready and continuing opinion poll of viewers. Digital technology has enabled the spread of cable and satellite programming and with it networks such as Discovery and Bravo that further raise the stakes for entertainment in America. To compete, traditional networks must offer ever more innovative and interesting programs—quite an improvement over a time when electronic communication was limited to three networks and AM and FM radio.

Critics of the role of computers in the arts may still be unimpressed and may dismiss television as a plebeian medium. Without addressing that viewpoint directly, it is easy enough to point out that the spread of information through the Internet has increased awareness of the "fine arts" as well. This is also true of literature, which gains more exposure through the World Wide Web than ever before. The Internet abounds with writers' sites and with "e-zines" that offer not only information about writing and interviews with writers but also opportunities for writers to publish their works on-line. Electronic publishing, whereby writers, for a fee, may arrange the distribution of their books in electronic form or in traditional book form on a print-on-demand basis, increases writers' exposure to a reading public.

Computers as a Tool for the Artist

But what about the role of computer-based tools that aid the artist or writer? Are these not forms of "cheating"? According to this line of thought, Michelangelo would not have deigned to use Auto CAD for designing St. Peter's Basilica; Leonardo da Vinci would have shied away from three-dimensional imaging software; and Raphael would never have touched any sort of program that would have assisted him in creating visual art. There is no reason to believe that if those masters were alive today, they would not avail themselves of the technology available now, just as they did the technology to which they had access in their own time.

If the painters of the Renaissance had been antiprogress, they could well have opted not to paint their works using the chemical preservation techniques available at the time (for example, eggs as a setting agent in frescoes) and chosen instead to use the methods by which the Greeks applied color to their statues. Leonardo's Last Supper and Raphael's School of Athens might well be as faded and lost as the colors that once decorated the sculptures of Praxiteles.

It is absurd to imagine that Shakespeare would not have appreciated the value of software that assists writers. He might not use such software if he were alive today, simply because writing is an idiosyncratic vocation in which every practitioner has his or her own way of doing things. Shakespeare might, as many writers do today, opt to be alone with the empty page and a more basic form of software. But precisely because, as a writer, Shakespeare would know just how difficult writing is, it is difficult to imagine him turning up his nose at any form of technology that makes the task easier. Similarly, Tolstoy, who wrote a staggering eight drafts of War and Peace, would undoubtedly have benefited from word-processing software.

Tolstoy's contemporary, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), availed himself of what constituted state-of-the-art "word-processing" technology at the time. According to Clemens's autobiography, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, was the first American novel submitted to the publisher as a typescript.

Is Technological Progress Bad?

In effect, critics of the computer as a tool for the arts are saying that technology is ultimately bad for society. According to this line of reasoning, whatever is older and simpler is better. Such a view is reflected, for example, in the idea of "the good old days," which for Americans seems roughly applicable to the 80 years between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War II. It was an age, we grow up believing, wheneverything was simpler and better: when parents stayed married and only had children when they intended to raise them; when the government devoted its efforts to protecting the nation and its citizens instead of meddling in every aspect of human life; when students knew the Greek classics, Roman history, and the biblical stories and code of morality; and when talking and chewing gum—not shoot-outs and crack cocaine—were the biggest problems in school.

All of that sounds wonderful to most people, but lest we forget, it was also an age without penicillin, polio vaccine, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and an endless range of other medical benefits that came about in the mid twentieth century and afterward. It was a time when people smoked tobacco without any concept of the damage they were doing to their bodies, when people had little concept of dental hygiene as we know it today, and when most adults did not use deodorant. Without air conditioners and electric fans, washing machines and dryers, disposable diapers and canned baby formula, life was immeasurably more difficult than it is now.

Many defenders of antitechnological sentimentality claim, first, that society itself was more moral in an age when technology was simpler and, second, that technological progress and societal decline go hand in hand. But was society really more moral in the "good old days"? If we focus purely on the examples of the character of schools, marriage, and government then as opposed to now, a good case can be made for the past.

If we look beyond these carefully chosen examples, we see a past society that was morally coarse. It was a society in which, for example, most members of the white majority went along with a system in which blacks in the South were subject to Jim Crow laws and lynching and blacks in the North were treated as second-or third-class citizens. Tolerance of any difference from the perceived norm, in terms of religion, sexual orientation, or even physique, was much lower than it is now. The average marriage may have lasted longer, but there were many cases of spousal abuse, infidelity, frigidity, sexual dysfunction, and so on that simply went unknown or unreported. Although school shootings did not occur, it is instructive to compare the widespread horror and outpouring of emotion that followed the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 with the degree of apathy or even outright approval that regularly greeted the lynchings of a century earlier.

Does technological progress make people morally better? Of course not; it only enables them to gain a clearer picture of who they really are. It gives people greater exposure to ideas and by freeing people from drudgery and repetitive tasks increases their opportunities for self-reflection. These changes have affected artists and the arts as they have affected society as a whole. The changes can only be counted as positive. Because of computers, artists possess tools that make it possible to do things they could only dream of before, and they are surrounded by a much widely informed public that is vastly more likely to be "in touch with" their art—both figuratively and, through electronic communication, literally. The image of the artist laboring alone in a garret is a sentimental artifact of another century. Today's artist may still work alone, but the computer gives him or her access to millions of other people.

—JUDSON KNIGHT

Viewpoint: No, the increasing computerization of society is not healthy for the traditional arts, and in fact it threatens the creative process that drives artistic expression.

It's a beautiful day outside. The sunlight is streaming through your window, beckoning you to go outside and see the world. But you don't budge. Why should you? You're far too comfy for that. Plopped down in your new computer chair, complete with multiple swivel options, you needn't get up for hours. Feverishly you type away at the keyboard, attempting to save the universe from the latest computerized villain. Your eyes glaze over from the 3D accelerated graphics. Hours pass as food and sleep are forgotten. You're now officially a software junkie. Isn't the world of technology grand? At first glance, it might seem that way, but to people who are proponents of the traditional arts, the increasing computerization of society has some serious drawbacks.

To examine this issue carefully, it's important to discuss the definition of art. Webster's dictionary defines art as the activity of creating beautiful things. If this is so, is the activity of creating art meaningful when it is done on a computer? It certainly is not as personal as using traditional media. Children, for example, cannot create finger paintings in their truest sense on the computer. They cannot feel the paint squish between their fingers or enjoy the sensation that comes from blending colors on construction paper. For them, the "beauty" of the experience and the creative growth that comes with it are lost in a series of keystrokes and computer icons. The finished product is without texture; there is no real paint on a virtual canvas. Computer art is impersonal.

The Personal Nature of Art

Anyone who attempts to define art in simplistic or immediate terms is doomed to fail. Even the world's greatest artists and philosophers have expressed various opinions on what constitutes art. What one person considers art, another may consider junk. Certainly there is a difference between refrigerator art and the renderings of an artist such as Michelangelo. However, there appears to be a thread that connects almost every valid definition of art. That is the concept or belief that the essence of creating art is personal in nature.

If art is the expression of human emotion, it is not difficult to see how an increasingly computerized society can thwart the creative process. Bean counters might argue that more works of art are being produced today than ever have been before, but what the counters fail to recognize is that quantity is not the same as quality. A depersonalized society damages the human psyche and ultimately the creative process. Computers do not replace human creativity and emotion.

The traditional arts, such as crafts, film, music, painting, storytelling, and theater, stem from the emotional connection between people and their environment and culture. The arts become an expression of life, reflecting the poignant elements of a person's world. As cultures change from region to region, so do the arts. Whether they present positive or negative impressions of that culture, the arts capture the human experience in a medium to be shared with others. It is impossible for a computer to possess the "humanness" required to convey such experiences, because computers cannot have any experiences of their own. They do not write, sculpt, or sing. They are incapable of presenting the infinite range of emotions that an actor can. The images, music, and text they display come from the creative endeavors of a human being, not from their own design. Although computers can enable us to learn about other cultures and their arts, they cannot help us truly understand the depth and soul of what is being expressed to us. They possess no more insight than a travel book or brochure. It is in the personal experience with a culture through its traditional arts that one can discover the diversity and customs of the culture, becoming engaged with other people through the experience of life.

The Virtual World versus the Real World

Sitting in front of a computer screen may bring people together in a "virtual" sense, but not in a "real" sense. Part of what makes life worth living is the physical experience. A society that places too much emphasis on computerizing everything tends to lose touch with the human side of life. Let's take the AIDS quilt, for example. Looking at that quilt on a 17-inch computer screen is one thing, but actually seeing it stretch out for acres in person is quite another. Watching people embrace over a special hand-stitched square or actually hugging someone in pain as his or her tears hit your shoulder is far more personal than the coldness of a computer screen.

People who spend all their free time in front of a computer miss out on the richness and texture of life. Yet the more and more computerized our society becomes, the more difficult people find it to get away from computers. People begin to think like computer junkies; they find more pleasure in sitting in front of a computer screen than in actually engaging in life. They begin to think talking to an automated telephone operator is as good as talking to a real person. They send gifts they've never held in their hands to someone via the Internet. In essence, the computerization of society has a numbing effect on the soul, which is unhealthy for the traditional arts and is unhealthy altogether.

The "Want-It-Now" Mentality

Computers have accelerated the pace of our daily lives. In some ways, that is a good thing. Numerous business activities take much less time to complete than they once did. However, the technology is a double-edged sword. Rather than using the extra time to engage in relaxing activities, such as the traditional arts, we are now trying to cram twice as much activity into a workday. The result is increased stress and a mentality that everything should be done in the interest of time. The quality of the experience is incidental. That approach is completely contrary to the one needed to engage in the traditional arts. Artists understand that the process of creating a piece of artwork is as important as the artwork itself. Perception, contemplation, and experimentation are all part of the creative process. The traditional arts encourage a kind of creative thinking that is sometimes existential in nature. A person is not spoon-fed a subject with a couple of typed-in key words.

Computers have encouraged us to want and to expect things to happen instantly. This is an unhealthy environment for the traditional arts. Engaging in most of the traditional arts requires practice, patience, and time. In playing the violin, for example, one does not become proficient overnight. It takes discipline—and lots of it. The development of skill that embraces a combination of tenacity and contemplation is part of the creative process.

A Question of Values

In a computerized society too much emphasis is placed on activities that have an immediate lucrative value. The negative effect on the traditional arts is obvious. One needs only to look at how the arts are underfunded in schools to see the message that is being sent to children. Although the arts foster self-expression and creative exploration, many people do not see the intrinsic value in supporting these programs. Yet such programs are extremely important on a variety of levels. They help to enrich children's lives with skills that the children can carry into adulthood.

Art therapists can attest to the importance of early emphasis on the arts. In the art therapy section of the Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, Paula Ford-Martin points out that "art therapy encourages people to express and understand emotions through artistic expression and through the creative process." Ford-Martin lists self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and empowerment as some of the benefits gained from engaging in artistic expression. Personal goals such as these often are buried in an over-computerized world. Emotional laziness is encouraged as people anonymously hide behind pseudonyms in virtual chat rooms. The social skills required to engage in real-world relationships dwindle as people remain in the safety of their own homes. This is sometimes understandable given the complex world we live in; however, risk-taking is part of life, and even in failure we can sometimes benefit.

Conclusion

The essence of artistic expression stems from the emotional connection between people and their environment. This connection fades with each day as our society becomes increasingly computerized. Our minds close as we allow our machines to think for us. Even as our world becomes smaller, the distance between humans continues to expand. With each day, we lose touch with our souls. Apathy and banality extinguish the creative spark that drives us to express ourselves through the traditional arts. As such, our culture and society suffer for this loss. We must push away from the computer desk and reimmerse ourselves in the living world, savoring both its beauty and its ugliness. Only then can we truly be human.

—LEE A. PARADISE