No Man’s Blog

NOTE: [Every now and then I happen to think about something, an idea or observation, not suitable for quick blogging but something that rather needs a slower 'processing', (which you hope that once you blogged about it, it will generate an interesting conversation). And so you take your time, write a draft post only to find out that while you contemplated, someone already wrote about it...]

That’s exactly what happen to me last month when I came across this article in wired. But here’s my original ‘draft’:

As much as it is tempting to accredit this phenomena to Apple’s ipod/itunes, it is hard to pinpoint the starting point of this cultural revolution. It can be described as M&Ms entertainment or even nuggets culture and the essence of it is that with advances of technology and recent innovation we no longer bound to consume a whole culture/entertainment properties. And as with every cultural change, you are invited to take a stand: you either believe that these changes enable greater freedom and choice and the ability to distill things to their essence, or if you want to take a critical stand you might fear that this represents the end of cultural depth.

It is perfectly possible for us today to be very up-to-date with popular culture – music, TV, news, books, films, games and politics without consuming them in their original format. Think of TV for a second – You Tube is the greatest facilitator of them all – all the great moments of news, reality TV, music videos and whatnot are served on YT, in a bite-size piece, like nuggets of information and entertainment. Same goes to webizodes, mobizodes, e-zines and instant gaming on our ipods, mobiles or any other portable device (SONY just announced on a 5-min Charlie’s Angels webizodes) And of course itunes which completely revolutionised the way we consume music. No longer bounded to but a whole albums we have the power today to buy only the tracks we like.

Even with books you can today buy the readers-digest version of almost every non-fiction books. No longer do we need to read the whole of the long tail or blink – we’ve got some other people who read it for us and distilled the essence of it in four pages.

And this promise appeals to millions of people. But is this all good? Let’s stick to books for a sec as this is where I feel really doubtful and inconclusive about this nuggets culture. On the one hand, think about the recent non-fiction book you’ve recently read- it is no secret that in order to learn, understand and apply the key thinking of a book you don’t really have to read it all. However interesting, there are lots of background and off-topic sections which aren’t necessary for understanding what the author had to say.

On the other hand what we sometime see as ‘redundant’ is the stuff that give the book not only it’s volume, but it’s context, breadth and depth. And this argument can be applied to any other of the cultural artifacts that have been chopped or digested for us – we might miss the breadth of a musical achivement that only listening to a whole album can provide. We can miss and be misled by the lack of context in a bite-size consumption of news and politics and so forth.

So is the nuggets culture providing us with more precious time by distilling things to their essence or is it dumbing us up and reflects the death of depth in modern culture?

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between…