Grafton Tanner – Author
To: Grafton Tanner
Sent: 23/11/16
RE: Dissertation Research
Request
Hello Grafton,
I'm a third year Graphic Design student in the
UK. I'm currently in the process of writing my dissertation based on the
subject of cultural changes with the introduction of the new millennium. I've
investigated subjects such as the socio-political and socio-cultural impact of
social media in the western world, and the process of Retromania consuming
the graphic design industry in recent years.
Babbling Corpse was a read that had me agreeing
with almost all of your points and has really helped me articulate my
dissertation as finding scholarly sources to do with such a modern subject has
proved quite difficult. I'm currently undergoing some primary research for my
writing and I'd love to ask you a few questions to get your take on the
cultural impact to design. I know you primarily focus on music in your writing,
but I feel that this addiction to nostalgia is ever-more present in design as
the years go by.
I first read Babbling Corpse as an avid
vaporwave listener, but it has been one of my favourite reads on the subject
out of the countless texts I've gone through this year! I hope you can find the
time to help me out, but I appreciate that you may be too busy.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Christopher Mahoney
From:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
24/11/2016
Hi Christopher,
Greetings from the states, and thank you for
the kind words. I'm thrilled you enjoyed the book. I'd be happy to answer any
questions for your dissertation. What school are you attending?
All the best,
Grafton
To:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
24/11/2016
Hello Grafton,
Anytime! Thanks for the help, would it be okay
to send a few questions through tomorrow? What timezone are you in? I'm
attending Leeds College of Art, it's an interesting degree because it
encourages us to keep a synthesis between our theoretical and practical
projects, something i'm not used to!
Cheers,
Chris
From: Grafton Tanner
Chris,
Yes feel free to email me any questions you
have. I live in Georgia, so I am in the Eastern time zone.
Best,
Grafton
To:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
28/11/2016
Hey Grafton,
Hope you're doing well. Apologies for the
delay, I had some feedback with my tutor on the direction of my essay. Here are
the questions, but feel free to simply use them as talking points as I've just
used them to stimulate the subject I'm writing about. Thanks for your help!
What is your stance on the use of Social Media
in the modern age, for both personal and commercial purposes?
In your publication, you describe a recent
phenomenon of retromania, do you think there is a solution to this
cultural regression? Is there an element of a cyclical nature?
What are your predictions on the evolution of
the internet in the next ten years?
Regards,
Chris
From:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
29/11/2016
Chris,
Thank you for the questions. Here are my
replies:
1. The social, economic, and psychological
consequences of social media are already beginning to show. The cultural
critiques of social media are now going mainstream in light of the discovery
that Silicon Valley has no regard for the human consequences of their products.
I'm thinking of Black Mirror, especially, which does an expert job
of revealing the horror underneath our Instagrammed lives (although I often
wish they would push the envelope even further). Even Moby's latest album is a
takedown of our techno-moment: plugged-in, distracted, bored, throwaway, and
trapped. The evidence cannot hide anymore. The public is becoming more aware of
how digital technologies affect us.
Social media platforms are engineered to hook
us on a dopaminergic level. In this way, Silicon Valley is like Big Tobacco,
except cancer does not carry the stigma depression, loneliness, and anxiety do.
Would we allow our children to smoke at age thirteen? To think that the health
effects of smoking are greater in severity than those of social media use
misses the point. Both Big Tobacco and Silicon Valley use the best propaganda
to sell us products. Neither care about the consequences, and thanks to
unfettered capitalism, they will never be made to care. And thanks to the
stigma associated with psychogenic disorders in the West, advocates for a
healthier future will have a tougher time slowing down Silicon Valley than did
those who waged war on Big Tobacco.
There's a bonus here: social media gives us the
power to police ourselves. The NSA can sit back and comb through our metadata
in this post-9/11 corporate state we are in. Social media users are tracked and
monitored, and their data are sold to the highest bidders. It is
unconscionable.
It is worrisome that many social media users do
not care about these kinds of privacy breaches. Perhaps they don't understand
the severity. If people want to smoke cigarettes after learning the side
effects, then so be it. The same thought applies to social media. But I would
urge people to use social media with distance - to understand when you're on
Facebook and when you're not. To resist the urge to brand yourself online. To
educate others on the problems that come with social media use. To put up the
phones and have conversations with people. And to never get your news from
Facebook.
Unfortunately, it would be commercial suicide
for a business to not have a social media presence. I have no problem with
social media being used for commercial purposes. When the tactics used to
promote a product's Facebook page are employed for personal branding, though,
that is troubling.
2. Retromania is definitely cyclical. Simon
Reynolds is a good resource on how pop culture has always used the images and
sounds of the past to keep afloat. What is significant about twenty-first
century retromania is its ubiquity. Everyone can remember the same memory even if
that memory is false. More importantly, there has never been a more urgent time
to be aware of history. Corporations must peddle amnesia in order to keep
neoliberalism on life support, and the more people consume pain-free nostalgia,
the easier it is for corporate capitalism to run us all into oblivion.
A solution will come from the artists,
musicians, writers, and filmmakers who refuse to create reactionary nostalgia,
like the kind of surface-level object pornography in Stranger Things.
One of the greatest failures of contemporary culture is the lack of indie and
mainstream music critical of the eight years between Bush and Trump - the Obama
years. Once identity politics became the only game in town, nearly any music
that protested the rise of the corporate democrats vanished. The world
desperately needed for artists to call out the massive bank bailout of 2008 and
the right for Obama to detain and assassinate at will. It's not enough for
indie musicians to refuse anyone the right to take a photograph at a live show.
We need artists of all kinds to stop creating surface-level homages to the
1980s and to remember the vital hope of the "new" again.
3. The Internet is a rehearsal for virtual
reality. Once VR is affordable and goes public, there is no turning back. We
will trade the profiles of real people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
for their virtual representations. This is the logical endpoint of the
Internet. By giving consumers a wearable headset that projects whatever
fabricated world they could desire, companies will ultimately bring about a
society in which everyone who can afford a device can have limitless control
over simulated surroundings. If virtual reality will be anything like the
Internet, the majority of people will use it to fulfill sexual fantasies and
quell the fear of being alone.
We may not have very long to wait for these
things to come to pass. The augmented and virtual reality market is a
billion dollar industry, and interest in it has piqued thanks to headsets like
the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift device. For those in the industry, virtual
reality is the very mark of “the future.” Ironically, virtual reality devices
trade more in the market of regressive goods than in any market of “the
future.” Virtual reality promises a world made for each of us, our own island
where we can be a virtual Prospero in control of every facet of simulated life.
Ultimately we can return to a more childlike state where our every need was met
and the world was one that revolved around us alone. By knowing anything we or
Silicon Valley dream up can become a reality, we can live in one virtual world
after another, no matter how infantile or deviant those worlds may be.
What may seem at first like a fresh pursuit of
the future is actually a desperate attempt to escape the bonds of the human
condition and retreat to some utopian, childlike state. No one will stop the
creation of mass-marketed, affordable VR. There will be little discussion about
the psycho-social implications, and even so, would we not all sign on the
dotted line?
Let me know if you have any more questions or
would like to talk further.
Best,
Grafton Tanner
To:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
30/11/2016
Grafton,
Thanks for your time and answers, I'll let you
know if there are any more questions that pop up and I'll be sure to send you a
copy of the essay if you're interested.
Regards,
Chris
From:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
30/11/2016
Absolutely, Chris. And yes, I'd love a copy of
the essay.
Best,
Grafton
To:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
08/12/2016
Re: A
Question
Hello Grafton,
Hope you are doing well, I am almost finished
with my essay however I'm having trouble trying to come up with a design
solution to the regression of society through technology. It's such a complex
issue that it's hard to come up with a solution to the problem at all – never mind
a design-based solution. I just wanted to ask your thoughts on the issue and if
you felt that there was anything designers specifically could do to change the
course of the downward spiral western culture is undergoing.
I've attached a draft of my current essay, I'd
love for you to give me your thoughts on what could be improved and the
direction I could take from now!
Regards,
Christopher
From:
Grafton Tanner
Date:
09/12/2016
Hey Christopher,
Read through your essay. It's very good so far.
I didn't actually coin the term "retromania." I'm not sure who did,
but writer Simon Reynolds popularized it. Check out some of his work for more
analysis of retro-baiting.
I think there are multiple ways to arrive at a
solution. First, Web 2.0 effectively destroyed creative industries. Why pay a
graphic designer when you can just copy an image from Google Images? Why would
anyone buy a design or a photograph when they can just look at it for free by
following someone's Instagram account? In the attention economy, created by the
rise of social media, a knee-jerk reaction is the grail. This need for
impulsive likes and followers eliminates sustained critiques and reflection. A
piece of retro-bait is surface-level; you don't need to parse it to understand
what it signifies. An image of a 1980s ad for Coca-Cola works as a memory
trigger, prompting someone to press the "like" button and scroll
onwards. Nobody wants design that is future-forward or that challenges the
status quo, not when we would rather scroll the boards of Instagram and get our
dopamine fix from seeing images that make us nostalgic. The solution would be
to create design that challenges our relationship to social media and that refuses
to take part in retro-baiting. Also, charge fees for design services. Don't
give away your work for free on Instagram. Desperately and vehemently rally for
the "new."
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