Threats and Prospects of the Arts in the Age of Digital Media

 The history of writing is an evolving phenomenon. There are several propositions as to when and where writing began. However, across ages and civilizations humans have had the ingenuity of inventing ways of recording important timelines. The proto-writing and the Bronze Age, the Mesopotamian and the ancient Egyptian civilization have had a means of documentation.

Then came the invention of printing press circa 1440 in Rome by the German named Johannes Gutenberg, which fueled the proliferation of writing, and that of reading. However, in not-too-distant past writers composed their works manually; using a pen and paper, and only the privileged ones had the luxury of typewriter. This was regarded as a new development in leaps and bounds compared to the previous ages. 

Readers must have to use books; libraries existed and functioned manually. This at times seemed to be cumbersome and boring to the digital media minded individuals. The presence of modern media technology has redefined the concept of reading and writing and library itself. Opinions from some quarters have averred that books are dying, but writing is still alive; instead of making people lazy and having the reading culture dying a slow death, the digital media agency turns those who were ordinarily not readers into becoming ones, even without them knowing. What you read daily on social media platforms are tons of untitled essays that might end up being equivalent to a number of book chapters.

The social media environment offers an atmosphere of infotainment in which people carry libraries in their hand and peruse contents in a more relaxed and less stressful way. But there is also a line picking the argument from different perspective, that social media is corrupting, and making people lazy. People do not like to endure to read anything that seems to be lengthy, beyond 180-character, literally. But this in turn gave birth to twitterature and related micro-fiction genres.

However, though much more concerned with sculpture, film and photography, Walter Benjamin in his famous “Work of Arts in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” expressed concern over the authenticity of the work of arts in the mechanical age, and said that the process of mechanical reproduction has the tendency to denude work its aura of eternal traditional aesthetic values. 

Let’s debate, critique, and agree to disagree with each other over threats and prospects of reading and writing in the age of mechanically digital media reproduction.

Editorial at ABU Creative Writers’ Club