Deriving from the Greek, the term ‘aesthetics' refers to the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values. Originally, the term was primarily used in connection with nature; trying to identify the transcendent and timeless aspects of natural beauty. It was only in the eighteenth century that these notions of quality were transferred to the artistic value of art and culture as a whole. However, as judgements of taste and aesthetic quality are not only subjective but social value judgements, critics have recently emphasized that such categories are ‘inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class society'. It is perhaps more accurate, therefore, to talk about certain types of aesthetics that either refer to a particular section of society (such as ‘black' or ‘middle-class' aesthetics), a political philosophy (such as ‘feminist' or ‘green' aesthetics) or an artistic movement (such as ‘avant-garde' or ‘postmodern' aesthetics), than making universal and essentializing claims about culture in its entirety. Certain forms of media also share ‘aesthetic' characteristics that differentiate them from other types of cultural form and expression. For example, some have attempted to identify the particular aesthetics of television, distinguishing that medium's unique characteristics from the likes of radio, cinema and video. In this article I want to discuss ‘digital' aesthetics, explaining and exploring how the digital representation of the world is aesthetically different from the one that was provided by analogue. I will start by giving a broad account of the digital landscape, offering insights into the means by which digital culture has transformed both our professional and personal lives. I will then move on to look at the textual dynamics and characteristics of digital technology in more detail, examining its form and finally asking whether or not such a unified ‘digital' aesthetic even exists.
Our first question when defining the digital landscape is: What do digital media look, sound and feel like? The fundamental quality of digital media is that they are driven by minute, discrete electrical impulses, commonly characterized as ‘on' and ‘off'. So, one common aesthetic quality of digital equipment is a tangle of wires, and indeed some generating authorities are experimenting with ‘smart electricity' which will supply network services through every socket in the home or office. Other applications like wireless networks and digital satellite television are transmitted through the air and are effectively invisible, inaudible and cannot be felt. This poses a first problem in digital aesthetics: many aspects of digital media simply cannot be sensed. In fact, as we shall see, what you cannot see is often the most significant thing about digital aesthetics. Nonetheless, digital media normally require the support of some kind of physical device. Typically, these used to resemble small televisions with a typewriter in front of them: devices deriving from the 1930s and 1870s, respectively. Today, however, digital devices come in all shapes and sizes. The desktop machine has been the subject of a massive rethinking in design, from the beige boxes of the 1980s through Apple's successful translucent iMac design of the 1990s to the plethora of portable devices - laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, MP3 players - that we find everywhere in the 2000s. Most of these devices sport screens, and most of them have some kind of input device - mouse, stylus, keypad, click-wheel - but some have only one (e.g. the iPod Nano), and many other common digital gadgets like step counters, cameras and wristwatches have idiosyncratic combinations of screens, buttons and menus that bear little relation to the common image of the desktop computer.
At the turn of the millennium, there was much talk in the industry of the convergence of all these widgets in one super widget, a portable device that would include a camera, MP3 player, mobile phone and personal assistant, that would link up with a master computer at home or work, but market trends seem to demonstrate that people like to have dedicated machines for each of these functions, even though many phones now come with the capacity to take videos and photos and play back music. Unfortunately, many of our devices are incompatible. Each mobile phone company has its own proprietorial format for video, for example; few of which work with the standard computer formats. Texting and email work on very different principles, even though they appear to be very alike from the user's point of view. And synchronizing portable devices with domestic computers can be a high-risk activity (especially in multi-computer households, or where the blurring distinctions between work and home mean that an individual has two or three computers to work with). One problem here is the issue of software compatibility. All digital devices have as a basic design structure some kind of input device, a central processing unit, some memory and some kind of output. To make these work, the device requires a set of instructions: software. Typically, it will require an operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux ....), on top of which sit a layer of applications (word processing, image and sound manipulation and generation, spreadsheets, and so on).
Though many manufacturers make applications for numerous operating systems, and try to maintain a similar look-and-feel to their operation regardless of what kind of machine they run on, under the bonnet there are substantial differences. These become especially apparent in networked processes, where a file has to be passed between users using different operating systems or even different versions of the same operating system. As we have already suggested, digital media have inherited legacies from previous generations of media like the typewriter and the television. Television itself can be understood in a longer history beginning with the cinema, a public building for social viewing. Television, while also used extensively in public places like bars and youth clubs since the 1940s, has a much more domestic profile, and partly because of its size tended for several decades to be viewed in the family circle. Computers, however, moved the screen even closer: from the far end of a hall in cinema, to the corner of the living room with television, now computer screens sit a matter of inches from our faces, and ‘third screen' devices like video iPods and mobile phones are even closer, more like clothing than familiar media.
One source of this dynamic is the origin of ubiquitous computing in what is sometimes called the second office revolution. The first office revolution was accompanied by New Media and new devices: the typewriter, the adding machine, the filing cabinet, the rolodex and the slide-rule. The second digitized these, led by the aptly named company International Business Machines (IBM). The typical office of both the first and second office revolutions looked much like the office inhabited by Bob Cratchett in Dickens's Christmas Carol: rows of desks facing a supervisor, and at each desk a clerk performing repetitive but intellectually demanding and skilled jobs. The skills of double-entry bookkeeping and copperplate handwriting were replaced swiftly with typescript and word processing, adding machines and spreadsheets. This rapid deskilling (see Braverman 1974) meant that office work could be less well paid, opening the doors to women workers, who were less likely to have high levels of education, less likely to unionize, and more likely to leave to bear children, meaning they had fewer expectations of a career structure. The other characteristic of the office is the division of the workforce, leading to the development of the individual workstation as a typical factor in computer design, further encouraging the individualization of public, domestic and now personal entertainment.
Anyone who has attempted to work on a shared computer will recognize that they are not designed for multiple users or social use. Deriving from this legacy of office provision, the typical screen interface for computers remains the desktop metaphor. That desks are not typical of everyone's working environment, and that folders and files and even trash cans are quite specific to the Western concept of a specific type of work, the major operating systems all evolved versions of this system, known variously as the GUI (Graphical User Interface) or, at one time, the WIMP (Window-Icon-Menu-Pointer) system. Such defining structures as file hierarchies seem to derive from exactly the same root. In this respect, as well as in terms of content, computing seems to follow the ‘remediation' rule that every new medium starts off imitating the medium before it. Thus, digital editing programs imitate film editing suites; image manipulation software mimics photographic darkrooms. It could also be argued that the design aesthetics of computers have followed slavishly the hierarchies and work discipline of the nineteenth-century office. A key response to the desocializing aspect of computing has been the massive expansion in networked services, notably following the release of Mosaic, the first mass-release web browser, in 1993. While spreadsheets had been the ‘killer app' that secured the office computer's place, email was the driver for the new generation of domestic as well as office users. Mosaic's replacement Netscape, released in 1994, provided a free, relatively simple email client in addition to its browser functions.
The first generation of browsers borrowed their names from the idealistic vision of cyberspace as endless frontier: Navigator, Explorer, Safari. That these open-ended wanderings were on the one hand largely controlled by the most successful portals (in the early days AOL) and on the other perpetually framed by the browser window itself rarely seemed to matter. Skilled users could always escape the carefully marshalled shopfronts of their Internet service providers, and it was skilled users who tended to write the influential emails, articles and books. Software critique would have to wait almost a decade before it became a key part of the intellectual landscape.
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