The Impact of Internet on Art

1. What Jaron Lanier means when he says that, ‘Authors, journalists and artists give freely without paying the fruits of their intellect and imaginations to the hive mind’ is that these people do not gain from their contribution to the internet. This is because their uploaded works can be accessed freely and easily by the internet users.

2. According to Lanier and other authors, the internet is changing the way we read, write, seek, and process information. We do not read everything but only those fragments that interests us. We only read what we want to know or seek only what we need to know, contrary to what used to happen in the past. Alternatively, our writing has also changed. We are more inclined to sensationalism and hyperboles within our writing with an intention of capturing the attention of our readers. Furthermore, internet has changed the way our brains process information.

3. The writers who are examining web induced changes in thought and cultures lend weight to their arguments by claiming that internet has made people to read scholarly material in the same way they read magazines or newspapers. These writers also claim that the internet has created a society of people who would rather read a summary of a movie or a play than watching the entire play or that movie. They also argue out that the online research has enabled scholars to make a quick search for specific information to support a thesis instead of reading through a lot of material in the traditional sense.

4. Cyber balkanization is when an individual designs feeds and alerts from their favorite websites to get news and information from the likeminded people. Cyber balkanization is dangerous because it leads to extremism whereby an individual becomes hostile to the people whose views are contrary to his own. Some people would go to the extent of avoiding ideas that are contrary to their own.

5. Deconstructionists approach the literary text by first considering books not to be the works of single persons. Consequently, these books are scanned and digitized into big continuous texts, which are then reduced to snippets of pages to be used into other new works. This would mean that authors of those books would be denied recognition and accountability.

6. According to Neal Gabler, the great new art of the 21^st century is celebrity because it competes and supersedes the traditional form of entertainment like the movies, books, plays and TV shows. Celebrity plays the role that played by the traditional forms of entertainment like sensitization and distraction. However, Neal Gabler does not approve of the celebrity taking over art. He argues how impossible it is to think of “Jersey Shore” who is a celebrity as a form of Art.

7. According to Kakutani, recycling and cut and paste aesthetics has led to a lazy imitation, cheap, lazy re-dos of movies and TV shows of the past. He criticizes the recycling of the old games like Tomb Raider, Resident evil and Mortal Kombat into movies. Characters have been recycled from a host of classic books like ‘The picture of Dorian Grey’, ‘Dracula’, and ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ to be incorporated into the movie ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.’ This is what makes Kakutani believe that, creativity is dying in people.

8. When Lanier says that by killing old media we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stocks, what he means is that the old media is what created our current culture. Since we rely on the old media for our cultural progress, killing it will mean its stagnation or decay.