Hosted By:
Director, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House
Apr 15
2012
A relentless torrent of discourse, high and low, has come to dominate contemporary life. Yet we willingly add more. Why does our chatter matter? Are we invested in the exchange of ideas, do we feel pressured to participate to keep from getting lost in the crowd, or is there something else going on? Where does substance and self-promotion stop and start?
Why are we having this conversation?
Nizan gave the final word
Our chatter matters because, first of all, we need to keep processing and reexamine all those things that have been said in the past in our eve changing contexts (political, social, economical, environmental, etc.). In chattering we also act as filters, keeping alive those chatters of the past that still matter for our present, while burring under the rubble of words those past discourses that have become irrelevant to us. Second, we keep talking because it is in our human nature. Of course we self promote, that too is in our nature, but hopefully we have also learned enough from the discourses on ethics and talk about what we believe really matter, not, for example, what is fashionable for the moment or what may bring us more personal opportunities and such.
Sunday, April 15 at 8:48pm
Kimberly, thank you for inviting me to this conversation. And thanks to Glass House for hosting it.
I assume we are mainly asking this question in the realm of digital world we are living in.. I’ll go right ahead.. My main observation of internet chatter is that no longer anything intelligently represented but it became an extension of NIMBY’ism replaced by NOMS, not on my screen.. People will go great lengths to defend a particular brand they purchase, subscribe or identify etc.. with a reality show flare to it. Facebook offers three choices of default chatter; like – comment – share.. This is in fact built-in unilateral process even though it seems not. I think it really works in a backward way. It prematurely kills any discourse before it takes off. Like classic internet caricature of the guy on his computer seemingly on a public forum late at night, telling his wife who is asking him to come to bed, “Honey, I can’t. This is important.., someone is wrong on the internet.” Funny thing is, you are right in your question, it all became someplace to manifest our preferences rather than ideas. Ideas are now gauged by market values, so are the political systems, education systems and so on. If your survival depends on mouse clicks, then you need to create that brand with a market value. Believe it or not, this is even more intelligent stuff about what goes on there. There are also stupid stuff that become internet sensations and fwd e-mails because they videotaped themselves while farting in a supermarket or something. All in all, like television, internet and digital world is increasingly becoming non space or low discourse.. I am afraid we are excelling on nothing.. Reading Yahoo comments on political or real time issues is like watching Jerry Springer show. Really scary chatter up there and Yahoo is just a small forum comparing to thousands out there.. What was the question? Yes.., I think discourse is becoming increasingly campy affair of spectator sport, not unlike a football match. We have less good ideas but more better product ideas. Commercials became the continuous discourse. That is the answer to “is there something else going on?“ part of your question. It is the big picture. Facebook and Linkedin are very corporate structures, they and few others monopolized it all. Once you see your conversation on the third party like the computer screen, it somewhat solidifies your existence. Whatever you say becomes an infinitely surviving document. That’s a huge opportunity for people. The new posterity. At least as a fantasy. Also becoming famous has just became very easy and common. There are three billion internet users as of now. Andy Warhol would radically adjust his “15 minutes” calcs..
Sunday, April 15 at 10:40pm
It just so happens tonight, someone in facebook wants me to sign up for this. So relevant:
http://klout.com/understand/klout
“How Klout helps you
We provide you with insights to help you better understand your own influence:
Do others trust your opinions online?
What topics are you the most influential on?
How do you compare with your friends?
Klout also gives you insight into the world around you. For example, did you know that Lady Gaga is influenced by Ellen DeGeneres? Learn more about the people in your network and discover new people to connect with using Klout.
Finally, Klout can help you unlock new opportunities: from using your influence to network into a new job, or getting the chance to check out upcoming products and experiences for free, our goal is to help you understand and leverage your influence.”
Monday, April 16 at 12:32am
Since I am a professional chatterer, I have to defend participation in the torrent of discourse; self-expression is only human, after all. But what singles out the voice from the blather and the substance from the self-promotion is the clarity of intent and expression. Editing is paramount.
Monday, April 16 at 10:28am
One of the things that we talk about a lot at BMD is editing. In other words, how can we express our ideas in a way that minimizes “chatter.” Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, has a mantra: “Edit to Amplify” which is something that I think the creative disciplines need to embrace — the notion is that fewer, but more powerful, ideas have the ability to create much stronger emotional connections & affiliations from customers/viewers/users.
Monday, April 16 at 10:59am
Maybe the validation of chatter is less important as an area on which to focus. We need articulated lenses as a form for editing the mass of conversation. Crafted editing which produces social intimacy that feeds civic affect.
Historic tools are relevant when translated with the understanding that we have exhausted attention spans and access to information previously unfathomable.
The concept of a glass house is a lens that highlights interior and exterior in a bold, active way. This could lead us to a tactic: can we construct a mobile glass house for public dialogue?
An invitation by Kimberli Meyer in this online format with a prompt to clarify our dialogical values feels like a glass house to me. Thank you to Kimberli and the innovators constantly reconstructing The Glass House.
Monday, April 16 at 12:23pm
I think your choice of words in formulating the question is interesting: “…a relentless torrent of discourse…”. Torrents do not let you swim, they take you along. Maybe the question, as you ask, is what is the purpose of this discourse: communication, ideas exchange or self promotion. On the communication side I am always amazed at how many means we have (to communicate that is) and how little we actually do. In the 18th Century you wrote a letter two months in advance and you showed up, period. Now it is a blow by blow account of “…where are you…”. We all participate so much for privacy concerns.
As far as ideas are concerned it is admirable to be able to reduce a concept down to a minimal amount of characters but is the actual idea still recognizable?
Finally, volume never was an indication of quality, I do not think that has changed.
Monday, April 16 at 4:38pm
Thanks to Frances Anderton for bringing up editing, which seems to be woefully absent from much of the posting, blogging, and tweeting that one comes across. I’m always looking for the chewy stuff, ideas that have stewed over time before reaching their public expression. But if I think about online chatter as being the equivalent of a conversation with colleagues in the hallway or over dinner with friends, then I can imagine the Internet offering a kind of open, public forum for developing one’s ideas. You throw things out there to see what sticks. The arguments that ensue (via “comments”) challenge you to rethink your position or better articulate your ideas. Perhaps all of this thinking out loud is useful as part of a bigger, ongoing dialog that will ultimately result in greater clarity of thought and prose. It remains to be seen.
Monday, April 16 at 7:13pm
We definitely have to make more decisions every day in regard to the flux of information, which seems to enrich and disturb our lives at the same time. To find a balance becomes a real task. This might be a bit off the track, but I really liked the sound of Kimberli’s question “Why does our chatter matter?” and was asking myself, how the chatter is different from now to then.
To chat from human to human (without any electronic interface) means that we exchange ideas, tell each other stories, gossip, comment on each other’s thoughts. We don’t have a limit of characters or a visual mask to fit those thoughts.
To chat on electronic platforms means that we have to condense our chatting. That brings in the notion of editing your thoughts, but is chatting actually about editing? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Are we really chatting on electronic platforms? Do these platforms really offer us all the freedom of communication? And asked the other way around: do expressions developed in electronic platforms also seep into our interpersonal communication? OMG, LOL – I have more questions than answers!
Monday, April 16 at 10:12pm
After reading Kimberli’s question and initial comment, I immediately thought about how much the democratization of opinion brought by the internet has affected the discussion about the city and architecture. We see all this exhausting chatting all around, this moving cloud of ideas (and clichés) mutating and being repeated endlessly and in circles by posts, blogs and tweets, this rising of so many automatic specialists, emerging voices and instant thinkers everywhere. No wonder that there is this recent claim for a return of the Critics in the internet era. People are longing for someone reliable to do the editing for them. As it was before. Because in the middle of the overwhelming information stream we know that we have to keep doing as we always did in our quieter past: we have to be intelligent, and “inter eligere”, i.e. select with wisdom. Paradoxically, the task, which is now easier as ever before, is also elusive as ever before.
Monday, April 16 at 10:54pm
Edited chatter is indeed reads as if an oxymoron. Specially in terms of digital chatter it seems not so sustainable and eventually leads to gated community type of chat rooms that die after a while. www is not particularly a literary context but 3 billion users constantly browsing and participating in news, social media sites, porn media outlets, extremist websites, commentaries, specialty professional forums and so on. The significant number of chatter is stationed in low discourse. Society at large is a low discourse majority. 144 character limit of twitter is changing the way people are talking. Talking in banner slogans is not necessarily a great way to communicate if you ask me.
This type of communication is very new and different than printed media. It has its own hybridized unique structure. It is also easily cloned, modified, copyright violated, traceable and almost impossible to censor, it is very mobile and quantifiable. Not a luxury car but public transportation. In order to fully engage, one needs to ride in it for a while. Otherwise it is editing yourself out of it.
Also, nothing wrong with the little guy promoting his enterprise while giant companies are catered by large agencies promoting their products for millions of dollars. Why should he be scolded or look down upon as self promoter if s/he has something worthy to bring to public discourse?
Tuesday, April 17 at 7:25am
Editing and glass houses, huh? Nothing cheers me more than good editing (and Eli Pulsinelli is one of the great editors I’ve work with). I’m not actually as pessimistic about the quantity of discourse as the quality. I notice, for example, that when I post pictures of a weather event on Facebook, dozens of people pay attention, whereas if it’s about Hilton Kramer, Occupy Wall Street, or the role of the comma, few people engage. Probably part of my motive for posting on weather or sunsets or the food on my plate is to get people to connect. Going further, I probably use a certain strategy from the classroom in my discursive (online, public, semi-public) life: to move from the ordinary to the specific, or the accessible to the more remote. I never get to talk about Modernism, politics or grammar enough for my own liking. Call me a stick in the mud. One of the keys to good editing is the smooth transition, like moving from the particular to the universal. It allows us to connect things such as our inner life to the sunset, or the position of the comma to the philosophical role of truth. Our inner life, and truth, seem substantial to me, and if I can use self-promotion, self-interest, and advertising gimmicks to get there, I will.
Tuesday, April 17 at 6:53pm
Isn’t the glass house all about the inability to edit and as such perhaps becomes relevant in its similarity to the immediate, uninhibited, sloppy, exhibitionist—and in those respects transparent—impulse of facebook, for example? I echo Matias’ craving for a deep interaction between the personal and the intellectual, and am looking for a way to make in meaningful and not merely self-indulgent. Where can one draw the line between the personal as political, case-study, or model, and that of the personal as entertainment/gossip.
Tuesday, April 17 at 7:35pm
Well since you asked, I have a bit to say about the glass house. It’s the great symptom of our addiction to transparency, our fetish, our lust for seeing everything laid bare. It’s about the notion that the eye is supreme, and it pushes away what you could also call the imagination. The frenzy of the visible is at the heart of the pornographic impulse: when asked why there are so many mirrors everywhere, the protagonist of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom says “By repeating our attitudes and postures in a thousand different ways, they infinitely multiply those same pleasures for the persons seated here upon this ottoman. Thus everything is visible, no part of the body can remain hidden: everything must be seen.”
I think this impulse to the visible is at the core of Modernism and modernity. From de Sade I’d like to jump to Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” in Chicago. It’s a bean-shaped mirror that reflects the world and the viewer back to himself in remarkably distorted form. [I'll try to attach a pic.] As you probably know it’s wildly popular, and is often seen on Facebook to index a visit to Chicago. It seems like a brilliant, pellucid way of transmitting an idea we have of the reality of the world (& ourselves) and it’s fascinating malleability — through art, of course. What do we see when we look at it? Ourselves of course, in distorted form, which echoes our sense of self importance (as humans, subjects, burghers). Because we know its distorted, it’s not really a misrecognition, but it does place us right back in the center of the universe, gazing out to see our jovian selves reflected everywhere right back at us.
It’s sort of the glass house in reverse. You stand outside and it envelopes you. The glass house promises a kind of mastery of nature. No longer afraid of being seen naked (since you are either rich, isolated, or shameless), you survey the landscape outside as if you own it, which you probably do. If the original purpose of architecture was to protect us from nature, now it assists us in harnessing it. We ride the landscape in an almost pornographic way, oblivious of the natural world and other people. We’re omnipotent, but we still need to be reminded of it at every minute.
To pull us back to our conversation about conversations, I’ll ask if the whole frenzy of visibility is a way to protect us from the mob, the public, the uncountable others who may have needs as deep as ours that we’d prefer not to see. Is there a way to make room for other voices, for polyphony? Is there a way that’s more productive than to just shut up, which is an option I often choose, and will choose now?
Tuesday, April 17 at 11:29pm
just to add another shovel of dust: let’s demand a message-free sunday so people find time to drive their cars again. with their PARTNERS. I crave for silence, hearing nothing but the pink sonic noise that reverberates from all the chatter and finally evaporates. now listen …to your engine… nice.
Tuesday, April 17 at 8:56pm
Matias Viegener, your last post is beautiful. May I than offer an addition to include a pavilion, let’s say Dan Graham’s, to produce the polyphony? Offering two way mirror effect(maybe even three way) in the same time offering complete transparency in an architecturally manipulative way? Maybe this is a good analogy to the heart of this digital phonetics and interpersonal exchanges.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5259/5500819100_9e5187dbc2_b.jpg
perhaps this is more appropriate, or the combination of the two,
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5251/5500223477_0c6c1cc18d_b.jpg
There is also the vulgarity of the “Silica Boy” which is very internet troll peeping Tom like character giving the urban glass houses their money’s worth. Kind of internet conversation everyone wants to shut off.
Wednesday, April 18 at 12:51am
Associate Professor, California State Polytechnic University | principal starfish-prime
In this post-critical age chatter is a necessity. Such as our memory-bank (brain) transforms into a hypertext markup device, individual editing and crowd-sourcing become interchangeable terms. Does it matter? Maybe, but we can’t be sure. We might not like this, having experienced a time before WWW and Smartphones; however, we should at least embrace it as it marks a significant departure from the status quo. Now our memory doesn’t remember facts but locations of where we can find things; our devices (including the Internet) became our extensions, our proprioception. Ultimately, we desired this environment, we crafted it, we are living it.
Now we need chatter to exist, to justify the mechanics. But I think substance is beyond this ‘sese conservare’, it is in the perceived representation. So if you ask me “why are we having this conversation” I would like to ask back “what is this conversation really about?”
Wednesday, April 18 at 1:05am
There seems to be a narrative of loss in this question. The emphasis on “chatter” takes us one step away from conversation and closer to the critique, to “chattering masses”–that noisy, unedited barrage of the Internet. But as someone who has been deeply involved the architectural conversations going on on twitter, I can say that what may be perceived as chatter or self promotion on that platform is also a means to form discursive communities. The next generation (actually the current generation) of architectural critics and curators have all been connected through social media for years. The discourse, but also cultural production including books, essays, galleries, exhibitions, think tanks, coming out of this network cuts across all parts of architectural discourse. There’s always been something insidious about cocktail party chatter, in that it is where the real deals are brokered. Similarly, in a network culture, back channel texts, tweets, and even “likes” build alliances across traditional geographic and institutional boundaries. #lgnlgn
Wednesday, April 18 at 11:03am
Thank you all for being game for the conversation, and for offering such thoughtful comments. I like the idea that we need to keep talking in all the forms available to us in order to constantly revise the dominant narratives and reflect ever new and nuanced thinking. I also like the idea that the Internet has democratized the mediated voice, and that the multitude of positions now available prompt us to re-evaluate our own preconceptions. Scarier (if fascinating) to me is the link that Orhan posted about the marketing of social influence – if we accept these kinds of measures of worth, what kind of prison are we gleefully locking ourselves into?
Though I understand the basic necessity of self-promotion in a tough cultural and economic climate — and fully participate, because it’s my job to do so — I still question it, especially when quite often we sell ourselves as “critical.” I am always reminded of a conversation I had with Michael Asher when we were driving around LA looking at the artist-created billboards the MAK Center had commissioned. He wondered out loud if one can promote and be critical at the same time. I think that is a very good question for cultural producers to ponder.
Wednesday, April 18 at 8:52pm
As pointed out in an another forum by a friend, a relevant article in NYT by Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and MIT professor.
“The Flight From Conversation”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion
Here is a quote
“Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”
If in fact this is the wide spread case, it is a huge shift of behavior whose ramifications, without making a value judgement, are extremely generative, open ended and triggered by technological means.
Sunday, April 22 at 11:25pm
Perhaps we are having this conversation because we recognize the need for new forms of caesura, or spatio-temporal intervals, in/on/@ which we might begin to sift through your questions.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval. Marshall McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point
Tuesday, April 24 at 11:36am
While I am not much of a chatterer at all I still think the chatter matters. Even though then I would not call it chatter. The digital media have revolutionized how we exchange and look for information, and the process lives from the multitude of contributions. I believe that at the end the positive aspects outweigh the negative. The capacity to self- correct is inherent in the process, and it is quite easy to edit or separate the valuable from the non- valuable information. By participating with meaningful information we contribute to the enrichment of the conversation. The aspect of selling and self- promoting has to do with our value system. Currently it propagates it.
Friday, April 27 at 3:12pm
Nizan Shaked
Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies
0
Nizan gave the Final Word
Our chatter matters because, first of all, we need to keep processing and reexamine all those things that have been said in the past in our eve changing contexts (political, social, economical, environmental, etc.). In chattering we also act as filters, keeping alive those chatters of the past that still matter for our present, while burring under the rubble of words those past discourses that have become irrelevant to us. Second, we keep talking because it is in our human nature. Of course we self promote, that too is in our nature, but hopefully we have also learned enough from the discourses on ethics and talk about what we believe really matter, not, for example, what is fashionable for the moment or what may bring us more personal opportunities and such.
Sunday, April 15 at 8:48pm