Blog 4 Art, Entertainment, Entropy

I found Wallace Stevens' critique of media to be different from other critique articles I have read for TCS; his argument not only attacks the effect of commercialized media on the public masses, but the overall effect of commercialized art. First, he stresses the important difference between the creativity of an artist v. the creativity of a commercial entertainer, and the methods in which they manipulate an audiences' emotional and/or psychological triggers to gain a response; the difference being, when an artist uses these triggers, he does so without the intent of pleasing his audience (both positive and negative responses are acceptable), but a commercial entertainer uses these same triggers to purposely draw a positive response from the audience, often by “giving the audience what they want.” Secondly, he draws on the laws of thermodynamics as a metaphor to describe “feedback” which “exists between systems that are not closed but rather open” (pg 63), in this case “system” being the exchange of ideas within what is commonly referred to as the public sphere; commercialized art and media acts as an agent of “entropy”, which prevents new contributions of ideas to the public sphere, thereby causing a “redundancy” of ideas, and a “[reduction of] the potential for change” (pg 63). In a nutshell, commercial media satisfies an audience's expectations, but does not provide them an opportunity for thoughtful reflection, and therefore limits or reduces said audience's subjective development.

Now, it could be argued that interactive media like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are open systems of media, and have the potential for change through new ideas; however, considering Stevens' analysis, I would argue that they are, in fact, closed systems. For the means of my argument, I would like to focus attention on the video sharing website, YouTube. Giving its creators the benefit of the doubt, YouTube did start out as a means for people to communicate and expresses themselves freely; the flow of new ideas into this open system occurred daily. On the one hand, YouTube provides a means for everyone, including artists and commercial entertainers, to express themselves and their ideas to a worldwide audience. The website allows users of all ages to become user members and post their own videos, and allows all users the right to view any videos on the website; this, however, is just an idealistic interpretation of the site. In reality, the other hand, YouTube prohibits the viewing of certain videos flagged as “inappropriate for certain viewers”, and will only allow a registered user over the age of eighteen to watch it, as well as prohibiting (or rather discourages) certain material from being posted that may “potentially offensive”. The reason behind this policing of the website, is because most of the world still hangs on this delusion that there needs to be censorship in the public sphere; I am not arguing against censorship, just this idea that a form of media which is supposed to support freedom of expression, should still be subject to censorship, and if it does not comply, have censorship forced upon it. The idea of censorship, I believe, is directly connected with Stevens critique of media, in that censorship narrows the flow of ideas, reducing and preventing ideas it deems offensive from entering the public sphere.