One of the interesting effects of media saturation is the dramatic growth in video aesthetics. We’re quick to separate the gifted eye from the amateurish, the well-made from the cheaply-produced. Consider music videos from twenty years ago; were most to have been made today they’d be dismissed. This is not simply because tastes have changed, but because our aesthetic apparatus has exploded.

It’s not total, though. Creative output still branches into the composed, where these aesthetic parameters apply, and the real(ish), where such parameters disrupt our belief in the legitimacy of the event. But at some point the former will swallow the latter, and even charming kitten videos will be scoffed at, so long as the lighting’s poor.

In the middle of another fine post, Mark Fisher notes

The “twitchy, agitated interpassivity” I describe – from which I’m far from being exempt myself – it is what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention” It’s not a simple matter of opposing pleasure to duty. As digital addicts we are much like Matt Dillon’s junkie in Drugstore Cowboy, “working harder than a construction worker on overtime”. The constant craving to be connected, or to click through to the next link, or to check to see if mail has arrived, is intensely demanding: cyberspace is a hard taskmaster, and one that is never satisfied (and which, similarly, leaves us feeling dissatisfied any drained). Increasingly, I find reading books to be a refuge from digital twitch, and, in that way, more enjoyable – than ever. (That’s one reason that I greet the rise of ebooks with something of a shudder.) [Emphasis mine]

The word “shudder” calls up the right mix of fascination & repulsion here, and the right internal queasiness; I’d wager it’s something most screentext-savvy readers feel. This is more than a reactionary reflex, or a mourning period for the tactile qualities of the real object. It is a desire to re-evaluate the function of the book — a chance to consider the “dumb” object as an alternative to a perpetually linked and socially-aware space. But the cost of production won’t allow books to be any more (or any less) than a luxury item, a psychological stillness afforded to a particular class of consumer.

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Everything Mark Fisher writes is highly recommended, incidentally, especially his recent book Capitalist Realism. That one’s put out by Zer0 books, who also publish Owen Hatherley and Nina Power and a host of other (primarily British) writers blogging about politics, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Only took me 8 or 9 months.