1. Obsolescencia estética:
2. Tecno-fatiga
I recall a Gary Larsen cartoon in which a cretinous-looking student stands up in class and says to the teacher "may I be excused, my brain is full". I feel like that a lot lately. My brain is full of function keys for dozens of obsolete software packages. The prospect of learning a new software application, or even an update, fills me with dread. My professional situation exposes me to more of this than most people, as I'm expected to be able to teach a range of these things, but I would like to look at the question of changing technologies and time management from this perspective.
As a teacher of computer art , I am forced to put in long hours learning new peripherals and their software. I just took a new job. I have to learn the resident software packages, the peculiarities of the lab and campus network, etc. This load translates into hours of rote learning. Imagine if every two years the tools of a painter went out of date and every painter had to re-train: if drawing paper suddenly became multi-dimensional, paintbrushes were motorized, and color-mixing was achieved by numerical operation!
In the context of this changing landscape, my pedagogical strategy has been to emphasize conceptual skills that the student may `port' from one package or plaform to another, rather than to encourage fetishization of a particular product which will likely be obsolete before they graduate. But it becomes clear that what I had considered to be general conceptual notions almost universal to computer art are also subject to obsolescence. As machines become more powerful and more procedures become transparent, conceptual lessons such as the idea of conversion from Binary to Hexadecimal become irrelevant.
This is a load that the pace of technological change and the `irrelevant criterion' of technological up-to-dateness forces upon us. One is bound to ask: will this ever slow down? My current guess is that a consumer resistance will force a change in the cavalier way that new packages are introduced to the market. To some extent that is beginning to happen.
Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative:
The Artist in Dataspace
First presented at On the Air symposium
Transit/ORF, Innsbruck, Austria 1993
First published in Critical Issues in Electronic Media
Edited by Simon Penny, SUNY Press, 1995
http://simonpenny.net/texts/consumerculture.html