The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine

Abstract

As we hurtle into twenty-first century, will we be passive downloaders of content or active uploaders of meaning? The computer, writes Peter Lunenfeld, is twenty-first century's culture machine. It is a dream device, serving as mode of production, means of distribution, and site of reception. We haven't quite achieved flying cars and robot butlers of futurist fantasies, but we do have a machine that can function as a typewriter and a printing press, a paintbrush and a gallery, a piano and a radio, mail as well as mail carier. But, warns Lunenfeld, we should temper our celebration with caution; we are engaged in a secret war between downloading and uploading-between passive consumption and active creation-and outcome will shape our collective futures. In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as the high fructose corn syrup of imagination and worries that it can cause cultural diabetes; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and info-triage as cures; and offers tips for crafting bespoke futures in what he terms era of Web n.0 (interconnectivity to nth power). He also offers a stand-alone genealogy of digital visionaries, distilling a history of culture machine that runs from Patriarchs (Vannevar Bush's WWII generation) to Hustlers (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) to Searchers (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google fame). After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find will to make best of it.