Searching for the new Beautiful
There's no denying the Internet has the power to make our lives simpler, if we choose to let the technology do it. You can move millions of dollars (or a few bucks) from bank account to bank account, at home in your pajamas at night. You can buy 10 perfect Christmas presents in an hour, surfing the world in that short time to find exactly what you want. Of course for many of us, for better or worse, the Internet has made our lives more complicated - more choices, more opportunities. But by and large, that's our choice. The Internet is indeed the world's most useful tool.
But as a medium to convey information, thoughts, images, or sounds, the Internet is still lacking in one thing -- beauty. Sure we have content everywhere, and some of it is really good content, and some of it has elements of real beauty to it. But what's beautiful on the web?
Newspapers and magazines convey beauty every day, in their photography, design, how they manage text.
Radio has beauty. The sound of an AM baseball broadcast on a hot summer night. A favorite song you hear driving on a long trip.
Television has beauty too. The work of some of my colleague news photographers and reporters still astounds me, even though I've been in this business a quarter century. I remember 20+ years ago, to the early days of my career, when I was a college student working part-time at CBS News' Dallas bureau. Of all the great stories I got to help with, I remember one simple image from an otherwise routine spot news story that one of our correspondents Martha Teichner did, and I thought it was beautiful. There had been a tornado in West Texas. Typical tornado story -- lots of damage, survivor stories. You've seen it dozens of times. But the beauty in this story was a single shot at the end of the story -- a mailman delivering mail to a curbside mailbox that was still standing, in front of a home that wasn't. Life goes on, doesn't it? I don't remember how Martha phrased her last line of copy in that story, but she didn't have to say much. That story had beauty. Television as a medium has the power to convey beauty every day.
So where's the beauty on the Internet? You can post art to share it with others, but the art itself isn't really different from what it was centuries ago. You can post video and audio, and mix it together, and now even people with no training or experience and using cheap technology can do it. We're starting to see new ways to display video that will give us an HD-like experience. But that's just television transported to a new platform, so it's not really beauty that's native to the net. Sure, there's all kinds of interactive elements, but does interactive equate to beauty or is it just another tool?
Certainly we'll find beauty on the web too, in ways that no other medium can produce. It's coming soon, but what will beauty look like, and what will make it different from all the beauty we already have in our lives?
But as a medium to convey information, thoughts, images, or sounds, the Internet is still lacking in one thing -- beauty. Sure we have content everywhere, and some of it is really good content, and some of it has elements of real beauty to it. But what's beautiful on the web?
Newspapers and magazines convey beauty every day, in their photography, design, how they manage text.
Radio has beauty. The sound of an AM baseball broadcast on a hot summer night. A favorite song you hear driving on a long trip.
Television has beauty too. The work of some of my colleague news photographers and reporters still astounds me, even though I've been in this business a quarter century. I remember 20+ years ago, to the early days of my career, when I was a college student working part-time at CBS News' Dallas bureau. Of all the great stories I got to help with, I remember one simple image from an otherwise routine spot news story that one of our correspondents Martha Teichner did, and I thought it was beautiful. There had been a tornado in West Texas. Typical tornado story -- lots of damage, survivor stories. You've seen it dozens of times. But the beauty in this story was a single shot at the end of the story -- a mailman delivering mail to a curbside mailbox that was still standing, in front of a home that wasn't. Life goes on, doesn't it? I don't remember how Martha phrased her last line of copy in that story, but she didn't have to say much. That story had beauty. Television as a medium has the power to convey beauty every day.
So where's the beauty on the Internet? You can post art to share it with others, but the art itself isn't really different from what it was centuries ago. You can post video and audio, and mix it together, and now even people with no training or experience and using cheap technology can do it. We're starting to see new ways to display video that will give us an HD-like experience. But that's just television transported to a new platform, so it's not really beauty that's native to the net. Sure, there's all kinds of interactive elements, but does interactive equate to beauty or is it just another tool?
Certainly we'll find beauty on the web too, in ways that no other medium can produce. It's coming soon, but what will beauty look like, and what will make it different from all the beauty we already have in our lives?
posted by Chip Mahaney at 11:15 PM
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