Creative industry

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In the fullness of time

Non-fictionOur devices and data are more than extensions of our physical bodies. The so-called ‘human-centric’ approach to designing wearable and carriable devices means that they disrupt traditional divisions between work and leisure, production and consumption. It’s difficult not to feel the incursion of work-logics into leisure times and spaces as normal. Stretched for time, couples, families and friendship groups are starting to organise themselves using tools like Slack, Jira, Trello and Asana – that is, in the same way as workplaces.

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Less than human

Non-fictionWhat elevates Miku and makes her significant in our cultural landscape is her accessibility. Unlike traditional celebrities, who, even if they want to be accessible to their fans, only have so much time and can’t be perpetually available, Miku is software that anyone can buy and use. It only costs $200 and doesn’t require particularly advanced technical skills. Most of the people who produce Miku music are self-taught. One of the enduringly popular things about the concerts is that everything you see essentially comes from fans – the music, costuming and dance routines are all drawn from the expansive ‘Miku community’, where the lines between amateur and professional are deliberately blurred by everyone involved. You’re as likely to hear a song produced through a record label as you are one that was popularised by YouTube.

The marketing is still crap

Non-fictionThis neoliberal reframing of the arts into ‘creative industries’ first took hold in the UK with Tony Blair and his attempt to make the country’s image less frumpy and more innovative: New Labour lumped disparate industries together under the guise of creating a so-called ‘enterprise economy’. This ethos has continued with gusto in the twenty-first century, with artistic development corralled into corporate spaces while creative professionals are expected to perform their roles with sharpened governance, purpose and glad-handing to prove more is achieved by following a new regime of accountability.

Scrolling to the end

IntroductionOur contemporary content malaise feels very recent, yet the twentieth-century media scholars Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman predicted our technological capture decades before Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates devised a neat way for their fellow Harvard students to connect online.