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Cultural Differences Part Four - Its a Generational Thing.................

......For all my life I have been surrounded by stuff - cultural stuff ; cultural artifacts in the form of books , newspapers , albums ( ah, vinyl and the feel of an album cover ) , CDs , videos  ( and later on , DVDs ) , catalogues , prints , drawings , paints - and for me , most importantly in my line of work, a drawing board.

I like stuff - apart from the obvious storage problem ( last time we moved I had 46 boxes of books ) most stuff is easy to access , doesn't require ( at least in the case of books or pictures ) a power source , is easy to layout in groups for comparisons , easy to cross reference between two , three or more sources at the same time ; and because you can lay it out in groups then the 'stuff ' can form its own relationships - books , pictures laid out at random can generate connections that you were not previously aware of. I suppose the most extreme form of 'stuff ' for me is something like Francis Bacons studio which I discussed at length in my posting ' On Reflection ' dated 23 / 10 / 2010 : you get this very visceral feel of the creative process through the accumulation of visual references with which he surrounded himself in his working process.

.....And now I understand that ' stuff ' is disappearing from our lives ....all I need now is a laptop / kindle / ipod / iphone , some apps for streaming / Flickr / Skype / Netflix etc and a credit card..............everything is reduced to streams of digital information.

This worries me - the further we become divorced from the tactile process, the further we become estranged from reality . As soon as money started moving from a purely cash transaction to an exchange of information we started to loose a sense of value , partly at least fueling the credit boom and the subsequent crash . Lets take an example - there are a couple of books I want , one costing £5.00 , the second one costing £50.00 . I go into a bookshop - remember those ? - and hand over £5.00 for the first one. Handing over £50.00 for the second one I am immediately aware how much more valuable it is - ten times the worth of the first one - so I wonder is it worth it ? and do I really want it / need it ?  Ok , now lets look at Amazon - I can buy the books on line ; great ............but the transaction is now exactly the same - just a click of the mouse . There is no differentiation in the process , no sense of added value between the purchases.

Lets stay with books for a moment and their replacement by the Kindle and downloads - just a click away. Well, maybe not ; one of my most treasured books is ' Fra Angelico at San Marco ' by William Hood , a detailed analysis of the fresco cycle at the monastery of San Marco in Florence . Superbly illustrated , a double page spread when the book is opened comes in at 290mm high by 500mm wide. This doesn't even fit on my laptop screen , and to reduce it to suit reduces the size of the images and - more importantly - the font size ; maybe at the reduced size I can't even read it..............yes, downloading six books onto a Kindle is by far the easiest way of taking a good read on holiday , agreed , so maybe we have to be selective here.

The sense of touch is one of our five senses and we are rapidly loosing it , literally ; all tactile awareness is now reduced to an interface with a keyboard - everything is a click away. We are moving from a state of active participation to a passive state - art students don't even know the feel of paper on pencil anymore as design programmes become more and more sophisticated : for ' artisan / craftsman ' read technician.

The phrase ' to loose touch ' means to loose contact.........maybe it IS a generational thing, but I don't want to loose touch with stuff just yet, please.