Educational Media Reviews Online

In response to industrialization in the late 19th Century, a new political and social philosophy developed called Progressivism, and by the 1930s, it had swept social culture in America. Associated with the middle class, liberalism, and reform, its ideology rested on a belief in the inherent goodness of human nature. It taught that the keys to human flourishing included our proclivities towards pragmatism, adaptation, self-expression and self-determination. If these attitudes formed the backbone of society, our social future would continually be better than our present. Quickly adopted by the fledgling labor movements of the time, progressivism would come to undergird various political projects like the New Deal and various social projects like environmentalism and social justice. The makers of PressPausePlay never say so, but the message of their film is simply a recapitulation of Progressivist ideology for the digital age. Convinced that humans, at bottom, turn their creativity to useful purposes, this film argues, sometimes persuasively, that if you give everyone digital tools for self-expression, the world of the arts will be and is being transformed into something truly democratic, wide-ranging and relevant to people’s lives, and more than the sum of its parts. The filmmakers spend most of their time in brief interviews with various current artists who essentially say the same things: modern technology is wonderful, everyone doing their own thing is wonderful, and gosh, it’s so great we’re living in such a wonderful time for art.

This ideology, while appealing, is more problematic than the filmmakers and most of their interview subjects realize. (Firstly, it must be noted that almost all of those interviewed are unknown outside—and sometimes inside—their chosen artistic field.) The question of whether a superabundance of new voices in the artistic marketplace may dilute the quality of art overall is addressed, but the point is made over and over again that a huge proliferation of artistic voices will be a spur for society and individuals to not only bask in having so many more choices in art and self-expression, but also to develop more finely honed discernment about art and culture. In the end, doubt about the goodness of putting a video camera or sampling device in everyone’s hands is a straw man, and the few dissenters are sprinkled into various places in the film, just dropped in here and there while the overall narrative stays with artists who advance and reiterate the film’s ideology.

The other attitude clearly on display in the film is a general disrespect of art before the current/most recent generation, and a casual dismissal of definitions of art which have been in place for millennia. Early in the film, recording artist Moby sums this up simply by saying “In the olden days of 30, 40, 50 years ago, people didn’t make things. People would go to photography exhibits, people would go buy records, and there were professional artists. And now everybody’s a photographer, everybody’s a filmmaker, everybody’s a writer, everybody’s a musician.” There’s a tacit shift here from consumption to production: if you write something and you self-publish, you’re a writer just as much as someone who has a book contract with a publisher and works with their editors to release that book. The more subtle point no one seems to bring up is what this also does to the idea of an artist. Before, artists were celebrated as having careers and being a point of unity for a people-group, geography, style, or nation; in this digital revolution, artists are hobbyists, expressing only personal ideas and are left to fend for themselves in a glutted free market of mediocrity with no support from a larger artistic culture or the structures of that culture, be it a place, people-group, institution, or stylistic movement within their chosen art. Entrepreneur and author Seth Godin later speaks of how he writes a short book, puts it on the Internet for free, it gets millions of downloads, and then he self-publishes it and it goes to #5 on the NYT Bestseller list. All the while he doesn’t acknowledge the established system of publishing and his several previously successful books with that model, which are what got him to the point of being a big-name author in the first place.

The fault of PressPausePlay is not that it makes an argument for progressive thinking in the digital age, but that it stacks the deck and refuses to seriously explore the homogeneity and even dehumanizing side of a free-for-all art culture which values individual self-affirmation at the expense of celebrating art which speaks to a broad spectrum of life and engages thoughtfully with art that has come before in ages past. Technology is wonderful, and there is much to enjoy in the digital revolution, but this film suffers from a short-sightedness which refuses to take seriously even the obvious criticisms which can be leveled at it, much less more subtle ones.