I’ve been saying for a while that if *I* worked for Google and had one day a week to develop whatever app I wanted, I’d work on something to organise these bookmarks a little better. One of the most significant changes Mozilla made to the new Firefox was to install a “smart” navigation bar that learns which websites you visit regularly and makes them easier to find.

I’m pretty sure you and I are a little more intense than most people when it comes to bookmarking (frankly, I don’t think most people want to do the work, or are as anal, or even know how), but we can’t be the only ones. I’m sure eventually some ingenious person will come up with a system making it easier to pull up the sites one wants.

Another tangent to this topic -that you reminded me of- is the dynamic way in which users of content customize the lens through which they interact with media. For an internet instance, I have an extensive set of bookmarks that include media blogs, design blogs, Ignis Fatuus, photo repositories, and financial websites that I navigate to on a daily basis. In aggregate, these addresses form an ephemeral piece of information infrastructure, and it in turn serves as my filter through the maze of digital crap. iTunes facilitates a similar type of filtering with its playlist interface… a filter that enables users to navigate, expand, and compose smaller themes within an impossibly huge collection.

Maybe these forms of information downsizing, at the scale of the person, represent ways in which media will be cataloged and judged on the macro scale in the future.

I hope I didn’t come across as apocalyptic. I don’t think technology is capable of bringing about the end of high culture, or texts destined to be timeless classics. In fact, I think it will bring us lots of hidden gems that would otherwise miss. But at the same time, technology is capable of burying them in crap. So while I think digital technology is great — even if it means the proliferation of crap in disproportionally large amounts (we can always ignore it, right?) — it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I know people who say there’s nothing good on TV (or YouTube, or whatever). Of course, there’s something for everyone on TV (or YouTube, or whatever), even if it’s book readings or art criticism or documentaries about eye surgery. But it’s understandable if you think that there’s nothing good on TV, because finding what you’re looking for is like finding a needle in a haystack.

One of the major topics I haven’t talked about yet (but am planning to) is new ways that content can be pre-filtered for us, especially in organic, subculture-based ways (I call it “word of mouse”); think of it as crowdsourcing the job of the critic. This isn’t organised enough to be happening on a large enough scale to be utile yet, but I think it will happen.

I think your question about what will endure as art, culture, etc. is a fascinating one, and I hope we live to see what type of artefact baggage comes along with us. Who knows… maybe we’ll be typecast as the parody/youtube mash-up era.

Regardless of tangibility, time tends to validate the cultural “worth” of things, and cultural artefacts tend to acquiesce in the face of some populist metric. Do we (or should we) have control over what becomes the representative cultural material of our time? For a historical example, some would say that Shakespeare himself was a populist, based on the character content and bawdy humour present in a great deal of his plays. Does that make Shakespeare’s work any less authentic or culturally relevant? There is even a small group that protests the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work (“The Shakespeare-Bacon Theory”), so why should such a figure of controversy be part of the contemporary canon?

I don’t really know where I’m going with this… other than to say that apocalyptic sentiments with respect to culture have been raised before, but in spite of that, advances in access and replication have provided some contribution to culture. Digital technology, especially, is flattening the access of tools and materials to be more inclusive to the general public. Photography, in a broad sense, has never been more popular (as evident in the explosion of image hosting sites like Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, etc.), and the idea of disposable content adds to the repertoire of the neophyte photographer. If anything, technological ubiquity should improve the cultural canon of a given time, because (in theory) it should force artists and authors of content to be more creative… or to invent new tools that will later be consumed by an interface available to the masses.

The disposable, the replicated, and the mediated experience will always be an issue (and it has been since we decided to seek shelter from the “profanity” of nature)… but I think we’ll all be okay as long as the Benjamins of the world remain critical and questioning.

I don’t think digital distribution is bad, overall — people like me get blogs, for one thing, and without adding to consumerism, either.

But … if this is the state of the art these days, perhaps publishing really is doomed. There’s only so much demand, and the more content being thrown around, the less of a real audience works of value can build over time. To be enduring, a work first has to endure … I wonder if any new work could ever reach an audience (share) as broad as Shakespeare’s again?