| ||||
| ||||
 |
|
McCloud Cuckoo-Land By Gary Groth
It is axiomatic that the commercial colonization of new frontiers, real or virtual, must be accompanied by hyperbolic rhetorical claims that are clearly perceived after-the-fact as transparently propagandistic and whose vastly inflated humanitarian forecasts are unrecognizable when compared to the inevitable outcome. This is as true of, say, the new frontier of the American West in the 19th century as it was of the new mediated frontier of radio and television in the 20th. Opening these new frontiers to infinite commercial exploitation will invariably, we are told, spread enlightenment to the masses, nurture democracy, reestablish the bonds of community, bring us closer to God and generally work to the betterment of man and society. The entrepreneurial P.T. Barnum helped pave the way to mythologizing the American West by chasing a small herd of buffalo around Hoboken, New Jersey to the amusement of huge crowds, while the pulp novelist Ned Buntline created the romantic gunslinger-as-hero formula of the western. On a more intellectual plane, Theodore Roosevelt published The Winning of the West in 1889, which Frederick Jackson Turner described as "awakening a real national self-consciousness and patriotism" in America. Similarly, the commercial ownership of radio was preceded by a PR campaign conferring vast humanitarian benefits on the new media. According to radio and TV historian Erik Barnouw, the first issue of Radio Broadcasting (May 1922) proclaimed that radio "symbolized a coming age of enlightenment. It was seen as leading to the fulfillment of democracy. Government, it was said, would become 'a living thing to its citizens.' Broadcasting was called 'the people's university.' It would link rich and poor, young and old. It would end the isolation of rural life. It would unite the nation." Subsequent claims for television were even more extravagant, of course, before NBC President William Paley would refer to it as the cultural wasteland it would become in short order.
Cheerleading for the latest media frontier of the Internet and digital technology is a small industry in itself. The claims are not only eerily similar to those voiced about television in the 1940s and 1950s, but the hype has, if anything, been ratcheted up a few notches. The designated pitchman and residing guru for how comics will benefit from digitalization is Scott McCloud, who tells us that the Internet will provide a level playing field where self-publishers can successfully compete with the mega-corporations and expand the artform itself into new, unseen frontiers of aesthetic splendor.
But, I am getting ahead of myself.
Understanding Comics, Et Al.
Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics in 1993 to universally positive critical acclaim. Everyone from Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman to Jim Lee and Alan Moore sang its praises. No one had seen anything quite like it before. There had been books about comics earlier (and good books, too, such as Coulton Waugh's The Comics and Jules Feiffer's Great Comic Book Heroes), but Understanding Comics was unique: a book of comic book theory told in comics form. McCloud was the right person in the right place at the right time. Understanding Comics rode the wave of a growing academic interest in comics, and McCloud became that most improbable of creatures: a comic book theoretician celebrity. He hit the lecture circuit and hasn't stopped theorizing, carving out a career trajectory for himself as a comics theorist and spokesman for comics - he must be in the rolodexes of every mainstream news organization and is known to give sound bites on demand. This trajectory was interrupted briefly - and disastrously when he reinvented himself again as a comics creator with 1997's Adventures of Abraham Lincoln. The San Antonio Express News referred to him recently as "probably the industry's leading aesthetic philosopher and guru," Frank Miller called him "just about the smartest guy in comics," and Rick Veitch believes he is "a world-class thinker." He has also become something of a theory hero among a certain generation of young cartoonists (in their late 20s and early 30s) who look to him for intellectual guidance (in his Journal interview, Jason Lutes practically needed a dribble bib whenever he mentioned McCloud or Understanding Comics). Previously, McCloud was best known for Zot!, a manga-inspired comics series about a teen-aged superhero published in the 1980s. This was competent enough superhero work, sentimental, charming and almost endearingly old-fashioned in those pre-Dark Knight days, but against the backdrop of Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking Maus, the Hernandez Brothers' innovative visual vocabulary which they used to explore characterological and social issues in Love & Rockets, the anthologies of RAW and Weirdo, the liberating humor of Peter Bagge and Chester Brown, new artists pushing the boundaries of what we had come to know as comics and older artists doing the best work of their lives, Zot! was by general consensus inconsequential, even regressive.
Between Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, McCloud went back to narrative fiction and made the mistake of indulging his theories, particularly his new-found love of computer technology (and apparently his hatred of beautiful drawing) by producing - or do I mean manufacturing? - a miscarriage called The Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, a book that failed on every conceivable level: satirically, visually, conceptually, even technologically. If an author could refute the practical value of his own theorizing about art and technology, McCloud succeeded in doing it in this book. The abject aesthetic failure of Lincoln might've given a more self-searching artist pause before he embarked on singing the praises of the very technology that proved so disastrously and ineptly misused here. But, still flush with the critical and commercial success of Understanding Comics, McCloud evidently continued with Reinventing Comics without missing a beat.
Reinventing Comics
Reinventing Comics is, properly speaking, two books uncomfortably wedged into one. (McCloud acknowledges this in his introduction: "putting the ideas in Part One and Two together wasn't easy. They are two very different books...") The first half, titled "Windmills and Giants," is a conventional history of comics and the comics industry from approximately the late 1970s to present. This more or less sets the stage for the second half (titled "Catching A Wave") that comprises McCloud's speculations as to what Internet and digital technology hold for the future of comics. Part 1 also serves as an examination of the intricate market mechanisms of the direct sales market; I was an intimate participant in the direct sales market throughout this period and even I found this excruciatingly tedious. I cannot imagine what a lay reader's reaction to this would be. McCloud's technique of combining micro-economic comics minutia with simplistic and repetitious symbols (he uses his two-panel open-and-shut eye icon representing the quintessence of the comic 145 times throughout the book, or approximately 144 times too many) seems almost designed to induce narcosis on the part of the reader. And while I could posit quibbles large and small with this section, the second half of the book is of greater interest and I will primarily focus on it within this critique, although I'll refer to certain features of Part 1 as they relate to Part 2. The second half of Reinventing is divided into two chapters, "The Frictionless Economy," which attempts to prove that e-commerce and e-delivery will revolutionize the business of comics, and "The Infinite Canvas," which proselytizes on behalf of the aesthetic potential of digital and internet comics. This critique focuses on "The Frictionless Economy"; next issue, I'll tackle "The Infinite Canvas." But first a few general comments about the visual format of the book.
The first thing that struck me about Reinventing Comics is that, unlike Understanding Comics, in which the best way to illustrate mechanisms of the comics form was in the very form it was describing, the only reason to have "written" Reinventing Comics in comics form was to capitalize on the commercial success of the previous volume and to bloat what would have been a 50-page essay into a $19.95 book. There is no intrinsic reason Reinventing Comics should itself be a comic. The comics format actually works against the first half of the book, where McCloud's desperation for imagery to illustrate arcane economic events and principles is palpable, and palpably deficient. There are countless drawings of Scott-the-narrator walking around or sitting in his studio lecturing the reader; given the loveliness of these drawings and the concomitant interest the reader could have in these drawings qua drawings, they are entirely superrogatory. He has mastered a curiously unique rhetorical strategy - or visual sleight-of-hand - that combines a phlebitic and platitudinous sound bite with easy-to-swallow symbols and a good-natured, visual persona who prances and zips around the page like a professorial Candide, wide-eyed, curious, that simultaneously oozes sincerity and gullibility.
The quality of the line drawing is also conspicuously worse than that in Understanding Comics. The drawing in Understanding Comics looks as if it were drawn by a human hand - not a particularly proficient human hand, but a human hand nonetheless - whereas Reinventing Comics looks like it was drawn by a computer. Which it more or less was. According to McCloud, he drew it directly onto a computer using the latest technology to avoid the crude instruments of pencil and paper. The result is a dead line, stilted figure work, lots of scans, and some jazzy computer effects. It is for the most part visually grotesque and, more ironically even than Abraham Lincoln, a refutation of many of his grandiose claims about the superiority of computer technology over and against such antiquated techniques as applying ink to paper with pen or brush.
The second half of Reinventing Comics is devoted to how the Internet and digital technology will affect the art and industry of comics, and as I implied in my opening paragraphs, it is a long groveling before techno-rule. He prefaces his comments with an odd disclaimer (page 131): "My rule of thumb: If it's about the present, it's probably hype. If it's about the future, then no amount of hype can do it justice." Never has an author so cleverly hidden in plain sight his intention to eschew a commitment to responsibility and truth in favor of his wholly uncritical, indeed, breathless and drooling enthusiasms for technology irrespective of their grounding in reality or even commonsense. Caveat emptor, as they say.
What is most deficient about the 113-page section devoted to comics and the Internet is the level of critical intelligence on display, which is embarrassingly superficial: McCloud embraces all Internet and digital technology without reservation. The bibliography doesn't allow for any books remotely questioning of the new world order. Every book about computers or the Internet (and there aren't many, at that) is basically by a well-known cheerleader for the industry; no dissidents are allowed in the McCloudian world view. In McCloud's jolly and affirmative presentation, the Internet is an instrument of comics' (not to say the world's) salvation and skeptics are dismissed as "cynics," to whom McCloud may as well hang a "Do Not Enter" sign on the cover of the book.
McCloud is mining a genre, heretofore unseen in comics, but evidently ubiquitous among hustlers in the futurology racket. Theodore Roszak's description of John Naisbitt's Megatrends and Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave in The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking could easily include McCloud's Reinventing Comics:
You couldn't ask for a better or more accurate description of McCloud's Reinventing Part 2: "Catching a Wave." And what makes the description particularly remarkable (if not prescient) is that it was written 15 years ago, proving that even as these impostures refer endlessly to sweeping and limitless change in every area of human conduct, from the structure of the political economy to the human mind itself, the clutch of rhetorical clichés at their disposal remains utterly immutable in their formulaic predictability. The more things change....
In keeping with his penchant for list-making so prodigiously displayed in Understanding Comics, McCloud begins the book by providing a list of not one, but 12 "revolutions" that have occurred (or are ongoing) in comics from the 1970s - and if you didn't know that you lived through 12 revolutions, join the club. They are:
Leave it to McCloud to refer to what are mostly incremental shifts in industry practices as revolutions. It's the next three so-called revolutions that I will concern myself with:
McCloud pushes two main futurological theses in the second half of the book: The first is that Internet and digital technology will effect a global economic shift and result in greater autonomy on the part of the producer and consumer of culture while simultaneously displacing the power of media conglomerates, which, unlike the Internet, McCloud claims, does not give the public what it truly wants. Second, that digital comics, created by computer methods and experienced in digital form, will, by jettisoning antiquated techniques involving pencils, pens, brushes, ink, and paper, catapult comics into aesthetic heights unreachable otherwise or heretofore. McCloud actually does a great disservice to both art and political reality by asserting these pipe dreams as even remotely attainable.
The first part of "Catching a Wave" (titled "The Thing About Tools"; perhaps in an effort to duplicate hypertext, there are chapters within chapters in this book) is a hagiographic adoration of computers specifically, and technological progress in general. It never occurs to McCloud that technologies could ever be anything other than the benevolent tools of mankind. This seems to be a particularly dangerous and blinkered, indeed, obtuse point of view, though it is perfectly in keeping with the rah-rah tone of the book as a whole, and of books in the futurological genre in general. One would think that at a time when books such as IBM and the Holocaust point out the malevolent uses to which computers can be put (Edwin Black proves that IBM computers, or punch-card technology, helped the Nazis automate the extermination of the Jews; or on a less button-pushing level, of course, computer technology can actually accelerate environmental degradation by making corporate polluters more effective economic machines) that one should exercise greater judiciousness when extolling technology and refrain from conferring such exclusive benignity to such devices. But, quite the contrary: As the power and ubiquity of computers grows, McCloud enthusiastically claims that "some far more dramatic scenarios suggest themselves." Naturally, a list of these "more dramatic scenarios" follows:
"...the growth of a new generation utterly at home with digital media..."
"...a radical realignment of industrialized economies..."
"...the advent of wearable computing..."
"...the first stirrings of genuine artificial intelligence..."
"...the maturing of virtual reality as more than just a headache-inducing novelty..." and
"...the first imperfect prototypes for the ultimate 'killer-app' - a universal translator..."
Aside from the banality of the list - computer clothing of all things! - it offers an insight into the underlying ideological assumptions informing McCloud's point of view: every one of these forthcoming technological "virtues" is something to be consumed (computer clothing, the universal translator) or something that will facilitate consuming (the shopping cart icon illustrating the glorious realignment of industrialized economies is truly sinister). McCloud describes the second half of Reinventing Comics as "a full-blown manifesto for radical change," but as the above makes clear (along with his breathless obeisance to e-commerce and his general prostration before all communication technology that will facilitate e-commerce), his "radical" position is merely the standard neo-liberal agenda of global capitalism and universal consumerism proffered by most western governments and corporations, not to mention the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. McCloud even adopts the same populist rhetoric that corporations and governments are fond of: wider bandwidth, high-speed Internet access and interactive television will make us all liberated consumers.
As Jesse Drew wrote (in "Media Activism and Radical Democracy"): "Media pundits, academic futurists, and technology-industry spokespeople who uncritically promote the new technologies like to describe the upcoming technological changes as a 'revolution,' implying some larger social change, as if the major structural problems confronting our democracy were merely technical shortcomings." But as Ernest Mandel notes in Late Capitalism (1972):
McCloud's third chapter, "The Frictionless Economy," offers a potted history of the Internet cobbled together, as nearly as I can tell, entirely from Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon) and is told with the same narrative momentum as the book: a small band of intellectual techno-heroes, financed by the Defense Department, and thinking out of the box, invented the Internet (then the ARPANET). A key player was J.C.R. Licklider, who graduated from Washington University with degrees in psychology, mathematics, and physics. Upon joining the Harvard faculty, he came under the sway of B.F. Skinner and became a behaviorist. According to Hafner and Lyon:
In other words, Licklider was a true believer and the spiritual antecedent to McCloud's feel-good prognosticatory career. McCloud's recap of Internet history brings us up to the early 1990s "when the web hit the mainstream like an atom bomb" and there it ends, followed by this hortatory exclamation: "Licklider's 'Library of the Future' has, in some ways, surpassed even his expectations, but with all the hype and corporate breast-beating, we can sometimes get jaded and forget what an astounding invention the Web really is!" Our man is off and running, unjaded by the corporate breast-beating, to extol the virtues of the net. The rest of the chapter is devoted to describing how, through the miracle of digital delivery, the net will empower each and every individual artist to become an entrepreneur and bypass the insidious obstacles to disseminating his work to a wide public and goes into some detail, at least by McCloudian standards, to explain why corporations who currently control the vast majority of global media, won't also control the Internet.
But, curiously, McCloud's history of the Internet stops short of asking; Who owns the telecommunications technology that makes the Internet possible? As it happens, it is the very same handful of multi-billion dollar corporations who own most global telecommunications technology and mass media. Thanks to the corporate-friendly Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the reinvigoration of the concept of corporate convergence that the Telecommunications Act made possible whereby the previous legally enforceable distinctions between media and communication sectors have been eliminated, leading to the mergers, takeovers and strategic business alliances among media empires, telecommunications corporations and computer firms, thus ensuring their dominance of the Internet.
As James Fallows wrote (in the New York Review of Books, November 16, 2000), "Until four years ago... telephone wires, cable connections, wireless transmission networks... had been treated as separate industries, regulated by different agencies of the federal government. After passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, they became one big blob of 'bandwidth.' Bandwidth is the tech industry's term for the speed at which information can be transmitted. Before the Telecommunications act, different sources of bandwidth - telephones, cable and broadcast TV, cellular phones, and the Internet among them - were separated from one another as businesses and often operated as regulated monopolies. . . . The pre-1996 system discouraged the growth of huge media conglomerates, because, say, a television network couldn't buy a telephone company." Curiously, none of this is mentioned either in Reinventing Comics, or in any book to be found in the bibliography.
Nor does McCloud mention anywhere that the floodgates to the corporate colonization of the Internet was opened up when in 1993 - the point at which McCloud's history of the Internet ends - the US government privatized its portion of the Internet backbone, wiping out any possibility of treating the Internet as a publicly owned communications sector favoring full citizen participation, and instead ensuring that it would be a corporate-run for-profit branch of global media. Hauber and Hauber argue in Netizens (another history of the Internet not found in McCloud's bibliography) that the basic plan for a "transition of the network from a government operation to a commercial service" was nailed down in a closed-door, by-invitation-only meeting in 1990 at Harvard University attended by government officials and representatives of the largest telecommunication and computer firms. According to Robert McChesney in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, "A decisive point [of the meeting] was the argument that it would be 'unfair' to private providers of network services to have to compete with the government, so the government should just get out of the Internet. The conference summary report acknowledged that private control of the Internet would change the nature of the system, moving it away from a public service, with private vendors most interested in providing services to affluent consumers and businesses, but that did not alter the report's recommendation for privatization. 'Sure [the government] created the technology through their funding,' an official of the Internet Society conceded, 'but the baby has grown up and left home.' Home being a public service sector with democratic or plebiscitary mechanisms that would encourage engagement as citizens rather than consumers, of course."
Although the Internet was initially financed and controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, the foundational technology resided in the public domain and the rights to it were made freely available to various universities and then more widely. Robert H. Reid, in Architects of the Net, wrote that at this point, "nobody owned the network. Virtually nobody made money from it directly. And almost every piece of software that governed or accessed it was free." In 1980, the National Science Foundation took over management of the Internet's consortium of university users. Four years after the Harvard University meeting, in February of 1994, according to Dan Schiller's Digital Capitalism, "the NSF announced that four Network Access Points (NAPs) would be built so that a new class of Internet operators might interconnect directly with each other to exchange traffic. The purpose of the scheme was to cede provision of the Internet backbone network directly to commercial carriers. Little more than a year later, the NSFNET backbone was indeed supplanted by the NAP architecture, and the later in turn became the Internet. Additional NAPs, directly owned and privately controlled by corporate vendors, were likewise established."
McCloud's belief that the Internet will provide a level playing field where self-published cartoonists can successfully compete with multinational corporations derives from his unshakeable - and one must say, quaint - faith in the establishment of an idyllic free market system: In McCloud Cuckoo-Land, "We're about to enter a world in which the path from selling ten comics to selling ten thousand comics to selling ten million comics is as smooth as ice. An economy in which consumers' interests are served directly, not merely guessed at, and in which the creator's work can rise or fall on the strength of that interest - and not for any other reason," meaning the commercial dictates of publishers.
In other words, the Internet will usher in an era of a Friedmanesque free-market purity, at least as far as the arts and entertainment industries are concerned, because the digitalization of everything and the ability to zap this digitalized cultural product across the Internet will derail the economic behemoths whose power is predicated on treating cultural products as physical objects. "As objects," McCloud tells us, "[comics] have been subjected to the strict laws of supply and demand, and diverted by those with enough power to turn those laws to their own advantage. But, what happens to the law of supply and demand when the demand creates the supply? Digital delivery isn't just about improving selection, it's about the elimination of the very idea of selection!... For music, art, movies, comics, and the written word, our whole planet is about to become one giant jukebox - and the foundations of a new economy are about to be built, not by those who want to make a killing, but by those who want to make a living." If it weren't for those inconvenient physical objects, capitalism would have worked perfectly since the Industrial Revolution.
McChesney could not be more to the point when addressing this kind of shallow, sloganeering pap: "The claim that the market is a fair, just, and rational allocator of goods and services is premised on the notion that the market is based on competition. This competition constantly forces all economic actors to produce the highest quality product for the lowest possible price and it rewards those who work the hardest and the most efficiently. Therefore, these new technologies will permit hungry entrepreneurs to enter markets, slay the corporate dinosaurs, lower prices, improve products, and generally do good things for humanity.... This is the sort of pabulum that is served up to those Americans who lack significant investments in the economy. It provides an attractive image of the way our economy works - making it seem downright fair and rational - but it has little to do with the reality. Corporate executives will invoke this rhetoric in dealing with Congress or the public, and at a certain level, they may believe it. But their actions speak louder than words."
In fact, the same corporations that dominate media, telecommunications, software programming, and computer manufacturing are succeeding in duplicating precisely the same level of hegemony over Net marketing that they currently enjoy in their respective fields and in creating the same economic hierarchies and the same financial obstacles to using the Internet as exist in traditional business practices that dissuades most of the population from participating in the economy as anything other than wage slaves.
Convergence is now the name of the game: the corporations that now dominate global media (Newscorp, AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Sony, and TCI) are all maneuvering themselves into impregnable positions whereby they have complete control over every aspect of media transmission - from content creation to digital delivery directly into the homes of every consumer. Digital TV appears to be the endgame, where everything converges: satellite TV, digital cable TV, digital terrestrial TV, the Internet, and intensified branding and advertising synergies (click on Cameron Diaz's outfit and it will be placed in your shopping cart).
To this end, Microsoft has spent over $2 billion between 1994 and 1997 purchasing or buying a stake in some 50 communications companies, including $1 billion alone devoted to buying an 11.5% stake in the cable giant Comcast. It has also partnered with TCI, Intel, GTE, and the Baby Bell regional phone companies, and owns its own WebTV, connecting the World Wide Web through telephone lines, and purchased major stakes in Qwest, the 4th largest US long-distance carrier. AT&T bought TCI, the behemoth cable company owned by the neanderthal John Mallone, as well as the cable modem ISP Excite@Home. AOL bought Netscape, the main competitor to Microsoft in the browser business, then bought Time Warner (which alone did $28 billion in business in 1998), which owns the cable network CNN, Time magazine, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Warner Brothers Studios, and, oh yes, DC Comics. AOL-Time Warner now runs about half the cable TV systems in the United States. Disney is allied to several major U. S. telecommunication companies as well as to America Online. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is reported to be buying DirecTV, the biggest satellite broadcaster in the world, which would create a new company - Sky Global Networks, worth $80 billion.
What does the smartest guy in comics think of all this? Not much. McCloud appears to be dimly aware of facts such as these - never actually enumerated in Reinventing Comics, something of a missed opportunity for a list-maker of McCloud's caliber - and aware that they may inconvenience his populist message that the Internet will empower individual artists and displace the economic dominance of culture corporations. He spends a whole of six pages dismissing this skeptical view of the Internet's populist potency. "Here at the turn of the century," he writes (on page 190) "the barons of the physical world have begun to leverage their influence on theme analysts to take a New-Game-Same-Rules attitude. The evening news is filled with stories of corporate mergers and takeovers," which is as specific as McCloud gets as to corporate ownership of the Internet. "In such a climate," he continues reassuringly, "one might fear that our lone creator wouldn't survive because he'd never exceed his thousand readers once the big boys move in! With more cash to throw into production and promotion, the big and slick frequently get a head start on the small and innovative - and, in the industry that's grown up around printed comics, we've seen the tools by which the products of bigger players can easily crowd others out of the market entirely. But" - and here comes the good news - "if you think the same rules will automatically apply on the Web - think again!" McCloud's main argument here is that the Internet will preclude the manufacturing cost of a physical product, giving the "lone creator" the necessary edge to fulfill the dream of McCloud's level playing field.
This would be almost touchingly naive if it weren't so morally and politically complacent. First, it is unlikely that digital culture will ever entirely displace physical objects of culture; they will probably always co-exist, which will give larger corporate entities the scale-of-economy edge they enjoy in perpetuity. Today, most Web traffic is driven predominantly by media-saturated brand names, the purchasing of the physical products (books, DVDs, CDs, etc.), and the synergies connected to various physical - not digital - modes of consumerism (amusement parks, restaurants, etc.). This is a distinct advantage to those corporations who just happen to own the majority of those traditional media. Second, even assuming that all physical vestiges of culture disappear tomorrow, there is the question of how exactly individuals would discover work - art, entertainment, journalism, et al. - on the Web. If you don't already own all the media necessary to drive consumers to a corresponding website, the only answer is advertising or media attention in one of the vehicles owned by one of the global conglomerates too busy promoting their own cultural product to give you the time of day. When Oprah raved about Gemstar-TV Guide's new Rocket e-books, Gemstar CEO Henry Yuen announced that he'd spend $100 million to promote Gemstar editions of six new bestsellers. Just in case you thought you misread that, let me repeat: he was willing to commit $100 million to promote six bestsellers. This is the kind of level playing field the lone creator will be playing in. According to W3PR Inc., an Internet advertising firm, there are currently over 1 billion websites worldwide. According to The Incredible Internet Guides, "the most comprehensive search engines are aware of only 16%" of the extant websites. Which is to say that if you throw a website up on the Web and expect consumers to flock to it, you will be sorely disappointed because it will be virtually invisible unless you already have established a name for yourself elsewhere or have a small fortune to spend on advertising. In short, as a lone creator, you'll be in largely the same position you're in now, or possibly worse. The same rules of capitalization required to attract a potential buyer's attention still apply.
In a feeble attempt to address this issue, McCloud dismisses those of us who see the glass half-empty thusly: "The idea that the flow of traffic on the Web can be controlled like it is in the physical world has been the source of many analysts' cynicism" (to which Shaw had the best rejoinder, as always: "The ability to see things as they actually are is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.")
"We know that the power of advertising is limited if the work itself fails to deliver, but that principle only applies if readers know they have an alternative!" (McCloud is onto something here!) "Some fear that as more and more once-independent 'portal' sites are bought (often at huge prices) with the intent of maintaining their impartial reputations - such sites may increasingly be filled with nothing but paid endorsements and in-house promos!" But, not to worry, because "unlike in the physical world, the brand loyalty of online consumers can't be easily coerced because you can only keep consumers in if you can lock the competition out and the truth about the competition only has to penetrate once! If your trusted portal only leads to sites that pay for the privilege or that the portal's parent owns, then your experience is quickly degraded and you'll look elsewhere. And unless you're straight out of the box, you'll know you can. You'll know because you'll know someone whose site isn't listed and who found out why. You'll know because the sites you visit will link to other sites with links to still more sites that can never all be policed. And you'll know because there'll be at least one subject that you'll know enough about to know when the coverage sucks."
In short, online commercial media will work perfectly because online consumers will have the activist intelligence to smell a corporate rat and, acting like the rational consumers they are in the rational free market paradigm, shift allegiances to portals more in keeping with their penchant for good taste and commitment to free expression. On the very next page, not to stack the deck too obviously, McCloud portrays the average consumer of physical culture - who is presumably the future consumer of digital culture - as a passive dolt. "THINK; How many times have you been dying to see a great new movie, but settled for what was playing in your area? How many times have you tuned in to a just okay TV show because there was nothing else on?" Not only will a commercial Internet turn the economy on its head, but it will apparently turn willful dolts into highly intelligent, discriminating consumers!
Why would McCloud assume that his average American consumer, who doesn't have the intellectual and cultural resources to do anything other than watch a mediocre TV show "because there was nothing else on," would have the wherewithal to discriminate among corporate portals? As McCloud notes almost parenthetically, portals are being colonized by - surprise! - the same corporations that control the majority of global media. As McChesney reports, "With 11 million subscribers. AOL [Time Warner] accounts for 40% of all online traffic, and 60% of home use. Fully 80% of AOL users never venture beyond AOL's sites." Yahoo! And Excite are linked with AT&T's Worldnet Service and Dell Computer. The portal AltaVista is owned by the computer manufacturer Compaq. Microsoft launched the portal Start.com and formed a strategic alliance with Barnes & Noble in which they will, according to promotional materials, "weave together their online products and services." As one investment analyst noted in the August 3 issue of Fortune magazine, "Launching an e-commerce site without a portal partner is like opening a retail store in the desert. Sure, it's cheap, but does anybody stop there?"
"The Web is the biggest collaborative positive effort in recorded history, and there's every reason to think that it's still in its infancy" gurgles our proponent of the power of positive thinking on the last page of "The Frictionless Economy." McCloud is, as everyone charitably agrees, an enthusiastic and sincere proponent of comics, but that is no excuse for putting a happy face on and misrepresenting the system that is now being glued into place by way of corporate and governmental complicity and that will result in further marginalizing dissident voices and increasing artistic subservience to a monolithic engine that is becoming too enormous to comprehend. (Speaking of subservience, it is worth pointing out that this "full-blown manifesto" prophesying the liberation of the lone creator was published by AOL-Time Warner (1997 annual sales: $25 billion). McCloud could've thrown this on the Internet, but as he would be the first to admit, the technology isn't there yet. He could've published through an independent publisher (Top Shelf's Chris Staros would've given up his firstborn to publish this dreadful book), but McCloud went to AOL-Time Warner for the same reason future creators who want their work sold on the Internet will go with AOL-Time Warner, which is, as McCloud would put it if this review were written in the form of a 200 page comic book - $$$$$.
"Catching a Wave" in particular and Reinventing Comics in general reads more like a resumé for the lecture circuit than a truth-seeking polemic, but if it spoke honestly about the future of global capitalism and corporate domination, the author probably wouldn't be invited to speak to employees on the Microsoft campus. McCloud has allowed himself to become a spokesman for the same point of view shared by corporations, Western governments, and numerous high-profile media hustlers while masquerading as an outspoken radical bucking the system: e-commerce will increase global economic growth, liberate individuals in third world countries (while paradoxically strengthening multinational conglomerates), turn us all into budding little capitalists, and enhance democracy throughout the planet - you know, like it did in the last U. S. Presidential election. McCloud's eagerness to see the entire planet turned into one gigantic jukebox that mirrors that of governments and corporations who want a global polity turned into depoliticized consumers. This is not only stupid, but dangerous because it's counter-productive to the goals of true radicalism - human-scale economics and culture for starters. Let David Watson's sobering remarks about such feel-good top-down propagandizing from his essential jeremiad Against The Megamachine serve as a warning to anyone who would take this nonsense seriously:
|
||
|
About | Subscribe | Back Issues | Writers | Advertising
Newswatch | Interviews | Reviews | Essays | Online Features
All site contents are © 2002
|
||||
