Virginia Heffernan on technology, virtual reality, and what the Internet means
Within this little feud, culture critic Virginia Heffernan has been a longtime outlier, peacemaker, and iconoclast. Heffernan has literary East Coast chops—she earned a PhD in English Literature from Harvard, and then worked as a TV and tech critic at the New York Times for close to a decade.
But Heffernan has long celebrated the aesthetic potential of the web’s whackier and more whimsical corners. She may well be the least cranky tech critic east of the Rockies. In her new book, “Magic and Loss,” she argues that “the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art”—a kind of giant role-playing game that demands “a new aesthetics and associated morality,” and, perhaps above all, a sense of wonder.
Are the artistic project and the profit motive incompatible in some ways?
Thing just aren’t produced if money isn’t being made.
Why did poetry suddenly become short when the New Yorker was the gatekeeper for all poetry? If you’re weighing it against a cartoon and columns of text, then suddenly you can’t write like Walt Whitman with long lines. Most great American art forms, including novels, do end up finding a way to make some money. I know some artists don’t like to have to push back on the market, but to a great extent I appreciate the art that finds dynamic tension in that relationship, and not just crushing tyranny.
See the full story here: http://www.salon.com/2016/07/04/im_in_awe_every_day_virginia_heffernan_on_technology_virtual_reality_and_what_the_internet_means/