Technology: Talent Need Not Apply

Any sufficient advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.     -Arthur C. Clarke

"When did software become my medium?" my artist friend asked last week via chat, lamenting the amount of time she spends creating, promoting, selling, collaborating and working online. This is a sad question from a woman who used to say that, to her, the smell of paint in her studio was "what baking cookies is to other people."

Coincidentally, two days later I saw Sound City, Dave Grohl's documentary about Sound City Recording Studio. The history of this charmingly lackluster studio was a front for the documentary's real purpose: exploring technology's effect on musical talent.

Viewing the documentary at the Tivoli Theatre (itself an historic presence in entertainment), I waxed nostalgic about my early days working in radio. We spliced tape and ran it carefully reel to reel, our voices hoarse from 20+ takes because there was no "edit" button. We wrote scripts on scrap paper or CD inserts. We didn't have a delay option to cover slips of profanity (just an angry station manager and an unhealthy fear of the FCC).

And I never grew tired of the beautiful sound that was created in those small, minimalist rooms with dusty equipment - and raw talent.

Fast forward to today (which, by the way, is not that many years later) and I revel in how productive and creative I can be with technology. From my phone I can be a writer, videographer, producer, photographer and editor. Talent need not apply - software and apps will do it for me. And this is great, right? Amateurs can be the creative masterminds they've dreamt of without investing a great deal of time, practice or money. 

But it also means we don't need talent. It is no longer necessary to engage all our senses to be creative. Are we intrinsically missing something? We may not know the satisfaction of working at something long enough to truly master it. And those who master their craft - like some of today's great musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers and television production crews - are minimized by the assumption that technology is responsible for their success. 

It's hard to recognize true talent when singers' voices are fixed with autotune, Instagram makes a dull sunset look spectacular, and for less than $200 I can write a best-selling novel using software that structures my plot and creates my characters (I picture Hemingway chasing his daiquiri with a double shot of absinthe in protest). It seems very little distinguishes real artists from hobbyists.

Don't get me wrong: I like (and use) technology. Thankfully, gone are my newspaper editing days of performing paper surgery with an X-Acto knife to replace misspelled words on production-ready copy (that really happened. A lot). I recently recorded a commercial and was pleasantly surprised that it was ready for production in two takes with the help of a brilliant editing suite. I don't even remember life before Google. And since I've always loved photography, I'm sort of partial to Instagram's fun filters (and Typic, Snapseed, Pic Stitch, Hipster...). 

And so this is today's watershed. I don't want to give up the convenience technology affords me, but I also don't want to misdiagnose technology as talent. If we want to be good at something, we need to practice it. Study it. Engage as many of our senses and as much of our imagination as we can to fully appreciate it.

Or, quoting Sound City, "Technology must be a tool - not a crutch." 

 I couldn't agree more.
 

Image Source

For more on this topic, here's some good stuff I found: 

How to use technology to make you smarter  Time Magazine 2012

Technology and Health: Is the Digital World Huritng us or Making Things Easier?  Huffington Post, December 2012


 
(or just for fun Google "does technology make us stupid?" You'll have nearly 12 million blogs, articles and books to choose from. Wow.)