Consuming culture in the Covid years

This article was written for the Dominion Post’s culture pages.

The new year may bring aspirations for organising your life: the messy top draw, your lonely socks, the shed. I find myself attempting to tidy up my digital life too, and plotting how I might be more considered in the culture I consume in 2021.

Because, time is short. I have two preschoolers who eat time, alongside a lot of milk-sopped weetbix for breakfast. Meanwhile there are columns and blogs to scan, books to read, podcasts to listen to, prestige TV to watch, and artists to follow—an embarrassment of riches. Or, is that a cacophony? There are weeks when I feel like I’ve had information flung at me from so many different sources nothing has stuck; there’s been no time to understand any of it.

This combination of information malaise and panic could be generational. As a late millennial, I grew up through the rise of the internet. Younger millennials and Gen Z must be much more comfortable shuffling the flow of digital information and taking the cards they need from the deck. I suffer from an unuseful mix of FOMO and apathy: wanting to see and read all things, but in a way that means I either skim, or take too much, and make no meaning.

I follow particular critics and media outlets for recommendations and ‘best of’ lists. The Pantograph Punch, for instance (a website I have written a few essays for) consistently points me to important new voices. But the traditional role of the critic, as arbiter of cultural judgement, continues to fracture — and I love the irony of writing this for a physical newspaper that has recently reestablished its arts pages. 

People are just as likely to use social media as the sieve through which they get to what they want. Friends have always been critics, but in our moment of online sharing, their opinions are easier to see and be influenced by. 

Algorithms are critics, too, and will only grow in their critical power, especially given the reported uptake of use of digital media for shopping, watching, and talking since COVID-19 swept the world. Algorithms know what we click on - even where our eyes briefly rest - and make sure more of the same bubbles float to the top of our content pile. They’re obsequious critics then, manipulatively giving us more of what we already like.

Multiple voices in our cultural landscape is a good thing. Artists that were ignored by the inevitably Pākehā male critics of traditional media now have online spaces on which to promote. However, the churn of social media can flatten discourse. Culture is either thumbs up or thumbs down; work that is difficult, troubling, or just slow burning, is often lost.  

Stepping outside of the recursive cycles of online media, maybe I will look away from all the lists, friends’ likes, and algorithmically curated suggestions and look at what I don’t know. This is easier said than done. I have subconscious bias. When I scroll, there are subjects and images that I am drawn to, links that I click on and, in that, voices that I don’t hear.

Good exhibitions help expose these biases, as artists will always show me a forgotten history, an overlooked issue, or a moment of unexpected beauty. Take Terri Te Tau’s current exhibition, Whakatau Miromiro, at Aratoi in Masterton. Conceptually expansive and formally elegant, the show aligns whakataukī with embroidered visualisations of the DNA of taonga species. It deftly reveals the limits of western knowledge systems and the relationships they elide.

To look at culture outside my field of vision; or seeing what I don’t see—perhaps that’s my wayfinder for 2021.