The death of the internet: how a shift towards social media has affected online arts culture, a critical evaluation from 2003-present.

 

In an increasingly virtual world, many facets of life take place online, particularly when physical proximity is more challenging. Art in all forms is online now in one way or another. The aim of this essay is to evaluate art’s changing relationship with the internet and how these changes affected and continue to affect art, both materially and conceptually. The first chapter will examine an overview of the advancements the internet has made since its inception and ask what impact the internet has had on art and contrariwise through the years. Chapter two will question in more detail how social media has affected the discussion and distribution of art, examining the ways in which commercialisation and steady centralisation of the internet may have affected our ability to create freely. Finally, Chapter three will review examples of autonomy seen on the internet, inspecting the cultural impact of a more censored internet.

 

 

Chapter one,

Art and the Internet, A Timeline.

 

The invention of the world wide web was promptly followed by the development of the webpage in 1990, allowing for public distribution of content online. This new tool of communication was fast paced and widespread in comparison to its preceding ascendants, and artist communities quickly took to this connection with the introduction of The Thing (Staehle, 1991), a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) that acted as a platform for discussing new media and art. This is seen by some as the beginning of online art communities. As the internet grew, these platforms grew and advanced alongside it. Following the first image uploaded to the web in 1992, Mosaic (1993) was launched by students at the University of Illinois as the first browser able to display both text and images in the same window, allowing for more accurate and in depth discussion of artworks. The development of websites such as this was a great feat in allowing more people to both access and circulate work as it could cut out the competitive burden of securing publishing, as you could now freely publish yourself. However, it is necessary to recognise that this is a luxury that may not be sustainable for creators that need to make a living out of publishing their artwork.

 

 In 1994 GeoCities (Bohnett, 1994) was launched as a website which allowed it’s users to organise their interests into ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘suburbs’ allowing for a curated, personalised use of these online communities. This was around the same time that internet art (or net.art) was developing with artists such as Vuk Ćosić and Jodi, (a collective of two internet artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) at the forefront. This movement focused on digital artwork, distributed via the web with the internet as an integral component of the concepts, rather than art that is solely shared online, internet art is categorically a product of the internet. ASCII art was a very prominent medium at the time, first used in the very early days of the internet, because photographic or graphic images were not possible. It utilised American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) to create images and could be seen as a reference to the vast cultural impact of the internet.

“The term net.art was created somewhere in the middle of the 90's. It is connected to Vuk Cosic, net.artist from Belgrade, that used Internet to reinterpret some famous works - with the software he created, Cosic converted pixels into an ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). He translated works such as Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and Hichcock's Psycho, as well as the famous porn film Deep Throat into ASCII”

(Martinez, 2015)

 

This influence can be identified in the expansion of artistic online platforms from 1996, to 2002. In 1996 Rhizome (Tribe) was founded by artist Mark Tribe. Having begun as an email list and evolving into a website by August of the same year this digital art community reached 16,000 members after only four years. Then in 1998 Wet Canvas (Burkett, 1998), appropriately named after the paining technique, was launched as an online forum for sharing industry news, tutorials and discourse concerning the art world. Two years later in 2000, Deviant Art (Sotira, Jarkoff, & Stephens, 2000) was launched as an online art forum and platform gaining 1 million users by 2003. In 2002 and 2003 the online art scene was introduced to Conceptart.org (Manley & Jones, 2002), an online community specifically for artists working in the entertainment industry, And Photobucket (Welch, 2003), the first major photo storage sight, followed by Flickr (Ludicorp, 2004).

 

2003 was the beginning of the internet as we know it now, witnessing the creation of the first major social media sight, MySpace (Anderson, DeWolfe, & Hart). With the slogan, ‘A Place for Friends’, every member’s first ‘friend’ was co-founder Tom Anderson. This was the beginning of the shift from online forums to social networking, the internet’s ability to spark, sustain or simulate affinity was a hit, and closely following was the release of Facebook in 2004 (Zuckerberg, 2004). Originally named ‘The Facebook’ as a direct influence from the directories given to American university students this was a website intended for Harvard students to communicate. The website was quickly adopted by many other American and Canadian universities, accumulating one million users in eleven months, and has been available to anyone worldwide above the age of thirteen since 2006, providing local laws approved. This evolution was what brought most to the online world, coinciding with the development of technology to allow more people to have a computer in their homes. This was an exciting and easy way to be online without the requirement of specific knowledge the previous forums depended upon. This shift in the culture of the internet was pivotal as it had become accessible to many more people.  However, this change could be attributed to the downfall of the art community online as the growing nature of the internet creates an ongoing demand for quick & concise forms of communication, permitting a detrimental lack of context, as discussed by Gilroy-Ware, “The underlying pattern that involves continuous navigation of novel media is a hallmark of a social media timeline, and it is this architecture that reveals social media use as a form of consumption.” (Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void. Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media., 2017).  This expanding platform also prompts the legislation of rules and censorship, and as art is inherently subjective these regulations can be fatal for the creation, distribution and discussion of art.

 

In the year 2005 a new era of faster internet came about with the introduction of Broadband, quickly surpassing dial-up and allowing for much easier and quicker internet use at the time. 2006 also saw the launch of Nasty Nets (Various, 2006), an online ‘surf club’ of collaborative artist-run blogs which focused on the internet,  coinciding with the arrival of the post-internet movement, which prescribed the idea of the internet being ingrained in society, becoming another medium alongside painting or sculpture allowing art works to move fluidly between spaces, from gallery walls to online spaces.

 

In 2007 Tumblr (Karp) was launched, this is to date the most direct attempt at recreating online forums within a social media setting, allowing users to create multimedia post within a personalised short-form blog. Tumblr achieved this very successfully for years, with more than 13 billion global page views in 2013 and the number of blog posts each day peaking at 100 million in early 2014. Tumblr was a perfect fusion of social media and art, as it was widely accessible, anyone with access to a computer could join and find a home on Tumblr, while also being a creative platform which encouraged artistic freedom and conversation. 2007 was an influential year as it also saw the release of the first iPhone and therefore easier and more regular virtual foot traffic, you could not only have access to the internet in your home, you could now have it constantly, on your person.

 

The year 2010 bore witness to the beginning of what has arguably become the largest culprit for the dissolution of flourishing online art communities, Instagram (Systrom). Marcus Gilroy-Ware likens social media to an ‘empty fridge’, allegorising the addictive nature of social media with the instinctive behaviour seen when a person continues to return to a fridge that is known to have nothing worthwhile inside. Gilroy-Ware argues that “the more habitually a medium is used, the more likely the medium is selected automatically and impulsively” explaining, “Some research has even suggested that self-control is like a resource in that it can be depleted, leading to poorer decision- making” (Gilroy-Ware, 2017) This argument holds social media’s addictive nature as the main contribution for why they have become more popular than other online platforms, alongside the fact that knowledge of coding and forum writing is now nonessential.  This is what these companies take advantage of as it allows them financial gain, equally demonstrating why smaller platforms within artist communities have lower and falling attendance. As Gilroy-Ware establishes, “The irrationality with which people are increasingly using social media suggests that they are driven by far deeper, and more powerful, phycological forces that social media platforms are able to unleash and harness”.

 

Just two years after its original release, Instagram was bought by Facebook for one billion dollars, and thus begins the vast commercialisation of the internet, with accelerated growth in users and the impact of high-status investors, censorship of content began to really effect online spaces.  Subsequently, this is the start of the downfall of many artist friendly sites. DeviantArt is acquired by Wix for 36 million dollars in 2017, after a steady decrease in usership since having been 13th biggest networking site with 3.8 million weekly visits in 2011. The following year (2018) Tumblr introduces what has come to be known as The Porn Ban, which many allege to be the end of Tumblr as it was once known. Tumblr exemplifies perfectly the impact censorship can have on online platforms, thriving until its investors viewed its financial gain as more important than the content it produced.  (Ables, 2019)

 

Last year(2019), another once beloved site saw its end when GeoCities Japan was brought to a close, after being sold to Yahoo in 1999 while it was the third most visited website, it lasted ten years in the US, but lived on another ten years in Japan, until it’s complete closure in 2019. According to data collected in April of this year (2020); “After ZOOM and TikTok, the three other most downloaded non-gamic apps, both on the [Apple] App Store and Google App Store in April 2020 included Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram,” (Rasool, 2020). All of which are owned by Facebook. In 2019 the average number of pieces of art uploaded to DeviantArt daily was 65,000 (Smith, 2020) While the total number of photos and videos uploaded to Instagram per day is 100 million +, alongside 500 million + stories being posted to the site daily. (Instagram by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts, 2020).

 

It is also vital to consider that although the internet is now vast and available to many across the world, this access is not infinite and there are people and communities who this accessibility does not reach. This lack of absolute availability leads to disenfranchisement and it is important to remember when discussing the mass accessibility that the internet allows, that those who do not have this access are not dismissed. As the social media giants grow, thus the art forums disappear, and the art communities that were once widespread and diverse are packed into fast-paced, densely populated social media. And although the internet is generally financially free to use, there is an onslaught of targeted advertisements, ad walls (also known as soft pay walls) and extraction of personal data, allowing specific companies to hold immeasurable power over the internet. A potentially dangerous environment for the development of online art and art as a whole as we move ever further online because if artists are bound to these platforms, they are consequently bound to that platform's ideals of what artistic content is or is not deemed publicly acceptable, resulting in the art of a new age being moulded by corporate censorship.

 

Chapter Two,

Algorithms Against Subversion, the Battle Between Social Media Platforms and Artists to Define the Explicit.

 

As mentioned previously, the policing of content that appears on social media can be noticeably detrimental to online art. This intense supervision, although needed in moderation, gives large corporations and investors who own these so-called open platforms, control over the content that is upheld on social media.

 

The definition of explicit is a disputed subject, this lack of definition around a word that is so often used in creative discourse is problematic. An example of an artwork which is contentious for its potentially explicit content is Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse (Waterhouse)

 

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The offensiveness of this painting was debated when Manchester Art Gallery removed it from there longstanding Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in 2018. Some argued that this censorship was political correctness gone too far, as art critic Jonathan Jones writes;

 “To remove this work art from view is not an interesting critique but a crass gesture that will end up on the wrong side of history. This censorship belongs in the bin along with Section 28’s war on gay culture and the prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960.” (Jones, 2018)

This is a very different opinion to the one taken by Claire Gannaway of Manchester Art Gallery who emphasised on their website that it was not about censorship, but rather about

“the outdated and damaging stories this whole part of the gallery is still telling through the contextualising and interpretation of collection displays.” (Gannaway, 2018)  

 The purpose of the removal of this work was not part of a censorship measure but was a performance in the pursuit of provoking a conversation regarding curation, coordinated by artist Sonia Boyce. Her aim was to give audiences a say in what is exhibited, exposing the function of curators and questioning how art is typically displayed. An interesting argument, although the removal of this particular piece is a dictation of what is or is not curated in a gallery, implying that there is something about it that could be perceived as offensive. This piece of art was promptly the victim of misrepresentation by widespread media coverage, an issue also demonstrated in art shared online because of its possible widespread audience and lack of controlled context. This is perhaps a perfect example of the difficulties faced when a visual language such as art is translated into a verbal language via either the written media, or within online conversations.

 

The definitions of the nude and the explicit nude, or pornography differ from culture to culture, and is dependent on context, as John Berger explores in Ways of Seeing; “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”  (Berger, 1990) However, it is interesting to examine the difference between the two. The depiction of bodies with no clothes on is a frequent one in the western world and was a particular creative focus during the Renaissance and later academic traditions of the seventeenth century and after. The nude male body was particularly celebrated by the ancient Greeks; “Images of naked athletes stood as offerings in sanctuaries, while athletic-looking nudes portrayed the gods and heroes of Greek religion.” While “naked female figures are shown in very early prehistoric art, and in historical times, similar images represent such fertility deities as the Near Eastern Ishtar” However none of these images are particularly inherently sexual; “They express profound admiration for the body as the shape of humanity, yet they do not celebrate human variety; they may have sex appeal, yet they are never totally prurient in intent” (Sorabella, 2008) The definition of pornography however is more subjective, differing between cultures and individually due to personal sexual desire. A more basic definition is the “representation of sexual behaviour in books, pictures, statues, motion pictures, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement”. The key difference between the two being the purposeful intent to arouse the viewer. (Jenkins)

The definition of the explicit that this essay will refer to is one that many social media follow; visual depictions of sexual intercourse or fully nude private body parts, it is questionable to what extent the explicit is inherently offensive. This debate over an artwork in a gallery leads us to examine the censorship of the illusive explicit online.

 

The nature of Instagram being an image sharing app, on which there are pre-set editorial features upon uploading, would suggest that it is intended for creativity. In contrast to Facebook which is often used to share full albums dedicated to an event or a time in your life, Instagram is limited to only ten images or videos in one post, an update that came into play in 2018, 8 years after its creation, prior to this update only one image could be uploaded per post. This specific notoriety of a singular image implies direct consumptions of disparate but curated images, akin to a magazine or gallery. However, by viewing Instagram as an art sharing platform, their strict guidelines on themes consistently present in art are therefore contradictory. As Becky Burgum evaluates in their article, the images these guidelines report are often tenuously targeted.

“There is a great fear that surrounds the female body – a nude photograph immediately becomes pornographic even if that is not the intent.” (Burgum, 2017)

This argument is a great example of the hypocrisy that surrounds the feminine body throughout wider society, and is rampant throughout social media, particularly Instagram. That being the policing of which depictions of naked women are authorised to be shared publicly or not. There are many examples of female nudity that are not automatically considered explicit and therefore granted public, uncensored viewing. For example commercial adverts or well-known artworks such as the Venus de Milo (Alexandros) or The Birth of Venus (di Venere), both widely publicised naked female bodies that society approve of without censorship. 

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An interesting and often subdued contradiction between the celebration of art containing nudity, and the policing of others through the online platforms on which they are shared.

 

Arvida Byström and Molly Soda evaluate Instagram’s community guidelines in their book Pics or It Didn’t Happen, in which they feature images that their Instagram followers submitted to them in response to an open call for the posts that had been taken down by Instagram. They explain that when Instagram notifies their users that one of their images has been taken down, they do not inform them which image they are referring to, leaving the user to scroll through their entire feed in search of the missing image, before they can begin to understand why it was removed (Byström & Soda, 2016) Instagram has two versions of their guidelines, one short and one long, the short version is;

 

“We want Instagram to continue to be an authentic and safe place for inspiration and expression. Help us foster this community. Post only your own photos and videos and always follow the law. Respect everyone on Instagram, don’t spam people or post nudity”

(Instagram)

 

These rules, specifically regarding nudity align with the nature of the posts that Byström and Soda received.

 

“We quickly began to see patterns in types of images that had been subjected to censorship. These include photographs of genitalia, bare butts, female nipples, period stains, liquids resembling semen or vaginal secretions, and pubic hair”. (Bystöm & Soda, 2016)

 

Most of these censored images include nudity or are at least sexually suggestive. From this selection, it is clear that these images have been perceived as pornographically explicit, as Burgum suggests. Which raises the issue that naked bodies (predominantly female) are automatically sexualised, becoming exclusively sexual. As Film theorist Laura Mulvey suggests; “the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents”. (Eaton, 2008) This presumption that these images are automatically pornographic and damaging for Instagram’s community plays into the idea of the male gaze, that these images are solely for male, heterosexual consumption. Despite the fact that all of the images in this book are creatively arranged, shot, edited and posted, Instagram’s filtration system deems them inappropriate for their creative platform. It can also be argued that pornographic and explicit content can simultaneously be artistic and that the two are not antithetical. From the Khajuraho Monuments in India, famous for their erotic sculptures and built between 950 AD  and 1050 AD, to Andy Warhol’s film Blow Job (Warhol) which can now be found on Porn Hub, sex and sexually explicit content has always been present in art.

 

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However, when discussing the censorship of bodies, it is also very important to understand the different types of bodies that are more often censored and which bodies are found more shocking and have therefore been censored, as Bysröm and Soda describe when discussing the types of images they received;

“A common theme among the photographs submitted to us is the types of bodies pictured: Primarily white-passing, thin, cisgender. This leads us to wonder who feels more entitled to post these types of images?”

(Byström & Soda, 2016)

This is important to note as the argument for not censoring women’s bodies can often be unbalanced and lean mostly towards the types of bodies which society find more palatable. Further adding to the limitation of art enforced by Instagram’s guidelines, directly leading to a lack of space for already marginalised artists.

It is also very important to remember that the people whose job it is to examine the images that are reported as breaching Instagram’s guidelines are not responsible for the images which are taken down, but rather Instagram needs to invest more into their filtration system. The current system in place involves “outsourcing low-paid workers to look at and evaluate explicit, graphic, and often violent imagery in order to keep the app “safe” bringing into question whose safety is being protected and why?”

(Byström & Soda, 2016)

 

The confusion over which content does or does not pass the guideline gatekeeping isn’t something that is only felt by Instagram’s users, as Byström and Soda suggest;

“The nature of this wording often leads one to wonder what exactly violates these terms and what might be able to slip past. When criticised for their strict censorship rules, Instagram tends to pass the blame onto the Apple App Store, which has strict anti-pornography guideline.”

(Byström & Soda, 2016)

An easy deflection of blame to avoid accountability for the strict control over a seemingly creative application. However, this confession of monetary influence doesn’t quite absolve Instagram in the way they perhaps hope it would, this acknowledgement of prioritising wealth over safe creative freedom leads to the same disillusion that drove Tumblr into its decline.

 

As mentioned in Chapter one, A Brief History; Tumblr is the most direct attempt at recreating the online forums of the 90’s and early 00’s that resonated with the art scene. With its microblog format which allows users to post, share and discuss multimedia content, Tumblr was built and thrived as the one stop shop for creative, current and open-minded discourse. For example, the popular Tumblr account savedbythe-bellhooks (savedbythe-bellhooks) which used saved by the bell screengrabs to promote cultural and political discourse.

 

However, the site’s usage has dropped significantly since the introduction of stricter content policies with a heavier restriction on explicit adult content, also known as the ‘Tumblr Porn Ban’, commencing in December 2018. This resulted in an estimated drop of 30% of its user traffic in just three months. Although this may seem an act of responsibility on the part of the owners of Tumblr, many attribute this development to the downfall of artistic freedom online. Tumblr was launched in the February of 2007, by founder David Karp and in just two weeks gained 75,000 users. The site was instantly treasured for its bold community and users flourished in the open and introspective space that had formed. As Kara Swisher reminisces; “In its earliest incarnation, the kaleidoscope of a microblogging platform was rich with quirky communities, wonderful memes and, most of all, where vibrant creativity once reigned and often astonished. It was one of the most delightful places one could be at the time.” (Swisher, Who Killed Tumblr? We All Did, 2019) Tumblr was well known to all online creatives at the time as a well-established and pertinent platform to post, share and discuss artworks and current themes in the artistic sphere. Mason Sands discusses Tumblr’s reputation in their article, “Tumblocalypse: Where Tumblr And Its Users Are Headed After The Ban”, expressing that,

“The platform was renowned for its progressive community, providing a place where issues related to identity, body image, and sexuality could be discussed healthily. Most notably, Tumblr benefited from the Russian government takeover of the fellow blogging site, LiveJournal, and its censorship of pro-LGBTQ discussions, prompting many LiveJournal users to flee to the Tumblr platform. In an ironic twist with the advent of a new NSFW ban, Tumblr may just be going the way of LiveJournal today. The site’s freedom encouraged the creation of NSFW (not safe for work) content that featured explicit sexuality. Users appreciated this type of content for its depiction of healthy sex practices, opportunities for sexual exploration, and openness to taboo discussions, such as sex work.” (Sands, 2018)

 

Sands’ recollection of Tumblr is one that acknowledges the sexual content present on the site, but also absolves it of any infraction of propriety by portraying the nature of these posts as open-minded, educational and progressive. The fact that this article was published in the December of 2018, before the aftermath of the ‘porn ban’ transpired, is also an indication of how central these discussions were to Tumblr, as it could be predicted how detrimental the change would be.

 

Sex Worker and Artist, Vex Ashley credits Tumblr for her aesthetic and attitude in both her art and her sex work, which so often fuse. In her writing, “Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter”, she describes the way sex and porn was perceived on Tumblr;

“Sex wasn’t this separate, shameful thing, it was allowed to exist right next to every other facet of our messy, millennial experience. We shared it, discussed it, debated it and curated it. Porn on Tumblr wasn’t treated as disposable, something just to be immediately purged from your browser history, but an aesthetic, artistic component of your page and your life” (Ashley, 2018)

 

While not all of what was deemed porn in the 2018 ‘porn ban’ was definitively pornographic, Ashley describes perfectly how even the most explicit was shared in a healthy, often consensual and beneficial way. Tumblr was home to a wide spectrum of discussions dealing with sex, but even the most explicit wasn’t necessarily salacious, many were explorative or an artistic endeavour. It is also worth mentioning that having a Tumblr account and using it regularly didn’t automatically subject you to these themes if you didn’t want to be. Tumblr had a system in place which meant that posts were tagged with the type of content it held, for example a post with sexual content would have the tag ‘#sex’ and members who did not want to see anything with that tag could specify that in their personal settings. As well as the addition of trigger warnings, so that users who might find the content upsetting could avoid it. This allowed for an important space for people wanting to discuss these issues, while remaining an equally safe space for those who did not. This a feature was introduced by Tumblr but policed by the community rather than the corporation, a great example of social media being kept safe and inclusive by its users, portraying social media as much less dangerous than it was portrayed as by those who supported the ban.

 

While Tumblr was a success both for the owners and the users, peaking in the early 2010’s. This online platform like most, developed its darker sides as it grew and attracted audiences, as Kara Swisher describes;

 

“It quickly got its lofty valuation with $125 million in investments from tech’s smartest investors and took off. It hit a billion blog posts by 2010, and when the site started accepting advertising in 2012, Tumblr seemed golden.

Fool’s gold. What plagues the internet today hit Tumblr hard and early. There were the inevitable copyright problems and spam and security problems and product problems. And the content itself, which started as edgy, got rather gnarly, from self-harm sites to neo-Nazis to what really tanked Tumblr: sex.” (Swisher, 2019)

 

Unfortunately, the open and seemingly unmonitored attitude Tumblr displayed on the internet sometimes led to the discussion of dangerous topics such as self-harm, as well as attracting all ends of the political and intellectual spectrum as many users logged on to spread animosity and hostility. Most Tumblr users credit this fluctuation in content to 4chan and their encroachment of the site. 4chan was created as a site to discuss and share topics such as anime, manga and video games, as a counterpart to the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan. The website is now known as the home of activists and political movements such as Anonymous and the alt-right. As well as being infamous for the organisation of mass online pranks, harassment of other sites and their users, it is known for posting illegal content, threats of violence, misogyny, racism, and more. As Angela Nagle describes it in her book Kill All Normies; Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right:

 

“Although one could trace various threads to a multitude of different online and offline points of origin, Tumblr was one of the most important platforms for the emergence of a whole political and aesthetic sensibility, developing its own vocabulary and style – very much the reverse mirror image of rightist 4chan in this way.” (Nagle, 2017)

 

Acknowledging the reverse similarities between Tumblr and 4chan, she addresses the perhaps inevitable cross over and clash of the two.

 

In their article, Sands exemplifies how a fully open and free site can allow for all ends of the spectrum of discourse and behaviour, a perfect microcosm for the internet as a whole.

 “Tumblr’s relaxed content moderation also allowed blogs with more troubling content, particularly child pornography and Nazi agitation. This issue has been called out by Tumblr’s own users for years with no action taken”. (Sands, Tumblocalypse: Where Tumblr And Its Users Are Headed After The Ban, 2018)

An interesting criticism as this indicates that the Tumblr community did not stand by as this occurred and shouldn’t be associated with the blame of the fall of Tumblr. While community policing had its limits, Tumblr’s change from one extreme to another inevitably harmed the site, surely there was a way to maintain a balance between allowing nudity and banning genuinely dangerous violations such as child pornography.

 

As Kaitlyn Tiffany explains in her article, Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn, before Tumblr was owned by Version, “it had an in-house research team tasked with understanding the mechanics and sociology of the various websites it owned”. (Tiffany K. , 2019) An important tool for recognising where the problems lie and being able to combat them in a way that doesn’t harm non-offending Tumblr users. Something that was lost when Verizon Communications acquired yahoo (Tumblr’s previous owners) placing Yahoo and Tumblr under its Oath subsidiary (a merger between AOL and Yahoo). Tiffany also identifies that,

 

“Tumblr’s content-filtration system did an imperfect job preventing the spread of child pornography—a failing that got it removed from Apple’s App Store a few weeks before the ban was announced, and that ostensibly instigated the ban. It’s also possible, based on a former employee’s account, that the porn was going to go away regardless, as part of a last-ditch effort to make Tumblr more appealing to advertisers”.

(Tiffany K. , 2019)

 

While this lack of affective screening is an extremely valid reason for outrage among Tumblr users and non-users, there is an implication that it must be either both helpful and harmful forms of sexual depiction or neither, as an efficient filtration system isn’t possible. However, this would be a possibility if more research and staff where implemented (similarly to before Version Communications took ownership), although this would cost more, and as indicated by the fact that Tumblr are trying to appeal to advertisers, monetisation is clearly a priority over user satisfaction. The official new rules as of December 2018 are as follows;

 

 ““The NSFW ban, as explained on the company blog last December, included “explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).” The nudity exceptions listed in the original post were “a political protest with nudity or the statue of David.” The updated community guidelines forbid images, videos, GIFs, and “photorealistic” artwork of “real-life human genitals,” the much-derided “female-presenting nipples,” and any kind of sex act. “Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine””.

(Tiffany K. , 2019)

 

A clear issue with these guidelines is their ambiguity. It could easily be said that these qualities are a matter of opinion, while some might define educational as similar to sex education in schools, others would argue that blogs such as Madeleine Holden’s page, ‘Critique My Dick Pic’ are an important tool for education. This vagueness leaves the definition of these topics to the imposing company that is making money through advertisements. Leaving any artist who chooses to use Tumblr as their platform and/or medium, without the control over defining their own artistic practice, this is where capitalism starts to define art. This is a heavily discussed issue within the art industry, at 2017’s debate titled “Social Media is Killing Art” at Art Basel in Hong Kong, curator Alexie Glass-Kantor put forward seven ways social media is killing art, number five being, “Big social media companies make money off artists’ capital, rather than creating a shared profit system”.  (Glass-Kantor, 2017)

 

 

While many social media platforms have peaked and pitted and users have left and moved to the next, the metaphorical end of Tumblr had a larger impact both because Tumblr was once something extraordinary and because other platforms are implementing similar rules;

 

“Instagram is notoriously strict about nudity. Twitter can be too combative. Facebook requires real names. Reddit, well—you know about Reddit. The nascent social platform Pillowfort has been proposed as an alternative to Tumblr, but users are still required to label NSFW content. (And the platform can do it for them if they don’t.) Something like Tumblr a year ago seems unlikely to exist again on the internet.” (Tiffany K. , Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn, 2019)

 

However, censorship of art is not an issue exclusive to the internet, there have been numerous accounts of restrictions against art exhibited physically. For example, Robert Mapplethorpe’s explicit nude images. In 1990, as the US was at its hight of panic over Aids, Mapplethorpe’s work was at the centre of an anti-gay inquisition as seven of his frames were put on trial, aiming to sort art from obscenity. (Fritscher, 2016)

 

Cultural censorship is equally not something that is coupled with the growth of the internet. For example, Mary Whitehouse’s campaign to clean up TV in 1964 in which she criticised the BBC as she perceived they had a lack of accountability for allowing the use of bad language and portrayals of sex and violence in their programmes. In the 1970’s she organised a private prosecution against fortnightly newspaper Gay News on the grounds of ‘blasphemous libel’. (Wikipedia)

 

The policing of content on social media has led to art online having no true home, either it conforms to the rules established by corporations and investors or it is lost in the sea of removed Instagram images.

Therefore, the death of Tumblr can be considered as the beginning of the end of decentralised internet. The rise of investor led social media is a great example of the issues caused by an increasingly centralised internet and shows that social media run by corporations can be detrimental for art when it leads to policing of content, which has in turn led to young and upcoming artists changing their work to be more palatable, which is potentially more harmful than the censorship of art that already exists. Creating an environment that masquerades as a place for the arts but is not.

 

 

Chapter Three,

Mods Are Asleep: The nostalgic yearning for when the internet was ‘good’.

 

The ongoing growth and evolution of the internet has provoked many responses, one of which is a nostalgic fascination with its past. In the days when the moderation of a discussion board was performed by only a few people, if they weren’t online, users were able to post content with zero censorship until the moderators or ‘mods’ came back online, thus coining the phrase ‘Mods are asleep’. The earliest known use of this phrase was posted by Sputnik Music Forum’s Omega Red on January 25th, 2006, when explaining why a thread had not been locked. (Gerbil & andcallmeshirley, 2010)

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 This then became a popular meme among internet communities, the concept being that the moderators of the site were asleep, and its users could now post anything without consequence.

An example of users referencing this freedom is the My Little Pony thread on 4Chan;

 

“On February 26, 2011, moderators on 4chan’s /b/ and /co/ boards began removing threads featuring My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters and banning users who posted in them. In response to the bans, ponies became the subject of “Mods Are Asleep” threads, where users encouraged each other to post images of characters from the show.”

 

Acclaimed for its freedom and lack of corporate control,

this early era of the internet (circa. 2003 – 2010) is widely yearned for throughout wider society and the arts.

 

However, when evaluating the possibility of rebuilding this so-called free era of the internet we have to consider the fact that the internet has changed beyond recognition since this generation of online usage. According to the office for national statistics, in 2006 15 million, 57% of British adults had access to the internet, compared to this year (2020) in which 96% of households have access to the internet. (Prescott, 2020). Although this is a positive evolution for larger accessibility of knowledge and more specifically the artistic industry, the geographical, political and moral boundaries that the internet cross impact the amount of control that can be held over the context of what is shared online, primarily social media which has little space for the illustration made possible within more in-depth formats such as essays and articles. A piece of art relies largely on its context, a recent example of art for which context is essential to its potentially controversial meaning is Philip Guston's Paintings of the Ku Klux Klan. Although painted in the late 1960s, these paintings have been widely discussed more recently after being due to embark on a touring exhibition starting at the National Gallery of Art Washington, travelling first to London’s Tate Modern and on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Boston but is now being postponed until February 2024.

 

 

The intention of these images is to highlight the rampant white supremacy that is present throughout society. However, in light of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, it was decided that these images could be interpreted as highly offensive as without any commentary explaining otherwise, these paintings can be perceived solely as clown-like depictions of highly offensive issues. In a joint statement, the galleries explained that the exhibition would be delayed “until a time we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted” (Ruiz, 2020)  A questionable response, considering the Black Lives Matter movement are urging people to understand and see the rampant white supremacy within society, the same issues Guston’s paintings investigate. It is also arguable that one of the easiest places to control context is within an art gallery, with texts and curation it is much more than the image itself that goes into the understanding of an artwork. As Aindrea Emelife discusses in her article, Philip Guston's KKK images force us to stare evil in the face – we need art like this; “Postponing Guston’s provocative touring exhibition may avoid short-term discomfort, but it’s a profoundly patronising move”. (Emelife, 2020) In contrast these images are free to travel the internet, a place where globalisation has rendered the monitoring of context online near impossible, making the misinterpretation and misuse of these images much more likely. As with all physical artworks, the internet detaches these images from their specificities and they become simple two-dimensional images, without their dimensions and materials being known they lack a part of their meaning as all physical artworks are materially specific, relying on their nuanced materiality and consequently all images now seem equal irrespective of the medium in which they were created. Therefore, the internet is capable of dramatically changing an artwork’s meaning, especially one such as this, that was made prior the publicization of the internet. Guston could not have foreseen the usage of these images without the context of the gallery and their materiality. Again, raising the issue of art as a visual language being translated and losing it’s intended meaning.

 

The early era of the internet, which is so often viewed nostalgically by modern society is a decentralised one in which no one person or company hold authority. This is in contrast to the modern internet, which is controlled by companies who have a monopoly over the apps and sites we use, such as Facebook, Google or Apple. This totalitarian internet on the verge of being centralised, has led to many desiring the internet of the past on which you could do or say as you liked without the strict regulation of the aforementioned platforms. Unfortunately, this complete lack of censorship is not an option free of being problematic. An example of what the internet void of restrictions looks like is 4Chan, a website on which anyone can post comments and share images anonymously. 4Chan was originally created to discuss manga and anime in 2003 but is known today for its alt-right user base and their role in spreading disinformation, doctored images, and nefarious memes during the 2016 presidential elections. The platforms lack of restrictions can lead to dangerous misinformation.

 

“False narratives originating on 4chan don’t migrate directly to traditional channels. 4chan users call on one another to organize and coordinate their efforts to spread disinformation, which is then shared by people who believe it to be true (misinformation). They creep into larger communities like Reddit forums and closed networks like WhatsApp groups. Once they infect enough people on popular, algorithmic platforms like Twitter, it’s often too late to curb their impact” (Gonimah, 2018)

 

The impact of this disinformation, hoaxes, cyberbullying incidents, and internet pranks has, and will continue, to impact wider society in ways that many don’t realise first materialised on 4chan or even the internet. A couple of examples include; The murder of 10 people and injuring of 15 by Alek Minassian when he drove a rented van into pedestrians in Toronto, siting on Facebook;  “”wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan.... The Incel Rebellion has already begun! ... All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"

 

"Minassian, it seemed, had dedicated his massacre not to a recognisable religious or political agenda, but to 4chan.org, an Internet message board about anime.” (Beran, 2018) And Google- and poll-bombing, which involves searching or voting for the same terms en masse, with the goal of either sabotaging and online vote, or making a topic trend artificially. For example, 4chan successfully getting a swastika trending on Google. (Dewey, 2014) Referring back to the ‘mods are asleep’ trend, 4chan is somewhere which intrinsically lacks moderation, allowing for the violation of this autonomy and leading to such outcomes as these.

 

Misinformation is not exclusive to 4chan, as previously explained by Gonimah, false information spread into other online platforms and thus into reality for example through Twitter. This is a problem so rampant that, in leu of the spread of false claims regarding Covid-19, they updated their approach to misleading information, adding new labels and warnings to tweets with misleading information, disputed or unverified claims. “In serving the public conversation, our goal is to make it easy to find credible information on Twitter and to limit the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content.” (Roth & Pickles, 2020) Therefore, the lack of censorship and individual responsibility that 4chan’s format allows, although free, is undoubtably inherently dangerous. As Caitlin Dewey explains in her article Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman:

“4chan is a forum — nothing crazy or mysterious there. It’s just a forum with no names, few rules and few consequences, which is (a) the philosophical antithesis to virtually every other mainstream social property and (b) means people can (and do!) say just about anything they want.” (Dewey, 2014)  

 

The nostalgic yearning after this era of the internet will never be satisfied, so instead we are witnessing the romanticisation through the aestheticisation of the internet pre-social media. There are many examples of this throughout society, from artistic aesthetic, to games, and culture, there is a resurgence of themes and fashions present in the early 00’s and late 20th century. Aesthetically some of the strongest references to this period include ASCII art generators, Vaporwave and Lo-fi/ post internet art.  ASCII art originated in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and is a graphic design technique in which images are created using characters defined by the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) Standard from 1963.  Due to the limitations of computers at the time the use of text characters to represent images was fundamental. Along with ASCII's original use in communication, it also began to appear in the underground online art groups of the period. Here is an example of ASCII art which was published in Creative Computing magazine in 1976, One of a series of seven prints depicting characters or scenes from the original 1966 Star Trek TV series

 

ASCII art has come full circle and is now admired for its depiction of a simpler time, as it is referenced on Reddit’s r/nostalgia page and used on social media as an artistic reference to a time before. However, now it is made effortless with the introduction of ASCII art generators. Vaporwave, an aesthetic and music genre that became popular in the early 2010s which draws on cultural references from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Vaporwave’s name derives from “vaporware”, meaning commercial software which is announced but never released, this aesthetic aims to provide a satirical take on consumer capitalism and technoculture, embracing the internet as a cultural, social, and aesthetic medium, incorporating early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes, as well as anime, Greco-Roman statues, and 3D-rendered objects.

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This low-fi, post internet aesthetic that references the internet of the past is still very much present in today’s art, for example this piece by Warakami called Error95.

 

An example of this nostalgia within gaming is Hypnospace Outlaw which is a “simulation video game developed by Tendershoot and published by No More Robots. Set in an alternate-history 1999, the game takes place inside a parody of the early Internet that users visit in their sleep called Hypnospace” in which the player acts as an enforcer for the company Merchantsoft—creator of Hypnospace, and it is their job to police any illegal content, copyright violations, viruses or cyberbullying. This game not only emulates the yearned after aesthetic of the early internet but also mimics the conditions of this era, when a website was mediated by individual people/ users and the internet felt like a safe, self-moderated space.

 

There is of course a delicate balance between over moderation and under moderation. An example of over moderation being the postponing of Guston's paintings for fear of causing offence, instead allowing for a lack of context leaving these paintings to exist in a dangerous contextless state and simultaneously adding to the issue by avoiding a difficult topic. While at the same time 4chan is an example of under moderation, a website on which users can say and do as they please with serious implications as a result because of a lack of moderation and accountability. When discussing freedom online it can be assumed that the reference point for the most freedom would be something like 4chan, a website completely void of regulation. However, a more integrated example of a democratic internet would be one in which users are in a position to self-moderate, this example would closely align with the way in which artist led spaces are run whereby you are held to your own account, it is your responsibility to decipher what is appropriate and deal with the consequences judiciously if there is a disagreement.

 

Conclusion

 

While the internet is an amazing phenomenon for the accessibility of art both physically; we are able to view art in new and more available ways, but also intellectually; the gap between academic and non-academic interpretation is getting smaller due to greater access of information. In general the internet has broadened connections with many areas of knowledge. The problem with the internet is its lack of space for creatives to experiment and discuss new artworks and current artistic themes. This is because the internet has principally become a space of conformance, and those who choose to confront this are either censored or, if they reside somewhere other than the dominant sites, they are deemed a subculture, rather than the internet as a whole being an open and equitable space. Online environments are either uncensored, but aggressively hostile such as 4chan, or they’re a space that is not as aggressively hostile but holds no room for subversion such as Instagram. The post Myspace internet is struggling to provide a space that walks the thin line between these two extremes, there was a moment with Tumblr that felt close to this but matters unrelated to the art world have prevented this.

 

A conceivable proposition for how we could develop an internet ideal for creative discussion and distribution would include exclusive self-regulation without the overbearing control of capitalist owners and investors that is seen within social media. This alternative would rely entirely on users being accountable for their actions online, taking the idea of free speech to be what it truly entails, allowing all people to speak as they wish as long as they are willing to deal with the ramifications. As Noam Chomsky describes it; “Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favour of free speech.” (Achbar & Wintonick, 1992) Rather than the idea that free speech allows you to say and do as you please without consequence as many have come to interpret it. This proposed version of the internet would allow users to discuss potentially explicit or culturally difficult themes, while creating space for correction, education, and caution, ergo minimising serious offence or upset, education and caution. This, partnered with a system which allows for content warnings on potentially upsetting content, similar to that of the tagging system on Tumblr, would in theory support an internet on which art can truly thrive. Although this is not currently operative, hopefully as the internet evolves spaces will emerge where this is possible.

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