Art is an expression of life through various mediums, and in her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, author Virginia Heffernan studies the Internet and how it is expressed as art through a medium that touches almost everyone’s lives.

Heffernan spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Hadoop Summit at the San Jose Convention Center in California. She discussed the digital and anti-digital culture in a fascinating interview that will have you viewing the Internet from a whole new perspective. Heffernan is SiliconANGLE’s Woman in Tech featured guest this week.

Before the Internet

At the beginning of the interview, Heffernan started by recounting her pre-Internet life and how it really all began.

“There was digital culture before the advent of the World Wide Web in the early ’90s. You know that  I would get any electronic games, Merlin or Simon or whatever they introduced, and I also dialed into a mainframe in the late ’70s and the early ’80s to play the computer, we didn’t even call it the Internet.”

Furrier noted that their generation put the training wheels on technology for future generations.

He then discussed Heffernan’s premise that there are magical things happening on the Internet regarding art, and he asked if she has encountered any negativity. Heffernan explained how the negatives are balanced by the positives.

“Recently someone asked me how can the Internet be art when Twitter is so angry. What do you think art is? Art is emotions; art is powerful emotions represented in tranquility, and this is what you see on the Internet all the time. Of course, our human art needs a place to live — call it Twitter right now, it used to be YouTube comments.

“But we are always taking the measure of something we’ve lost. I get the word lost from lossy compression — you know the engineering term that [explains] how MP3 takes that big broad music signal and flattens it out. And something about listening to music on MP3 made me feel like I was missing something. I was grieving for something from my analog life. On the other hand, that is more than counterbalanced by the magic we all experience on the Internet.

“[Through the Internet], strange serendipity happens, not to mention artistic expression in the form of photography, film, design, poetry and music, which are the five chapters of the book.”

Real life replaces digital

Speaking about the interesting convergence of concepts, people and life that the Internet enables, Furrier asked Heffernan if she had noticed anything after writing the book. She talked about an anti-digital culture and how this is the rebellion of today’s youth.

‘This may be interesting, but one thing I see is anti-digital culture — an epiphenomenon, a side effect of digitization. We have a whole world of people who want to immerse themselves in live music. Maker culture. Things made by hand. Vinyl records which are selling more than ever. The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter is selling more now than ever before. The Rolling Stones make a billion dollars touring a year. Would we have ever thought that at the genesis of the iPod when it seemed like recorded music represented music and that MP3 thing that floated through our phones was all we needed? No, we want to look in the faces of the Rolling Stones, get as close as we can to the way the music is actually made, and, almost defiantly, this is how the youth culture works. Reject. Create experiences that cannot be digitized.”

Rebelling against the oversaturation of digital

Furrier asked about the rebellion against digitization, and Heffernan responded by breaking down the thinking and how business is responding.

“You see the first people to scale down from high-powered iPhones where youth going to flip phones. ‘It’s like the greatest retro … it’s like punk tech. It’s like I’m going to use these instruments, but if I break a string who cares. I’m going to use the simplest one. It’s going to be, like, look at you with your basic iPhone there and I’ve got my hacked down downscaled whatever … you know I don’t pick up my phone on the weekends.’

“But you know there are interesting markers there. For instance, the live phenomenon. I know there’s the new company by one of the founders of Netflix, MoviePass, which for a $30 subscription, you see movies in the theater as much as you want, and the theaters are beautiful. Instead of Netflix and ‘chill,’ you know the contemporary standard date, its dinner and a movie. You’re out again, you’re eating food, which can’t be digitized, you’re with company, which can’t be digitized, and you know sitting in a theater, a public experience. [All of] which is pretty extraordinary, the way that the culture and business pushes back on digitalization.”

Social interaction: Experimenting and parenting through it

The topic of losing social interaction bring up many topics for Heffernan. During the interview, she also discussed how kids are experimenting with the real world and how parents have to help children shape their digital image. She explained how the Internet sensationalizes art, people and the world we see.

Don’t miss this conversation about how the digital age is transforming our culture. Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Hadoop Summit US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE