Potato is yum

As we go about our daily life we consume all kinds of content. I watch youtube, play games, read webcomics, read books, and so much more. When I think about my time usage, I spent maybe a third of my 24 hour day looking at some kind of art. That means I spent at least 8 hours a day looking and processing art. That’s a lot of time. But there is no world where I would be able to invest my full attention for 8 hours. So, what does this mean?

Based on my feeling I will consume different kinds of media. If I feel energetic and want to do something I’ll pick up a competitive game like counterstrike or titanfall. If I want to do something but want to relax I’d load up minecraft or stardew valley. Now let’s say I didn’t want to do anything. Or I didn’t want to have to sit in front of a screen and just wanted to slouch in a beanbag for an hour or two. Well then I really only have two options, a physical book or my phone. Well. We all know that narrows down the list of media I could consume by basically… nothing. I could scroll shorts, read webcomics, read magazines, read books, read web serials, basically anything. I could even play mobile games.

I think everyone can agree that the medium of your art matters. It’s quite an obvious deduction. Through a short discussion with some fellow authors I realized I haven’t properly analyzed my usage of prose as my medium. The medium is important because it changes how your art conveys your message and how it is consumed. In previous posts I have explained my philosophy on the meaning of art. In short, I believe art is simply a vehicle to convey ideas and the “goodness” of a work is entirely on the effectiveness of this vehicle. Different wrappings can make the vehicle more enticing to use or attractive but at the end of the day the vehicle will drive and every consumer will drive it differently.

To add onto this analogy, we could say prose is like a car. You have different kind of prose on the form of short stories, poetry, and much more that correspond to compact cars, mini cars, and full on SUV novels. But there are other kind of vehicles. For example a game could be like a bike or scooter that requires more effort from the user to run. Or large works of art being trains that are small and efficient at conveying large quantities of information on an idea. Or entire productions of a rocket ship similar to that of a film.

But when we look at the analogy, we notice that all these vehicles have their strengths and weaknesses. Those strengths and weaknesses matter. A lot.