Wikipedia explains that camp is:
“an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism‘s notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption… Camp aesthetics delights in impertinence. Camp opposes satisfaction and seeks to challenge.”
Camp is often applied to visual, performing and conceptual art, along with lots of movies and TV, restaurants and experiences. RuPaul is campy, John Waters is campy, Benihana is campy, an art car is campy. But can it apply to software? Can you make meaningful or even “popular” software that “opposes satisfaction”? This website’s own home page was my attempt to work in an aesthetic I thought was so ugly it might actually be cool and to oppose satisfaction by providing only the shallowest of explanations of what Jiko Kanri is.
But there has to be much more out there. Apps with ironic look and feel? Does that count? Or tools made intentionally hard to discourage their use. We’ve all seen web sites we could easily describe as “over the top”. Every Chinese social app I look at seems to be inverting the normal values of software design to stuff the screen with every function and text it can find a few pixels of space for. Is that camp? Is Snapchats “old” unfriendly, gesture heavy UI and attempt to be impertinent and to challenge users to learn new things through word of mouth, excluding the conservative of habit and the un-networked user. Is that camp?
One effect of the usefulness of software, and its categorization as a medium for tools and games, is that media theory, which is rich and insightful about movies, TV, news, music, you name it, seems to treat software as outside its view. Website and trends might be analyzed and deconstructed. But non-game software is not subject to the same level of critical and analytical thinking. I enjoy watching YouTube videos by movie and cultural critics. These lengthy reviews, analyses and essays are interesting, insightful and show how media like TV and movies work. How much of that is possible for software? Most software videos are tutorials or shallow reviews. I understand these apps are tools.
But I also know: Software is a medium.
I want a more popular, useful, fun, interesting media study of it. And I want to see weirdos like me celebrating software so ludicrous its tragic, or so tragic its ludicrous.