Vagaries of attention (1 July 2011)

There's an important distinction between attention and recognition, though I think we easily confuse them in speech and in practice. We seek attention when we want recognition, some sense of our worth or integrity to others. Attention is a necessary prerequisite for recognition, but doesn't always lead to a feeling of having been recognized. My main fear about social media is that is becoming harder to translate attention into recognition without their aid. Increasingly, attention that isn't in some way mediated seems inert, if not unsettling and creepy.

I have this feeling that people are going to become more and more wary of direct face-to-face attention because it will seem like it's wasted on them if it's not mediated, not captured somehow in social networks where it has measurable value. I imagine this playing out as a kind of fear of intimacy as it was once experienced -- private unsharable moments that will seem creepier and creepier because no one else can bear witness to their significance, translate them into social distinction. Recognition within private unmediated spaces will be unsought after, the "real you" won't be there but elsewhere, in the networks.

I have an essay up at the New Inquiry about artist Laurel Nakadate, whose work is, I think, about this emerging condition -- about becoming increasingly unavailable to attention in the moment, wholly ensconced by self-consciousness. Receiving attention in real time can't confirm anything about how you want to feel about yourself; it becomes a portal to a deeper loneliness -- the way out seems to be to mediate the experience, watch it later, transmute it into something else. In short, we are losing the ability to feel recognized in the moment, which strands us further and further away from fully inhabiting our bodies in the present. We are always elsewhere, in the cloud.

Music Cloud (10 May 2011)

The iPod's popularity has always implied the inevitability of a universal music library that anyone can tap into at anytime from anyplace. It would be a realization of the dreamspace in Twin Peaks: "Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air." I figured people would ultimately pay a subscription fee for "all music anytime" -- much as Netflix is evolving toward a monthly fee for "all movies anytime" (assuming bandwidth can keep up).

Google's launch of a cloud-music service moves us closer to that scenario: "Upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files." That makes for a nice peg for linking to this First Monday article by Jeremy Wade Morris: "Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud computing and the digital music commodity." Morris contends that "the cloud metaphor obscures the fact that the transition is more than a simple shift from music as a good to music as a service. Music in the cloud ... enmeshes users in ... a process of continual commodification of the music experience." The article is mostly an explanation of how cloud computing works and makes some incontrovertible points about the surrender of ownership this implies -- we rent computing power (putting us at the mercy of Big Tech) rather than own the means of production/consumption for ourselves. Morris points out that subscription services make music "contingent" on providers' whims, subject to surreptitious control. But I think this hint is worth following up: "the more ubiquitous music appears, the more difficult it is to conceive of music as a separate and distinct experience from our everyday activities."

It's worth noting how cloud-music services (Amazon has one already) posit that we hate the "hassle" of music as physical object and are liberated by the transformation of hard-to-lug collections into ephemeral lists. The implication is that we yearn to breathe music like air, at all times, and have been waiting for it to be dematerialized, decommodified. To a degree that is an ideological cover for the way cloud services intensify the circulation of music as a commodity. What do I even mean by that? It has to do with this part of the promotional campaign: "Mix it up. Create your own custom playlists with just a few clicks. Or use Instant Mix to automatically build new playlists of songs from your collection that go great together. All the playlists you create and all the changes you make to them are automatically available everywhere your music is."

Doing this sort of thing in the cloud makes that labor available to Google, along with your general preferences, and presumably associates them with everything else you do online while logged into a Google account. Google Music is another tool to keep you signed in, with music serving as another code for generating associative marketing data, regardless of whether or how much we listen to it. In the cloud, music is a much more labile signifier, a more flexible marker to denote emerging demographic niches. So in that realm, music is more commodifed, in the sense that it is enlisted to a more intensive degree as a signifier of nonmusical information. Those signifers circulate in ways we don't even know about, let alone control. Why does that matter? It makes music listening less autonomous an experience, and more an aspect of the online universe of sharing and self-presentation and immaterial labor. That means it is harder to hear on its own terms (if such an approach to listening "purity" is even to be taken as ideal or normative). Cloud music furthers the decontextualization process that commodifying music as recordings initiated.

Waiting for the Rhapsody (18 Dec 2007)

In BusinessWeek a few issues ago (I'm just starting to catch up on my reading), Peter Burrows was pushing subscription music services, trotting out some sensible arguments against being tied down to enjoying only the music you own -- you can discover so much new stuff, sample music on whims, and listen to a lot of cheesy songs you wouldn't necessary want on preserve on your hard drive. And you don't have to worry about a hard drive crash erasing your collection, because you won't have a collection: peace of mind through shedding belongings, which bring with them the anxiety of having to protect them. (This always makes me think of Spalding Grey explaining in Swimming to Cambodia how he conquered his fear of swimming in deep water by leaving his wallet in plain view on the beach. He was so worried about the wallet being stolen that he didn't think about the danger of being too far from shore.)

It seems inevitable that eventually a wireless device will be introduced that gives you access to all of recorded music for a subscription fee. The technology seems to be in place; it just requires the right combination of design, promotion and cooperation among what's left of the music industry. And this will seem like a great idea until people realize what a pain in the ass it is to select what they want to hear from the near infinite possibilities, and will long for the simplicity of radio stations one trusts to play good music. This, anyway, is what Sirius seems to be banking on, as their cocky commercials about their portable players implies.



For those who aren't indifferent or open-minded enough to give over control over what music they hear to professional -- to people who must play DJ for themselves (and probably their friends) ownership of music is essential for several reasons. First, making the purchase is a decision-making moment that in itself gives pleasure -- it's a moment in which one gets to make some piece of knowledge one has operational. The decision also invests one emotionally in the thing purchased, increasing the possibility for enjoying it. This is one of the sad realities of consumer societies, that putting money where your mouth is is way to fix your attention on something and be optimistically disposed toward its being about to please you. When you download a bunch of music off a borrowed hard drive, your investment in the music is zilch, and the effort to sort through it all is herculean -- all those little decisions about whether you like this or that song as you weed through has less pleasure attached to it because nothing ultimately is at stake in the choice. In such a situation, when I'm trying to assimilate a large quantity of music, I find myself thrown back on my taste alone, and that taste is nebulous, contingent. When I buy music, I find I have more reason to try enjoying it at different times, trying to find the mood or occasion that suits it.

And the big collection is necessary if you want to impress people with mix CDs. You give yourself a much larger vocabulary to speak with when you have more songs to choose from and consequently more juxtapositions to play with. It's nice to have a lot of music when you want to give it as a gift to someone else. I don't know that any recipient of a mix CD has nearly as much invested in it as its creator, but some of the emotion that gets poured into making mixes must survive into the final product. And that residual emotional is a direct result of someone working hard to make the most out of their music collection. (The friend I visited in Seattle recently had a new friend who made him a bunch of compilations, and reading through the track lists, I almost felt like I was getting to know her without actually meeting her. But I didn't ask to listen to them -- accustoming to making the compilations myself, I get peevish having to hear other people's; sad, really, the joy that I think compilations can give is something that I myself am generally shut off to.)

Collecting is a means for filtering, as is making the compilations, and both of these activities are about bringing knowledge to bear, making decisions with consequences. The subscription service removes the consequences, almost makes the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste.