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.
Showing posts with label collecting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collecting. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Desire as craftsmanship (23 Jan 2011)
I wrote an essay for the New Inquiry about traveling. I argue that we travel to try to get away from the ease with which we can want things, a modification on Guy Debord's point that traveling can make consuming the same mass-produced goods seem fresh and exciting. "Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized."
With consumerism, the goods themselves are often a pretense; what we want is to consume ourselves in some new posture, absorbed by some new desire. (This is one of the dimensions of what Debord calls spectacular consumption.) In consumerism, consumption is a production of the self, not simply a matter of using up some utility-supplying good. In The Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett suggests that "for the consumer, stimulation lies in the very process of moving on" -- of finding something new to desire. This energizes and involves our imagination, and thereby seems to increase the dimensions of ourselves. The more we can think to want, the bigger a person we are by consumer society's terms. Expanding the capacity for desire builds the personal brand of the consumer, whose job, after all, is to consume well.
Our selfhood seems bound up with the ease with which we can desire the right things -- a facility that travel takes away from us, forces us to rebuild from guidebooks, instinct, conversation with strangers, and so on. That rebuilding process, I suspect, is what hard-core travelers enjoy most about the experience. But tourists, who lack such improvisational skills, get something else out of travel: the sublime pleasure of having that high-functioning consumer self destroyed -- knowing all along, of course, that it can be safely readopted and even cherished with invigorated appreciation when one gets back home again. How wonderful it is to know what to want, and to know where to be taught to want more. Never mind that this institutionalizes discontent at the very core of our self, thus making it hard to truly love anything. Committing to a particular desire, to nurturing and growing it rather than replacing it, finds little cultural support.
Marketing discourse works not only to make generating new desires easier, but also, crucially, to make the experience of new desires pleasurable, as an increase of personal possibility, as a paradoxical kind of freedom. Desire may seem like bondage, as if one is controlled by need. Consumerism instead makes it appear as the escape from monotony, from the iron cage of ordinary life -- the boldness to imagine alternatives. The consumerist utopia! Here's how Sennett, who's ultimately skeptical, limns it:
The rise of connoisseurship makes this plain; we become proud of knowing how to consume better, how to refine desire to the point where it is never quite satisfied and we are always still hungering for the more exquisite experience. But this refinement doesn't represent the overcoming of restlessness; it becomes a way of perfecting its expression ans a positive quality -- I am restless, thus I am vital. Connoisseurship changes from being a deep, almost selfless knowledge of a subject that one has submitted to, and instead appears as a deep commitment to elaborate the self.
The ethic of connoisseurship seems to militate against convenience, but it's more accurate to say that convenience fuels connoisseurship, making us unimpressed with things simply working, with goods simply satisfying us. The inconvenience of travel makes this dynamic obvious for the tourist, who wants to consume for self-aggrandizement, but suddenly finds it hard to merely consume for sustenance. Sennett notes how convenience divorces us from how things actually work, freeing up that energy to be rechanneled as marketing (and human-potential psychology) encourages us, into the further fashioning of the self.
So connoisseurship no longer is an elitist matter of mediating "good taste" to heathens. It is instead within every consumer's reach; connoisseurship has become the craft of making a perfect self within consumer society's constraints -- namely how automation and capitalist relations have stripped away most other sources of craft knowledge in our lives. Sensual enjoyment falls by the wayside of performing desire -- having a food blog, say, rather than tasting food. Of course one can do both, but they are in constant tension; as fiction writers have always know, it is hard to observe life and live it at the same time. Consumerism tends to make us all life at a meta level, since the self is never given but always being constructed -- the self can never simply experience things but must be watched for what its experiences say about it. Social media is the platform for this metaconsumption of our identity and those of our friends. There, we share well-groomed information about ourselves the way old connoisseurs would have shared it about their particular ruling passion. Social media remakes the idea of "being useful to others" -- that is, of socially necessary labor that we all want to perform to feel recognized -- in its own image in terms of its peculiar version of sharing: sharing details about oneself first and foremost. Narcissism can then masquerade as utility.
With consumerism, the goods themselves are often a pretense; what we want is to consume ourselves in some new posture, absorbed by some new desire. (This is one of the dimensions of what Debord calls spectacular consumption.) In consumerism, consumption is a production of the self, not simply a matter of using up some utility-supplying good. In The Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett suggests that "for the consumer, stimulation lies in the very process of moving on" -- of finding something new to desire. This energizes and involves our imagination, and thereby seems to increase the dimensions of ourselves. The more we can think to want, the bigger a person we are by consumer society's terms. Expanding the capacity for desire builds the personal brand of the consumer, whose job, after all, is to consume well.
Our selfhood seems bound up with the ease with which we can desire the right things -- a facility that travel takes away from us, forces us to rebuild from guidebooks, instinct, conversation with strangers, and so on. That rebuilding process, I suspect, is what hard-core travelers enjoy most about the experience. But tourists, who lack such improvisational skills, get something else out of travel: the sublime pleasure of having that high-functioning consumer self destroyed -- knowing all along, of course, that it can be safely readopted and even cherished with invigorated appreciation when one gets back home again. How wonderful it is to know what to want, and to know where to be taught to want more. Never mind that this institutionalizes discontent at the very core of our self, thus making it hard to truly love anything. Committing to a particular desire, to nurturing and growing it rather than replacing it, finds little cultural support.
Marketing discourse works not only to make generating new desires easier, but also, crucially, to make the experience of new desires pleasurable, as an increase of personal possibility, as a paradoxical kind of freedom. Desire may seem like bondage, as if one is controlled by need. Consumerism instead makes it appear as the escape from monotony, from the iron cage of ordinary life -- the boldness to imagine alternatives. The consumerist utopia! Here's how Sennett, who's ultimately skeptical, limns it:
What I've described are pleasures which consumers make in things, imposed pleasure which a sober utilitarian would and doubtless should suspect. And the declaration that the "sky's the limit" could be defended on political grounds: people might be set free by dreaming of something beyond the routines and confines of everyday life. In the same way they might be set free by feeling they've used up and exhausted these perfectly workable ways of getting by. Aren't people set free when they transcend in spirit what they directly know, use, or need? The consuming passion might be another name for liberty.Desire becomes an expression of the craftsmanship of consumption. And consumption itself becomes, as Sennett argues, theater.
The rise of connoisseurship makes this plain; we become proud of knowing how to consume better, how to refine desire to the point where it is never quite satisfied and we are always still hungering for the more exquisite experience. But this refinement doesn't represent the overcoming of restlessness; it becomes a way of perfecting its expression ans a positive quality -- I am restless, thus I am vital. Connoisseurship changes from being a deep, almost selfless knowledge of a subject that one has submitted to, and instead appears as a deep commitment to elaborate the self.
The ethic of connoisseurship seems to militate against convenience, but it's more accurate to say that convenience fuels connoisseurship, making us unimpressed with things simply working, with goods simply satisfying us. The inconvenience of travel makes this dynamic obvious for the tourist, who wants to consume for self-aggrandizement, but suddenly finds it hard to merely consume for sustenance. Sennett notes how convenience divorces us from how things actually work, freeing up that energy to be rechanneled as marketing (and human-potential psychology) encourages us, into the further fashioning of the self.
So connoisseurship no longer is an elitist matter of mediating "good taste" to heathens. It is instead within every consumer's reach; connoisseurship has become the craft of making a perfect self within consumer society's constraints -- namely how automation and capitalist relations have stripped away most other sources of craft knowledge in our lives. Sensual enjoyment falls by the wayside of performing desire -- having a food blog, say, rather than tasting food. Of course one can do both, but they are in constant tension; as fiction writers have always know, it is hard to observe life and live it at the same time. Consumerism tends to make us all life at a meta level, since the self is never given but always being constructed -- the self can never simply experience things but must be watched for what its experiences say about it. Social media is the platform for this metaconsumption of our identity and those of our friends. There, we share well-groomed information about ourselves the way old connoisseurs would have shared it about their particular ruling passion. Social media remakes the idea of "being useful to others" -- that is, of socially necessary labor that we all want to perform to feel recognized -- in its own image in terms of its peculiar version of sharing: sharing details about oneself first and foremost. Narcissism can then masquerade as utility.
Existential hoarding (6 Jan 2011)
This CNN item about decluttering has sensible advice that few people, I suspect, would disagree with, as it fits the zeitgeist by seeming vaguely eco-conscious and consevationist. The author, Tsh Oxenreider, invites us to live as if we are always just about to move overseas:
I want very much for Oxenreider's fantasy to be true. I want shedding belongings to generate a lasting and satisfying sense of having purified my life. I want to prove myself the sort of fortified and transcendent soul who can overcome the hegemony of advertising and conspicuous consumption and capitalist reification to see the true value of things, the value that stems from my ability to invest them with part of my own spirit. I can dispense with the vulgar lies of commerce and live a spare, Spartan minimalist life of meditation in a tastefully empty room like the one we see pictured in the article.
Yet when I try to live with that sort of rigor, I experience little lasting joy. When I've purged things in the past, the feeling of lightness that follows tends to be fleeting. Instead, entering into purging mode can sometimes open a yawning void in my life, not because I am ridding myself of things and worry I will feel their loss but because I start to see how little anything "really" means. What's the point in having anything? I'm just going to die anyway. Having a hoard of stuff to sort through and manage and muffle my existence also stifles my sense of mortality, for better or worse.
And perhaps because of how I've been conditioned to experience things, the thrill of getting rid of stuff -- unconsumption, as Rob Walker would have it -- ends up feeling much like the joys of acquiring it. That is, the pleasure is detached from the nature of the object itself, from the intentionality that is supposed to be so obvious within it. Instead the objects prompt multifarious fantasies, depending on where we are coming from, what we have been exposed to, what are particular situation is that moment. So it is not as simple as it might seem to get rid of the "unnecessary" things in our lives, because necessity is a moving target, much like our own sense of self, our own priorities. Sometimes it seems very useful to me to have every album by Grand Funk Railroad loaded and ready on my computer just in case; sometimes it seems like insane clutter preventing me from noticing the really great music I could be listening to.
Sometimes the meaning of things elapses -- revealing another scary truth about mortality. It doesn't mater how few things you have; your memory is going slip away. The things that seemed important will merely haunt us then, or we will remember things we didn't save but not remember why, or we'll cherish that lost moment of purging more than what we've kept. Maybe at the point when you can no longer remember why something was important to you, you just throw it away -- but then why was it ever saved in the first place? You save it because you are afraid to forget its meaning, and when you do start to forget, the item may seem more dear than ever in its obscure mystery. Hoarding can be a matter of luxuriating in that surfeit of mystery as much as it is a matter of suffocating on material goods.
I don't think my life is a matter of memories stored in goods, but I am afraid of it seeming as empty as that room in the photo. In my eagerness to purge, the danger is I'll shut everything out. I don't know if I can access a way of organizing my life that doesn't lump people and things together -- a way of living in which I don't need otherwise useless things to remind me of the people I want to keep in touch with. Theoretically, I should be able to have a purity of intention that doesn't require objects in this inefficient way, and I shouldn't think about collecting experiences as if they were things or objectifying the time I want to spend with others. But to live according to that theory, with little social support for it, is to risk the empty room becoming not tasteful and light but a void.
Oxenreider writes as though our intentions are constant, so close to the surface, so readily accessible, but she also writes as though only our individual tastes are at stake in those things. But usefulness and meaning are slippery, social concepts, and we end up implicating one another in our needs for things, multiplying those needs without being able to account for where they are coming from within us. It seems like this weird burden to have things, this inexplicable hoard we end up with through no will of our own. But in fact that is just the burden of being with others, refracted into miscellaneous odds and ends.
Ask yourself, Is this thing worth hauling 6,000 miles across an ocean and in to a new home? Is it providing that much meaning and value to my life? If not, why bother having it now?She argues that more is less, in that you have less to take care of or worry about. If you purge yourself of unnecessary things, each remaining object becomes more meaningful, glowing with the value of its being intentionally chosen. The gambit is to create an artificial scarcity for oneself, set limits to manufacture aura.
Living this way isn't about having nothing. It's about everything in your life having value. It's looking at all your belongings and knowing that you've given that thing permission to be there, that the item is truly adding value and beauty to your life. When you get rid of the things that don't matter, the things you do keep become that much more valuable, and you'll have more time and money to invest in quality over quantity.It's an appealing fantasy. I imagine having that one bookshelf on which every book is one of the best and most powerful books I've ever read; I think of those apocryphal families of yore who only had a bible but knew it backwards and forwards and derived true spiritual nourishment from it as a result. I think of being able to imagine at some point eating every single thing in the refrigerator, or better yet, emptying it totally and eating only what I've bought fresh from the green grocer's on the way home from work each night. (Like I ever do that.) I think of empty closets, save for my all-purpose utilitarian uniform that I can wear at all times in any weather and always avoid the appearance of "trying to look cool." I'll be so free of objects that I will spend all my time in unfettered activity, really doing things -- though with only a few objects at hand it is likely to be the same sorts of things over and over, or it will involve me consuming disposable things or spending lavishly to access meaningful experiences. Or maybe not. Maybe I can convince myself that all I need is a guitar, a laptop, and a dream.
I want very much for Oxenreider's fantasy to be true. I want shedding belongings to generate a lasting and satisfying sense of having purified my life. I want to prove myself the sort of fortified and transcendent soul who can overcome the hegemony of advertising and conspicuous consumption and capitalist reification to see the true value of things, the value that stems from my ability to invest them with part of my own spirit. I can dispense with the vulgar lies of commerce and live a spare, Spartan minimalist life of meditation in a tastefully empty room like the one we see pictured in the article.
Yet when I try to live with that sort of rigor, I experience little lasting joy. When I've purged things in the past, the feeling of lightness that follows tends to be fleeting. Instead, entering into purging mode can sometimes open a yawning void in my life, not because I am ridding myself of things and worry I will feel their loss but because I start to see how little anything "really" means. What's the point in having anything? I'm just going to die anyway. Having a hoard of stuff to sort through and manage and muffle my existence also stifles my sense of mortality, for better or worse.
And perhaps because of how I've been conditioned to experience things, the thrill of getting rid of stuff -- unconsumption, as Rob Walker would have it -- ends up feeling much like the joys of acquiring it. That is, the pleasure is detached from the nature of the object itself, from the intentionality that is supposed to be so obvious within it. Instead the objects prompt multifarious fantasies, depending on where we are coming from, what we have been exposed to, what are particular situation is that moment. So it is not as simple as it might seem to get rid of the "unnecessary" things in our lives, because necessity is a moving target, much like our own sense of self, our own priorities. Sometimes it seems very useful to me to have every album by Grand Funk Railroad loaded and ready on my computer just in case; sometimes it seems like insane clutter preventing me from noticing the really great music I could be listening to.
Sometimes the meaning of things elapses -- revealing another scary truth about mortality. It doesn't mater how few things you have; your memory is going slip away. The things that seemed important will merely haunt us then, or we will remember things we didn't save but not remember why, or we'll cherish that lost moment of purging more than what we've kept. Maybe at the point when you can no longer remember why something was important to you, you just throw it away -- but then why was it ever saved in the first place? You save it because you are afraid to forget its meaning, and when you do start to forget, the item may seem more dear than ever in its obscure mystery. Hoarding can be a matter of luxuriating in that surfeit of mystery as much as it is a matter of suffocating on material goods.
I don't think my life is a matter of memories stored in goods, but I am afraid of it seeming as empty as that room in the photo. In my eagerness to purge, the danger is I'll shut everything out. I don't know if I can access a way of organizing my life that doesn't lump people and things together -- a way of living in which I don't need otherwise useless things to remind me of the people I want to keep in touch with. Theoretically, I should be able to have a purity of intention that doesn't require objects in this inefficient way, and I shouldn't think about collecting experiences as if they were things or objectifying the time I want to spend with others. But to live according to that theory, with little social support for it, is to risk the empty room becoming not tasteful and light but a void.
Oxenreider writes as though our intentions are constant, so close to the surface, so readily accessible, but she also writes as though only our individual tastes are at stake in those things. But usefulness and meaning are slippery, social concepts, and we end up implicating one another in our needs for things, multiplying those needs without being able to account for where they are coming from within us. It seems like this weird burden to have things, this inexplicable hoard we end up with through no will of our own. But in fact that is just the burden of being with others, refracted into miscellaneous odds and ends.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Pod People (17 Aug 2010)
The BBC reports on Kelly Sutton, the "21st century minimalist" and proprietor of a website called Cult of Less. He had concluded that he needs next to no possessions since the meaningful things in this life (i.e. entertainment media) have become by and large digitized (via Carles).
I would have an easier time getting behind this idea if it didn't seem like Sutton was just another stunt consumer trying and succeeding in becoming a meme -- like the guy who didn't ride in a car or the guy who made his family recycle everything or whatever. All these stunts give the impression that ethics themselves are also stunts, good only for attracting lucrative attention, and typically beyond the capabilities of ordinary people in their everyday life. Leading a better life quietly, without drawing lots of attention to it or making it seem extreme, outrageous or clever, is apparently now tantamount to not leading a better life at all. Achieving notoriety is the supreme moral guideline, and lesser imperatives can be subordinated to that ultimate goal.
There is a good chance that consumers of the future will own fewer DVDs, books, and records, and so on, but this will possibly prompt an explosion in the collection of supplementary meaningful objects -- tchotchkes of all kinds, not just culture industry products. Not everyone can be "minimalist" because then minimal will simply become normal, and some new distinctive posture will have to be adopted. The absence of things will no longer do the job of connoting what the presence of things already connotes for most people -- one's self-conception as an externalized posture.
The problem in our culture is not so much that there is too much stuff but that we are afflicted with insatiable egocentricity, which the stuff merely reflects. To borrow from Baudrillard, the stuff elucidates the code, and boasting about getting rid of it is just another moment of elucidation, another way of consuming it -- that is, getting it to signify ourselves. If you are getting rid of stuff and boasting of it online, you are probably canceling the import of your gesture out. Replacing real stuff with digital symbols of its rejection is just a passing gesture rather than real revolution, which requires rethinking the self, not simply what that self possesses.
(Apologies to those who were led to believe by the title that this would be a post about Trumpy doing magic things.)
UPDATE: Andrew Potter has more.
This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions.This seems like an intermediate phase before we wire the internet directly into our brains and enter the goo pods from The Matrix.
"I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation - cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact," said Mr Sutton.
I would have an easier time getting behind this idea if it didn't seem like Sutton was just another stunt consumer trying and succeeding in becoming a meme -- like the guy who didn't ride in a car or the guy who made his family recycle everything or whatever. All these stunts give the impression that ethics themselves are also stunts, good only for attracting lucrative attention, and typically beyond the capabilities of ordinary people in their everyday life. Leading a better life quietly, without drawing lots of attention to it or making it seem extreme, outrageous or clever, is apparently now tantamount to not leading a better life at all. Achieving notoriety is the supreme moral guideline, and lesser imperatives can be subordinated to that ultimate goal.
There is a good chance that consumers of the future will own fewer DVDs, books, and records, and so on, but this will possibly prompt an explosion in the collection of supplementary meaningful objects -- tchotchkes of all kinds, not just culture industry products. Not everyone can be "minimalist" because then minimal will simply become normal, and some new distinctive posture will have to be adopted. The absence of things will no longer do the job of connoting what the presence of things already connotes for most people -- one's self-conception as an externalized posture.
The problem in our culture is not so much that there is too much stuff but that we are afflicted with insatiable egocentricity, which the stuff merely reflects. To borrow from Baudrillard, the stuff elucidates the code, and boasting about getting rid of it is just another moment of elucidation, another way of consuming it -- that is, getting it to signify ourselves. If you are getting rid of stuff and boasting of it online, you are probably canceling the import of your gesture out. Replacing real stuff with digital symbols of its rejection is just a passing gesture rather than real revolution, which requires rethinking the self, not simply what that self possesses.
(Apologies to those who were led to believe by the title that this would be a post about Trumpy doing magic things.)
UPDATE: Andrew Potter has more.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Information Processing and Pleasure (30 July 2010)
I've been reading Tyler Cowen's provocative book The Age of the Infovore (a.k.a. Create Your Own Economy), which argues for the beneficial potential in seizing upon information organization as a form of pleasure itself rather than preparatory work that leads to pleasure. I'm somewhat skeptical of that; I tend to lament the time I spend sorting my library on iTunes instead of hearing the music. The need to organize and accumulate feels like a screen between me and the music; I can't even hear it anymore until it's organized, and I find myself listening as a way of processing to know how to sort a song, put it in its proper playlist, rather than to enjoy it in a more sensation-oriented way. I add so much metadata that it begins to obscure the data; the metapleasure cannibalizes from the pleasure I once derived from music. I end up just collecting music and information about it; much of it never gets played at all. And that gnaws at me at times. I fantasize about getting the "never played" playlist down to zero -- sometimes I consider leaving my iTunes playing while I sleep.
Cowen asserts that the organization makes the music "actually sound better" -- presumably that satisfaction from organizing can be enjoyed as sensuous. To me these are distinct satisfactions -- the organization "pleasure" feels more like OCD compulsion, an anxious restlessness at everything not being in its proper place. Whereas getting lost in the music is something entirely different, a suspension of anxiety and the need to "get things done." Perhaps the way I experience pleasure is no longer in sync with society -- i.e., my generation was socialized in a disappeared age, and the structure of everyday life now demands a different kind of subjectivity, responsive to different modes of pleasure. I may be insufficiently autistic, as Cowen suggests the pleasure in ordering and processing is a quintessential autistic trait that is becoming advantageous in an infocentric economy.
Cowen argues that ordering can be a mode of relaxation, rather than a mere manifestation of the psychic pressure to be productive: "Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb philosophical depths.... It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment." In other words, the infiltration of digitally mediated information processing into our daily practices gives a chance to experience more autonomy in our lives, provided we are content to live life at the level of "little bits," as he calls them -- memes, cultural fragments, decontextualized informational nuggets, isolated data points and so forth. Cowen makes this crucial point: When access is easier (which it has become, thanks to the internet), we tend to favor smaller pieces of information as a way of diversifying our options. This could be a matter of our inherent preference for novelty, though it may be a consequence of the values we inherit from our society, which privileges novelty over security, omnivorous dabbling over deep geekery. Either way, our internal filters are winnowing, such that we start to choke on anything more substantial than a tweet, become restless at the thought of assimilating larger, holistic hunks of culture. This seems to be a conceptual shift in how we approach experience, not as something overwhelming to lose ourselves in but as something to collect and integrate within ourselves as a series of discrete, manipulatable objects.
Social norms, biological imperatives and technological developments, then, have fragmented culture into ever smaller bits, as our identities have been cut free from traditional anchors. And experiences have been reified, in part because of the ease with which they can be digitized and distributed. As a result, we now carry the burden (or enjoy the freedom) of having to continually reassemble such fragments into something coherent and useful for ourselves -- into our self-identity, into an amalgam that represents our interests and self-perceptions, as well as the image we want to present socially. The Internet "encourages us to pursue our identities and alliances based around very specific and articulable interests," Cowen notes -- they need to be simplified to match the bittiness of how we all have begun to see the world.
As Cowen points out, culture was once largely ordered for us collectively by the nature of the slow media through which it reached us. Songs came in a prescribed order on an album. K-tel picked the hits for Music Explosion. Now we do the selection and the arranging for ourselves. "A lot of the value production has been moved inside the individual human mind," Cowen writes.
The key word is "individual," though. These amalgamations are increasingly private and intensely personal, but nonetheless need social validation, which was intrinsic to the cultural order when it was mandated for everyone. When there were only three TV channels, everyone wanted to know who shot J.R. and no one needed to explain what they were talking about with that or why they cared. Now I would need to do a lot of explaining if I was intensely curious about who shot J.R. (which I am, and please don't spoil it for me!).
The point is, we want our identities -- our cultural investments -- recognized; we want to be understood. So we end up having to explicate ourselves, "share" our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication -- the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.
Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing -- it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products. Our quest for coherence and recognition and ontological security turns out to be very useful intellectual labor when resituated outside the crucible of our own identity.
Sometimes this seems very sinister to me, a monetization of our social being in a way that cuts us out of the rewards, even as it makes some "knowledge work" jobs expendable. It also leaves us with an identity that feels more fragile and reified at the same time; we are alienated from our immediate experience of ourselves and instead relate to ourselves as though our identity is a brand. It also means that the public sphere becomes "the social factory," as the autonomistas say, a realm that blends production and consumption so seamlessly that leisure and for-itself social activity and pure sensual immersion become impossible. They become irrelevant, outmoded forms of pleasure -- contemplation (decidedly and necessarily inefficient) is a casualty of the joys of efficient processing as pleasure. (Cowen calls this the Buddhist critique -- ordering precludes a sense of oneness and harmony with the universe that Buddhists pursue. Nicholas Carr makes similar points about focus in The Shallows; our brains are being changed by internet use to disregard contemplation as joy.)
We are driven to be producing informational value and accepting that as pleasure, rather then engaging in the kinds of pleasure Bataille grouped under the notion of expenditure -- waste, symbolic destruction, eliminating meanings, destructuration, entropic anarchy. That may be a good thing, unless you believe the need for "expenditure" builds up within a rationalized society and may explode into fascist movements if not ventilated. It seems that digitization means that our visions of excess are directed into a rage for ever larger collections of things (think hoarders) or ever more order.
Cowen asserts that the organization makes the music "actually sound better" -- presumably that satisfaction from organizing can be enjoyed as sensuous. To me these are distinct satisfactions -- the organization "pleasure" feels more like OCD compulsion, an anxious restlessness at everything not being in its proper place. Whereas getting lost in the music is something entirely different, a suspension of anxiety and the need to "get things done." Perhaps the way I experience pleasure is no longer in sync with society -- i.e., my generation was socialized in a disappeared age, and the structure of everyday life now demands a different kind of subjectivity, responsive to different modes of pleasure. I may be insufficiently autistic, as Cowen suggests the pleasure in ordering and processing is a quintessential autistic trait that is becoming advantageous in an infocentric economy.
Cowen argues that ordering can be a mode of relaxation, rather than a mere manifestation of the psychic pressure to be productive: "Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb philosophical depths.... It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment." In other words, the infiltration of digitally mediated information processing into our daily practices gives a chance to experience more autonomy in our lives, provided we are content to live life at the level of "little bits," as he calls them -- memes, cultural fragments, decontextualized informational nuggets, isolated data points and so forth. Cowen makes this crucial point: When access is easier (which it has become, thanks to the internet), we tend to favor smaller pieces of information as a way of diversifying our options. This could be a matter of our inherent preference for novelty, though it may be a consequence of the values we inherit from our society, which privileges novelty over security, omnivorous dabbling over deep geekery. Either way, our internal filters are winnowing, such that we start to choke on anything more substantial than a tweet, become restless at the thought of assimilating larger, holistic hunks of culture. This seems to be a conceptual shift in how we approach experience, not as something overwhelming to lose ourselves in but as something to collect and integrate within ourselves as a series of discrete, manipulatable objects.
Social norms, biological imperatives and technological developments, then, have fragmented culture into ever smaller bits, as our identities have been cut free from traditional anchors. And experiences have been reified, in part because of the ease with which they can be digitized and distributed. As a result, we now carry the burden (or enjoy the freedom) of having to continually reassemble such fragments into something coherent and useful for ourselves -- into our self-identity, into an amalgam that represents our interests and self-perceptions, as well as the image we want to present socially. The Internet "encourages us to pursue our identities and alliances based around very specific and articulable interests," Cowen notes -- they need to be simplified to match the bittiness of how we all have begun to see the world.
As Cowen points out, culture was once largely ordered for us collectively by the nature of the slow media through which it reached us. Songs came in a prescribed order on an album. K-tel picked the hits for Music Explosion. Now we do the selection and the arranging for ourselves. "A lot of the value production has been moved inside the individual human mind," Cowen writes.
The key word is "individual," though. These amalgamations are increasingly private and intensely personal, but nonetheless need social validation, which was intrinsic to the cultural order when it was mandated for everyone. When there were only three TV channels, everyone wanted to know who shot J.R. and no one needed to explain what they were talking about with that or why they cared. Now I would need to do a lot of explaining if I was intensely curious about who shot J.R. (which I am, and please don't spoil it for me!).
The point is, we want our identities -- our cultural investments -- recognized; we want to be understood. So we end up having to explicate ourselves, "share" our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication -- the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.
Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing -- it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products. Our quest for coherence and recognition and ontological security turns out to be very useful intellectual labor when resituated outside the crucible of our own identity.
Sometimes this seems very sinister to me, a monetization of our social being in a way that cuts us out of the rewards, even as it makes some "knowledge work" jobs expendable. It also leaves us with an identity that feels more fragile and reified at the same time; we are alienated from our immediate experience of ourselves and instead relate to ourselves as though our identity is a brand. It also means that the public sphere becomes "the social factory," as the autonomistas say, a realm that blends production and consumption so seamlessly that leisure and for-itself social activity and pure sensual immersion become impossible. They become irrelevant, outmoded forms of pleasure -- contemplation (decidedly and necessarily inefficient) is a casualty of the joys of efficient processing as pleasure. (Cowen calls this the Buddhist critique -- ordering precludes a sense of oneness and harmony with the universe that Buddhists pursue. Nicholas Carr makes similar points about focus in The Shallows; our brains are being changed by internet use to disregard contemplation as joy.)
We are driven to be producing informational value and accepting that as pleasure, rather then engaging in the kinds of pleasure Bataille grouped under the notion of expenditure -- waste, symbolic destruction, eliminating meanings, destructuration, entropic anarchy. That may be a good thing, unless you believe the need for "expenditure" builds up within a rationalized society and may explode into fascist movements if not ventilated. It seems that digitization means that our visions of excess are directed into a rage for ever larger collections of things (think hoarders) or ever more order.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Hang the DJ (8 June 2010)
How can this possibly be true?
That's from Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker article about Pandora. I suppose I am blinkered by my own habits. The amount of time I listen to the radio is generally limited to the time I am trapped in environments playing the radio (e.g., the supermarket on the corner near my apartment, the barber shop, etc.). I don't spend much time in cars, which is where I once listened to the radio, mainly on car trips back and forth from Tucson to Phoenix and Las Vegas. That was mainly to alleviate boredom while traveling alone; trying to find a listenable song is a way to stay awake. All of that has made me feel somewhat alienated from the culture in which I live.
What songs DJs play on the radio are the result of a variety of institutional forces -- playlists, payola, personal preferences, radio station formats -- which is what makes those songs listenable, I think. They encode the zeitgeist, balancing various social pressures and contextual factors, expressing market forces as well as advancing certain trends while leaving a window of theoretical possibility for individual expression and taste. The medium of radio posits a collective audience that can be pleasurable to join or judge, or both. It allows for passive participation in something beyond oneself.
Frere-Jones lauds an online music service: "In some ways, it’s an improvement on the radio model: the number of potentially appealing d.j.s here dwarfs what you might have once found on radio." But that seems backwards -- his assumption that we want more options to suit our individual niche when we listen to the radio seems wrong. I don't think we care as much about hearing something we like than we do about exposing ourselves to what's going on in the world. Listening to the radio feels like cultural participation precisely because the options are limited. If one can choose from a huge number of stations, one doesn't end up with the feeling of participating in culture -- instead one seems to be escaping from it (to where?). The limited number of stations mimics the limits our cultural context puts on our identity. The boundaries are necessary to create a sense of belonging to something, of being something in particular. If "what's on the radio nowadays" becomes an unbounded set of songs, the radio becomes useless as a cultural barometer. And music itself becomes less intrinsic to social life, the more choices there are about what to listen to.
So I am skeptical that DJs will ever be replaced by computer-generated, Pandora-like applications that try to play what you as an individual really want and like. Listening to music is only partially about expressing an individual taste. It also about reading the collective mind, belonging to it, participating in a cultural conversation that one needs DJs (or perhaps other consumers that the Internet could connect us with) to moderate to believe that they exist. The iTunes autofill playlists put me into a conversation with an opaque algorithm that tends to infuriate more than anything else. (Hey, "Genius": Please stop playing Three Dog Night.)
“Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” Tim Westergren told me.
That's from Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker article about Pandora. I suppose I am blinkered by my own habits. The amount of time I listen to the radio is generally limited to the time I am trapped in environments playing the radio (e.g., the supermarket on the corner near my apartment, the barber shop, etc.). I don't spend much time in cars, which is where I once listened to the radio, mainly on car trips back and forth from Tucson to Phoenix and Las Vegas. That was mainly to alleviate boredom while traveling alone; trying to find a listenable song is a way to stay awake. All of that has made me feel somewhat alienated from the culture in which I live.
What songs DJs play on the radio are the result of a variety of institutional forces -- playlists, payola, personal preferences, radio station formats -- which is what makes those songs listenable, I think. They encode the zeitgeist, balancing various social pressures and contextual factors, expressing market forces as well as advancing certain trends while leaving a window of theoretical possibility for individual expression and taste. The medium of radio posits a collective audience that can be pleasurable to join or judge, or both. It allows for passive participation in something beyond oneself.
Frere-Jones lauds an online music service: "In some ways, it’s an improvement on the radio model: the number of potentially appealing d.j.s here dwarfs what you might have once found on radio." But that seems backwards -- his assumption that we want more options to suit our individual niche when we listen to the radio seems wrong. I don't think we care as much about hearing something we like than we do about exposing ourselves to what's going on in the world. Listening to the radio feels like cultural participation precisely because the options are limited. If one can choose from a huge number of stations, one doesn't end up with the feeling of participating in culture -- instead one seems to be escaping from it (to where?). The limited number of stations mimics the limits our cultural context puts on our identity. The boundaries are necessary to create a sense of belonging to something, of being something in particular. If "what's on the radio nowadays" becomes an unbounded set of songs, the radio becomes useless as a cultural barometer. And music itself becomes less intrinsic to social life, the more choices there are about what to listen to.
So I am skeptical that DJs will ever be replaced by computer-generated, Pandora-like applications that try to play what you as an individual really want and like. Listening to music is only partially about expressing an individual taste. It also about reading the collective mind, belonging to it, participating in a cultural conversation that one needs DJs (or perhaps other consumers that the Internet could connect us with) to moderate to believe that they exist. The iTunes autofill playlists put me into a conversation with an opaque algorithm that tends to infuriate more than anything else. (Hey, "Genius": Please stop playing Three Dog Night.)
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Searching for inspiration (12 April 2010)
Sometimes I feel so uninspired. Or should I say, (Sometimes I Feel so) Uninspired.. Usually what happens when I feel this way is I begin driving myself with ever more relentlessness through posts in my RSS reader, looking for something to spark my interest. But what I always seem to forget in these moods is how many ideas and articles I have already set aside because I was too busy to deal with them at the time. I probably have dozens of things that I have either starred or shared in Google Reader, thinking I would write about them later here. And I have a stack of articles printed out as well that I have been meaning to read and write about. Yet when I am in this mood, I never feel like going back to that stuff. (Once I shelve something for later, I am essentially logged it for permanent limbo.) In fact, the essence of the mood seems to be a weariness with the backlog, a sense of futility, and a craving for some deus ex machina that will crank the wheel of my "creativity" without my having to do much of anything.
So I press forward it pursuit of novelty, because novelty seems to work that way -- as canned creativity. The freshness of some particular meme can generate a seemingly automatic response: "So and so recently wrote X about Y. I agree/disagree with X, but believe that one must also think about Y this way. Also consider what Z said about Y when responding to so and so as well." (In a post about the sudden outburst of journalistic cheerleading for the economy, Ryan Avent notes how this mentality among journalists can stampede them into manufacturing new received wisdom.) Novelty can stand in as a replacement for deliberation, can simulate the feeling of having thought something through, simply because it leaves a residue that's similar to what I gain after I've thought my way through to what seems to me a fresh synthesis or analysis. When I go to the stream of fresh new content, it is because I want to avoid having to think anything through but still yield the same reward. I think that is the danger inherent in novelty generally.
A corollary to this is that I generally need to immediately think of something interesting to write about something I read or else I won't bother. This also seems like a problem.
So I press forward it pursuit of novelty, because novelty seems to work that way -- as canned creativity. The freshness of some particular meme can generate a seemingly automatic response: "So and so recently wrote X about Y. I agree/disagree with X, but believe that one must also think about Y this way. Also consider what Z said about Y when responding to so and so as well." (In a post about the sudden outburst of journalistic cheerleading for the economy, Ryan Avent notes how this mentality among journalists can stampede them into manufacturing new received wisdom.) Novelty can stand in as a replacement for deliberation, can simulate the feeling of having thought something through, simply because it leaves a residue that's similar to what I gain after I've thought my way through to what seems to me a fresh synthesis or analysis. When I go to the stream of fresh new content, it is because I want to avoid having to think anything through but still yield the same reward. I think that is the danger inherent in novelty generally.
A corollary to this is that I generally need to immediately think of something interesting to write about something I read or else I won't bother. This also seems like a problem.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Performative shopping and "hauls" (22 March 2010)
Marisa Meltzer has an interesting piece at Slate about teenage girls who make "hauls" -- videos of the stuff they bought on shopping trips. Meltzer compares hauls to tech-unboxing videos; they reminded me of when I freelanced at Lucky.
Making haul videos probably seems entirely natural, like it might have seemed to form a garage band in past decades. The consumer society's great achievement is turning shopping into the viable medium for creativity and social connection. It seems natural, inevitable even, to relate to other people that way. Meltzer makes her own haul video and concludes, "With a camera on me, everything I bought felt inherently important." The way to intensify our feelings is to film them and launch them into the world, imagining someone will watch and care enough to judge us. That fantasy is not new, but the means for seeming to fulfill it are (you don't have to, say, start a band, practice, and try to book gigs at the VFW), and they are of course going to be commercially exploited. That's one way to interpret the long-term game plan of Facebook and YouTube.
It was predictable that hauls should start happening, considering the commercial inflection of online sharing -- and also because shopping is always getting harder and harder. There's inherently a vague dread in making the commitment to spend, considering the way that consumerism relates to identity, and these sorts of decisions are being logged permanently online. It's a semiotic jungle out there; the meanings are multiplying and teens especially want advice on how to buy what will send the messages they want to send in the appropriate way. Adults have more leeway in inventing their own meanings, or have come up with disassociative strategies about what we all have to do in terms of self-presentation. Teens have fewer defenses.
The sample that Meltzer provides is pretty polished; the girl shows the pieces she bought, models them, and explains why she pulled the trigger on them. I imagine there are less polished versions, that are more desperate or more ostentatious. Bourdieu-style analysis could break such videos down by class; you'd predict that as you move up the hierarchy, the more pretenses at being disinterested in the presentation there would be, the more likely the discussion would be couched in aesthetic terminology.
The rhetoric in the video is straight out of Lucky, in fact, and reminded me of the weird admiration I had for the copy there, the quixotic optimism in all products, that there was something unique and redemptive to say about everything if you were ingenious enough and mined the thesaurus thoroughly enough for new adjectives. I enjoyed the way the editors there would heedlessly and inventively transform nouns and verbs into adjectives to invent entirely new criteria by which to evaluate boots and jackets and lipstick shades. Here's a more or less random example that gets at what I mean: "The structured sweetheart neckline combined with the blousiness makes it super flattering--and the unusual mosaic pattern is so cool. To offset the girliness I'm going to wear it with some thick gray tights, these futuristic BCBGMaxAzria platforms and Diesel's oversize boyfriend blazer." (Before I worked there, I never had heard of "boyfriend" clothes." The paradoxical conundrum implied by that appellation -- clothes for women made to simulate clothes for men that women would borrow under intimate and cozy conditions? -- made me want to break out my copy of Barthes's The Fashion System to figure out what it meant. But I think this Sociological Images post shows how the phenomenon has reached dizzying ironic heights well beyond interpretation.)
Lucky taught me how shopping could be a vector for unfeigned enthusiasm strong enough to entirely mask the underlying cynicism. People who love shopping are not in bad faith, and they seem to honestly want others to experience the joy and confidence it can intermittently bring them. That same hopeful tone animates the haul video; she's not out to exclude anyone, though that could certainly be the effect. Instead, she is aping the mass-media tone of inclusion and eager solicitude. She's not doing anything wrong; she seems successfully well-adjusted. Meltzer notes that girls like the one in the video "resemble the popular girls at any high school, which is precisely why they are so appealing to other teens." The popular girl doesn't have to snub you, she can just make you a follower without following you back.
Anyway, that's what is so disheartening about online sociality to me: the likable girl in this shopping video is the face of marketing's future. Marketers will seem more well-intentioned than ever; they will be our peers. And we won't notice that our peers talk like a commercial because we'll be using the same idiom ourselves.
Making haul videos probably seems entirely natural, like it might have seemed to form a garage band in past decades. The consumer society's great achievement is turning shopping into the viable medium for creativity and social connection. It seems natural, inevitable even, to relate to other people that way. Meltzer makes her own haul video and concludes, "With a camera on me, everything I bought felt inherently important." The way to intensify our feelings is to film them and launch them into the world, imagining someone will watch and care enough to judge us. That fantasy is not new, but the means for seeming to fulfill it are (you don't have to, say, start a band, practice, and try to book gigs at the VFW), and they are of course going to be commercially exploited. That's one way to interpret the long-term game plan of Facebook and YouTube.
It was predictable that hauls should start happening, considering the commercial inflection of online sharing -- and also because shopping is always getting harder and harder. There's inherently a vague dread in making the commitment to spend, considering the way that consumerism relates to identity, and these sorts of decisions are being logged permanently online. It's a semiotic jungle out there; the meanings are multiplying and teens especially want advice on how to buy what will send the messages they want to send in the appropriate way. Adults have more leeway in inventing their own meanings, or have come up with disassociative strategies about what we all have to do in terms of self-presentation. Teens have fewer defenses.
The sample that Meltzer provides is pretty polished; the girl shows the pieces she bought, models them, and explains why she pulled the trigger on them. I imagine there are less polished versions, that are more desperate or more ostentatious. Bourdieu-style analysis could break such videos down by class; you'd predict that as you move up the hierarchy, the more pretenses at being disinterested in the presentation there would be, the more likely the discussion would be couched in aesthetic terminology.
The rhetoric in the video is straight out of Lucky, in fact, and reminded me of the weird admiration I had for the copy there, the quixotic optimism in all products, that there was something unique and redemptive to say about everything if you were ingenious enough and mined the thesaurus thoroughly enough for new adjectives. I enjoyed the way the editors there would heedlessly and inventively transform nouns and verbs into adjectives to invent entirely new criteria by which to evaluate boots and jackets and lipstick shades. Here's a more or less random example that gets at what I mean: "The structured sweetheart neckline combined with the blousiness makes it super flattering--and the unusual mosaic pattern is so cool. To offset the girliness I'm going to wear it with some thick gray tights, these futuristic BCBGMaxAzria platforms and Diesel's oversize boyfriend blazer." (Before I worked there, I never had heard of "boyfriend" clothes." The paradoxical conundrum implied by that appellation -- clothes for women made to simulate clothes for men that women would borrow under intimate and cozy conditions? -- made me want to break out my copy of Barthes's The Fashion System to figure out what it meant. But I think this Sociological Images post shows how the phenomenon has reached dizzying ironic heights well beyond interpretation.)
Lucky taught me how shopping could be a vector for unfeigned enthusiasm strong enough to entirely mask the underlying cynicism. People who love shopping are not in bad faith, and they seem to honestly want others to experience the joy and confidence it can intermittently bring them. That same hopeful tone animates the haul video; she's not out to exclude anyone, though that could certainly be the effect. Instead, she is aping the mass-media tone of inclusion and eager solicitude. She's not doing anything wrong; she seems successfully well-adjusted. Meltzer notes that girls like the one in the video "resemble the popular girls at any high school, which is precisely why they are so appealing to other teens." The popular girl doesn't have to snub you, she can just make you a follower without following you back.
Anyway, that's what is so disheartening about online sociality to me: the likable girl in this shopping video is the face of marketing's future. Marketers will seem more well-intentioned than ever; they will be our peers. And we won't notice that our peers talk like a commercial because we'll be using the same idiom ourselves.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Curatorial compulsion (22 Jan 2010)
Nick Bilton writes in the NYT about the curatorial impulse that living online has unleashed.
If we don't curate online, it's as if we cease to exist. The efforts are existentially significant to us, but we only get back the sense of being alive; the companies and peers who we are producing for can harvest the value of this labor. But as Bilton points out, we recoup some of the value of the labor by capitalizing on the curatorial work of others: "Without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis." But should we even feel obliged to? Isn't that a grandiose and hubristic pursuit? To know the best of everything that is going on everywhere? When the urge strikes me to "keep up with music," I feel what Bilton is talking about most keenly, but instead of feeling caught up, I instead feel hopelessly behind, as I often do when I log in to my Google Reader.
Bilton cites Maria Popova, a curator he follows, who discusses what she does as "controlled serendipity" and "content discovery." These cold, oxymoronic phrases are apt in that they convey some of the mechanistic nature of the process, which Bilton labels a "reflex." But what happens is more like forced serendipity, a demand that the world give forth "content" to satisfy our curiosity, which atrophies, becomes lazier. Online, curiosity loses its active component as it becomes accelerated. I feel it when I fire through the 500 articles in my RSS feed, much of it densely written articles and essays that I cast aside with a glance. Maybe I file it in a shared folder with a satisfied sense of completion. Job well done, curator.
I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.This is a perfect example of how performing free immaterial labor is starting to rule our days, become a compulsion. No longer a hobby, it's an entire mode of being. Life is winnowing down to operations of this limited scope and scale -- pointing and thumbs-upping at texts and images.
Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.
If we don't curate online, it's as if we cease to exist. The efforts are existentially significant to us, but we only get back the sense of being alive; the companies and peers who we are producing for can harvest the value of this labor. But as Bilton points out, we recoup some of the value of the labor by capitalizing on the curatorial work of others: "Without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis." But should we even feel obliged to? Isn't that a grandiose and hubristic pursuit? To know the best of everything that is going on everywhere? When the urge strikes me to "keep up with music," I feel what Bilton is talking about most keenly, but instead of feeling caught up, I instead feel hopelessly behind, as I often do when I log in to my Google Reader.
Bilton cites Maria Popova, a curator he follows, who discusses what she does as "controlled serendipity" and "content discovery." These cold, oxymoronic phrases are apt in that they convey some of the mechanistic nature of the process, which Bilton labels a "reflex." But what happens is more like forced serendipity, a demand that the world give forth "content" to satisfy our curiosity, which atrophies, becomes lazier. Online, curiosity loses its active component as it becomes accelerated. I feel it when I fire through the 500 articles in my RSS feed, much of it densely written articles and essays that I cast aside with a glance. Maybe I file it in a shared folder with a satisfied sense of completion. Job well done, curator.
Possessed by Possessions (8 Jan 2010)
Ever since I read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces in 2004, I've wanted to read Raoul Vaneigem's Situationist manifesto, The Revolution of Everyday Life. I even went to the trouble of cutting and pasting all the text into a Quark document and printing it out. But I am only now getting to it; the stuff I've reading about immaterial labor and Web 2.0 reminded me of the Situationists, who (in my unrefreshed understanding) seemed like precursors to the techno-optimists who believe the interactivity of the Web has radicalizing potential and may usher in an alternative to capitalism that revolves around ceaseless unexploited creativity and self-actualization. It is the realization of what detournement -- reappropriating commercial cultural and subverting it -- could bring, a radicalized subjectivity that is fluid and spontaneous, uncaptured.
I'm skeptical of all that, agreeing instead with the arguments that see Web 2.0 as the apotheosis of the "social factory," in which our consumption is productive and subjectivity becomes the ultimate capitalist commodity. It has never been more bound up with capitalist production. We make our mediated identities out of the set of commercialized signs, and this becomes the bottom line and the horizon for any form of social activity.
Reading Vaneigem (which is not easy -- he tends toward the manifesto style of making a string of prophetic assertions and often argues by way of epigram), I see that the Situationist critique of consumer society (the "society of the spectacle" -- of role-playing displays of identity that are somehow not authentically lived) applies with equal force to 21st century commercial culture, but their Utopian prescriptions in many ways have been co-opted (which is what Marcus was arguing in his book, if I am remembering correctly -- punk failed). Vaneigem expresses boundless faith in the transformative power of spontaneous creativity but did not anticipate the invention of Web 2.0 as a system for harvesting it, stripping it of its subversiveness and making it serve the circulation of commodities and specular identities. It has become much harder to disappear into everyday life; instead everyday life has been assimilated into the existing relations of production. Were I to update Twitter or Facebook, I'd be administering that integration, whether I realized it or not.
Since my last few posts have been about "having to like new music" -- that is, whether there is a compulsion to pay attention to commercial culture that is now metastasizing, this passage from Vaneigem jumped out at me:
This comes in a the midst of a chapter in which he seems to be arguing that we can live forever if we really wanted to, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess. The lesson in this for cultural consumption is to experience things without becoming attached to them, without collecting them, without forming an opinion about them that it then becomes urgent to convey to others and use as part of your own social identity. That calls for the rejection of "remix" culture, which involves appropriating what's out there to better pin down personal identity so that it can be deployed strategically.
Ultimately, the implication of Vaneigem's claim here is that "self-expression" is a false ideal, at least as we know it -- that is, it has become a way of reifying the self as a manipulable object. What we need to do, he seems to be saying, is purify expression of the self; to end consumption as signification, as a form of production. A key to this, Vaneigem suggests, is to try to think outside the concept of time, which is the pivotal category for integrating the self. That way, we "construct the present" that has otherwise eluded us as we project ourselves into the future or ruminate over the past.
Interesting, but I don't know how this prescription doesn't end up turning radical subjectivity into perfect solipsism. (ADDENDUM: In other words it is hard for us to imagine sharing a world with others before imaging a self who does the sharing; we want sharing to consist of moments of self-expression exchanged rather than it being a constitutive moment, with the sharing bringing a collective spirit into being that precedes a self-consciousness.) The problem is that social recognition has become a product and we face increasing pressure to put it up for sale when we have some to offer. But that doesn't mean we can live a fulfilling human life without it.
I'm skeptical of all that, agreeing instead with the arguments that see Web 2.0 as the apotheosis of the "social factory," in which our consumption is productive and subjectivity becomes the ultimate capitalist commodity. It has never been more bound up with capitalist production. We make our mediated identities out of the set of commercialized signs, and this becomes the bottom line and the horizon for any form of social activity.
Reading Vaneigem (which is not easy -- he tends toward the manifesto style of making a string of prophetic assertions and often argues by way of epigram), I see that the Situationist critique of consumer society (the "society of the spectacle" -- of role-playing displays of identity that are somehow not authentically lived) applies with equal force to 21st century commercial culture, but their Utopian prescriptions in many ways have been co-opted (which is what Marcus was arguing in his book, if I am remembering correctly -- punk failed). Vaneigem expresses boundless faith in the transformative power of spontaneous creativity but did not anticipate the invention of Web 2.0 as a system for harvesting it, stripping it of its subversiveness and making it serve the circulation of commodities and specular identities. It has become much harder to disappear into everyday life; instead everyday life has been assimilated into the existing relations of production. Were I to update Twitter or Facebook, I'd be administering that integration, whether I realized it or not.
Since my last few posts have been about "having to like new music" -- that is, whether there is a compulsion to pay attention to commercial culture that is now metastasizing, this passage from Vaneigem jumped out at me:
To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearance to the advantage of the spectacle and to the detriment of real life. The consumer is killed by the things he becomes attached to, because these things (commodities, roles) are dead.
Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things makes you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present but the present has yet to be constructed.
This comes in a the midst of a chapter in which he seems to be arguing that we can live forever if we really wanted to, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess. The lesson in this for cultural consumption is to experience things without becoming attached to them, without collecting them, without forming an opinion about them that it then becomes urgent to convey to others and use as part of your own social identity. That calls for the rejection of "remix" culture, which involves appropriating what's out there to better pin down personal identity so that it can be deployed strategically.
Ultimately, the implication of Vaneigem's claim here is that "self-expression" is a false ideal, at least as we know it -- that is, it has become a way of reifying the self as a manipulable object. What we need to do, he seems to be saying, is purify expression of the self; to end consumption as signification, as a form of production. A key to this, Vaneigem suggests, is to try to think outside the concept of time, which is the pivotal category for integrating the self. That way, we "construct the present" that has otherwise eluded us as we project ourselves into the future or ruminate over the past.
Interesting, but I don't know how this prescription doesn't end up turning radical subjectivity into perfect solipsism. (ADDENDUM: In other words it is hard for us to imagine sharing a world with others before imaging a self who does the sharing; we want sharing to consist of moments of self-expression exchanged rather than it being a constitutive moment, with the sharing bringing a collective spirit into being that precedes a self-consciousness.) The problem is that social recognition has become a product and we face increasing pressure to put it up for sale when we have some to offer. But that doesn't mean we can live a fulfilling human life without it.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Decade-end lists (23 Nov 2009)
Having looked at a few of these "best music of the decade" lists that are just starting to appear, I think you are at a big disadvantage if you put out an album in the last year or so, and the albums that are put out early in the decade are at a great advantage. The rest of the decade's releases are viewed through the lenses focused by the albums that come out in the first few years. A teleology of trends is established to make for a conveniently packaged decade zeitgeist. Hence, London Calling, released in 1980, is regarded as one of the most important albums of the 1980s. In 1991, Never Mind is released in the "year that punk broke," revolutionizing culture for the 1990s. Kid A, out in 2000, sets the agenda for the 2000s and is its most important album by critical consensus.
Perhaps a work's "influentialness" has largely become a factor of external considerations like this -- of how well the release date fits with the marketing culture, with publishers' deadlines, with formulas for magazine features that are already established. Artists can start to produce meta-important works, works that presage the needs of the critical apparatus destined to arbitrate things like social relevance. They can help frame the narrative we want to tell about our times, which is anchored to arbitrary divisions like decades. If I wanted to release an album right now, I would most certainly wait a few months.
Perhaps a work's "influentialness" has largely become a factor of external considerations like this -- of how well the release date fits with the marketing culture, with publishers' deadlines, with formulas for magazine features that are already established. Artists can start to produce meta-important works, works that presage the needs of the critical apparatus destined to arbitrate things like social relevance. They can help frame the narrative we want to tell about our times, which is anchored to arbitrary divisions like decades. If I wanted to release an album right now, I would most certainly wait a few months.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Learned worthlessness (10 Sept 2009)
In the most recent NYT Magazine, the always interesting Jon Mooallem has an article about the self-storage industry in America. The need to store one's belongings in a 6-by-6-foot box miles away from where one lives is a pretty good indication that some sort of insanity has taken grip, but the very normality of that scenario shows just how entrenched consumerism has become. Once the need for storage was transitory -- a move or a divorce necessitated it. But in recent years, "the line between necessity and convenience -- between temporary life event and permanent lifestyle -- totally blurred," Mooallem explains. It has become convenient to live as though we are always in transition, that no set of belongings is stable or anywhere near complete or fulfilling. Obviously, this betokens the triumph of a consumerist ideology.
We accumulate things that we can't possibly use, but remember enough of what they once signified when we bought them -- the moments of excitement and fantasies being fulfilled that brought us -- that we can't throw them away. Much of what is stored is furniture, it turns out, in part because it's expensive enough not to seem disposable, but cheap enough to easily replace:
Though it has prompted the kind of turmoil that was once the storage industry's bread-and-butter, the current recession is also forcing people to give up spaces because they can't afford the rent. A measure of my own insanity: all I could think of while reading Mooallem's article was "Wow, I bet the dumpsters outside these storage units that people cant afford anymore are full of great stuff." But in this, I am just a reflection of that American optimism. Mooallem secured this great, telling quote:
We accumulate things that we can't possibly use, but remember enough of what they once signified when we bought them -- the moments of excitement and fantasies being fulfilled that brought us -- that we can't throw them away. Much of what is stored is furniture, it turns out, in part because it's expensive enough not to seem disposable, but cheap enough to easily replace:
The marketing consultant Derek Naylor told me that people stockpile furniture while saving for bigger or second homes but then, in some cases, “they don’t want to clutter up their new home with all the things they have in storage.” So they buy new, nicer things and keep paying to store the old ones anyway. Clem Tang, a spokesman for Public Storage, explains: “You say, ‘I paid $1,000 for this table a couple of years ago. I’m not getting rid of it, or selling it for 10 bucks at a garage sale. That’s like throwing away $1,000.’ ” It’s not a surprising response in a society replacing things at such an accelerated rate — this inability to see our last table as suddenly worthless, even though we’ve just been out shopping for a new one as though it were.This phenomenon suggests we are afflicted with a kind of schizophrenia about goods. As behavioral economists have long-known, we overvalue what we own (the "endowment effect"), yet at the same time we can't resist replacing it when we perceive a bargain. We appreciate taking advantage of a sale for its own sake, regardless of whether the opportunity conforms to any actual need, and regardless of whether we can accommodate the souvenir of our consumer triumph. We become trained to recognize potential value in everything and have a hard time recognizing when something has become worthless. It seems like the dark side of the congenital optimism that Americans are supposed to have; we can't give up on anything we once invested our faith in.
Though it has prompted the kind of turmoil that was once the storage industry's bread-and-butter, the current recession is also forcing people to give up spaces because they can't afford the rent. A measure of my own insanity: all I could think of while reading Mooallem's article was "Wow, I bet the dumpsters outside these storage units that people cant afford anymore are full of great stuff." But in this, I am just a reflection of that American optimism. Mooallem secured this great, telling quote:
“I really think there’s a spirit that things will turn around,” Jim Chiswell, a Virginia-based consultant to the industry, told me. “I believe that my children — and both my children are proving it already — they’re going to have more at the end of their lifetimes, and more success, than I’ve had. And so will their children. I don’t believe the destiny of this country as a beacon of freedom and hope is over. And I believe there will be more growth, and more people wanting to have things and collect things.”What is hope if not the hope to have more?
Friday, July 29, 2011
Beatles Rock Band (18 Aug 2009)
Though it has a great hed, Daniel Radosh's article on the new Beatles Rock Band game reads like a long infomercial, or like a textual equivalent of one of those fake-documentary shows that gets made to promote movies, with interviews with the stars and the director that can be clipped out for use on Entertainment Tonight or get thrown on the DVD as bonus "features." (Though I can understand why Radosh took the assignment -- who wouldn't jump at the chance to interview the last living Beatles?) It did nothing to allay my confusion about music-based games. Changing radio stations in the stolen cars in Grand Theft Auto still seems a more meaningful musical gaming experience to me than playing Simon to the beat on plastic mini-guitars. I still think I may as well try to play guitar and suck, or simply play air guitar rather than try to master the irrelevant and counterproductive ersatz fretwork of Guitar Hero. (Guitar playing involves raising to the level of instinct the movement of your fingers up and down the fretboard along with the rise and fall of melody. Guitar Hero seems capable of thwarting that development.)
And I continue to think statements like this one -- "Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition" -- are pretty ideological, wishful thinking asserted as nebulous fact by the game's marketers. ("Knowledge of the alphabet leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of poetic composition.") This tepid endorsement has the same hopeful vagueness: "Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s widow, who stopped by Abbey Road while Martin was working, recalled her surprise upon first playing Rock Band a few years earlier. 'You feel like you’re creating music,' she marveled. 'It must engage some creative part of your brain.' " Of course, you are not making music and are only simulating creativity vicariously. But if the game satisfies the brain's creative impulses, why not just call it real creativity, the same way we might call crack-induced euphoria "true happiness"?
My interaction with music has always been a different sort of game, in which I scored points with myself for memorizing lyrics and remembering song titles and the names of the musicians in bands that most people had barely heard of. Music trivia seemed the natural game to play to me, and the rewards didn't seem to cancel out the pleasure of listening but instead enhanced it with context. That trivial information could buy my way in to some conversations and establish bonds with people who otherwise would have ignored me is a happy by-product. The games circumvent all that; it houses the information and its interfaces commandeer the social engagement.
The mix of social, cerebral and sensuous elements in my response to music is most satisfying when it seems immediate and fused, a kind of physico-cognitive dance that occurs spontaneously with the sound. I tap my hand, maybe imagine an album cover, sing along in a way that makes feel as though I am merging with the music and its mood. I wouldn't want someone or something to judge my ability to keep time with the drummer while I am tapping my foot or measure the synced-up relevance of my air-guitar strumming. This makes me more self-conscious rather than less, seeming to defeat the whole point of immersing myself in a song. I'm "inside the music" in a ineffably complex way that seems direct as opposed to mediated.
So I just don't get Rock Band. I don't want a game to mediate music to me when music is already mediating other, more profound experiences -- memories, dreams, secret pathways into the hearts of friends or imagined strangers, sheer abandon to sensory stimuli. These are enough to hold my attention; I wouldn't want those experiences endangered or compromised or supplanted by the discipline enforced by a game that measures your attention. That seems to me like covert industrial training.
Maybe if I could get over the scorekeeping component and think of it more like karaoke, I would understand it better; as this explanatory comment of Radosh's made the most sense to me: "What nonmusicians want, it turned out, is a sense of what it’s like to perform the music they already love." I understand that desire, though it seems strange gratified in this form, largely free of the effort and frustration that actual collaboration and mastery entails.
I don't quite accept the argument that Rock Band is akin to things like Flight Simulator games that let you pretend to be a pilot without having to actually learn. Music appreciation is richer and potentially deeper than simply getting to pretend to do something you can't actually do. So the music games seem to be ruining richer soil, precluding the deeper engagements for a mediated, preordained, regulated one. It's the apotheosis of Adornoesque fears of debased, administered culture squelching the free space of aesthetic creation in which resistance and protest could still be mustered. Instead we'll get Rock Band: Woody Guthrie.
The need for spaces in which interactivity is not preprogrammed and which allow for an unbounded sort of imaginative engagement seems crucial, akin to the information-free zone Jason Zegerle posits in this TNR post.
I like to learn covers of songs on guitar, and I think it has something to do with this, retracing the steps of musicians you have come to think of as being beyond merely creative -- it seems almost unbelievable, miraculous, that you can actually just play "Dear Prudence," that your fingers are retracing that immaculate moment of creation that John Lennon had when he discovered it and it actually sounds sort of the same for you. It's like touring a holy land, or standing in some spot where a famous speech was delivered.
But I don't feel like I become these legendary rock figures when I play their songs on guitar. It seems like the video games are trying to promote a much more direct sort of vicariousness that cuts out the other potential pleasures of music, as if the reason to love music is simply to imagine yourself being loved by an audience, being someone else.
What McCartney says at the end of Radosh's piece is pretty incisive:
And I continue to think statements like this one -- "Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition" -- are pretty ideological, wishful thinking asserted as nebulous fact by the game's marketers. ("Knowledge of the alphabet leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of poetic composition.") This tepid endorsement has the same hopeful vagueness: "Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s widow, who stopped by Abbey Road while Martin was working, recalled her surprise upon first playing Rock Band a few years earlier. 'You feel like you’re creating music,' she marveled. 'It must engage some creative part of your brain.' " Of course, you are not making music and are only simulating creativity vicariously. But if the game satisfies the brain's creative impulses, why not just call it real creativity, the same way we might call crack-induced euphoria "true happiness"?
My interaction with music has always been a different sort of game, in which I scored points with myself for memorizing lyrics and remembering song titles and the names of the musicians in bands that most people had barely heard of. Music trivia seemed the natural game to play to me, and the rewards didn't seem to cancel out the pleasure of listening but instead enhanced it with context. That trivial information could buy my way in to some conversations and establish bonds with people who otherwise would have ignored me is a happy by-product. The games circumvent all that; it houses the information and its interfaces commandeer the social engagement.
The mix of social, cerebral and sensuous elements in my response to music is most satisfying when it seems immediate and fused, a kind of physico-cognitive dance that occurs spontaneously with the sound. I tap my hand, maybe imagine an album cover, sing along in a way that makes feel as though I am merging with the music and its mood. I wouldn't want someone or something to judge my ability to keep time with the drummer while I am tapping my foot or measure the synced-up relevance of my air-guitar strumming. This makes me more self-conscious rather than less, seeming to defeat the whole point of immersing myself in a song. I'm "inside the music" in a ineffably complex way that seems direct as opposed to mediated.
So I just don't get Rock Band. I don't want a game to mediate music to me when music is already mediating other, more profound experiences -- memories, dreams, secret pathways into the hearts of friends or imagined strangers, sheer abandon to sensory stimuli. These are enough to hold my attention; I wouldn't want those experiences endangered or compromised or supplanted by the discipline enforced by a game that measures your attention. That seems to me like covert industrial training.
Maybe if I could get over the scorekeeping component and think of it more like karaoke, I would understand it better; as this explanatory comment of Radosh's made the most sense to me: "What nonmusicians want, it turned out, is a sense of what it’s like to perform the music they already love." I understand that desire, though it seems strange gratified in this form, largely free of the effort and frustration that actual collaboration and mastery entails.
I don't quite accept the argument that Rock Band is akin to things like Flight Simulator games that let you pretend to be a pilot without having to actually learn. Music appreciation is richer and potentially deeper than simply getting to pretend to do something you can't actually do. So the music games seem to be ruining richer soil, precluding the deeper engagements for a mediated, preordained, regulated one. It's the apotheosis of Adornoesque fears of debased, administered culture squelching the free space of aesthetic creation in which resistance and protest could still be mustered. Instead we'll get Rock Band: Woody Guthrie.
The need for spaces in which interactivity is not preprogrammed and which allow for an unbounded sort of imaginative engagement seems crucial, akin to the information-free zone Jason Zegerle posits in this TNR post.
I like to learn covers of songs on guitar, and I think it has something to do with this, retracing the steps of musicians you have come to think of as being beyond merely creative -- it seems almost unbelievable, miraculous, that you can actually just play "Dear Prudence," that your fingers are retracing that immaculate moment of creation that John Lennon had when he discovered it and it actually sounds sort of the same for you. It's like touring a holy land, or standing in some spot where a famous speech was delivered.
But I don't feel like I become these legendary rock figures when I play their songs on guitar. It seems like the video games are trying to promote a much more direct sort of vicariousness that cuts out the other potential pleasures of music, as if the reason to love music is simply to imagine yourself being loved by an audience, being someone else.
What McCartney says at the end of Radosh's piece is pretty incisive:
The teacup clattered quietly on its saucer, and McCartney thought about the changes he’d seen in the music world. “There were no cassette recorders” when he and Lennon first started writing songs, he noted. “We just had to remember it. Then suddenly there were cassettes, then we were working on four track instead of two track, then you got off tape, then you’ve got stereo — which we thought just made it twice as loud. We thought that was a really brilliant move.” After the Beatles came CDs, digital downloads and now video games. “I don’t really think there’s any difference. At the base of it all, there’s the song. At the base of it, there’s the music.”The Beatles game makes him more famous, more relevant, more real. It makes those of us playing the game more anonymous, more immaterial, more unrealized. And the games of the future will make us able to become anyone but ourselves.
And the future? “In 10 years’ time you’ll be standing there, and you will be Paul McCartney. You know that, don’t you?” He made a sound like a “Star Trek” transporter. “You’ll have a holographic case, and it will just encase you, and you will be Paul McCartney.” He paused and then said, “God knows what that will mean for me.” Then he added slyly, “I’ll be the guy on the original record.”
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Box of books in the trash (27 April 2009)
Who says serendipity is dead? While I was jogging around my neighborhood yesterday, my run was interrupted by one of my favorite things to stumble upon -- a box of books being thrown out. This happenstance allows me to (1) acquire several more books of marginal relevance to me for the nearly always margin-defeating cost of free and (2) believe there is some sort of destiny in my reading and them and extracting what I can extract from them, all while (3) feeling like I'm performing a noble act of unconsumption, resuscitating something old and avoiding an unnecessary new purchase. If we need to be constantly rearranging our belongings to be continually reaffirming our ever-unstable self-concept, why not do it through acquisitive acts outside the economy?
Anyway, at this particular treasure trove (I guess if I used Twitter I would have immediately posted the address so all my non-existent friends in the neighborhood could go check it out?), my attention was arrested particularly by one spine, which read "QUANT by QUANT." What was this? Was it the anonymous confessions of a hedge fund manager? Not exactly. It turned out to be this:
Very mod. Inside are a bunch of pictures of Mary Quant cutting clothes and looking at her own handiwork through shop windows. I also got a copy of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, a book about teen angst called Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis, and this book, which I have read before but whose cover I find irresistible:
I read this book a few years ago mainly because I liked the title and found it almost impenetrably strange. If I remember right it is a Heavenly Creatures-like story of girls acting out against the patriarchy in their own misguided way. (I hope that is not too glib.) I've probably owned three copies of it in the apst, all of which I have given away -- this is my fourth. I will probably tear the front off and use it as a bookmark.
Anyway, as I left the box behind, I immediately began to do exactly what I frequently complain about in other posts -- draw conclusions about what sort of person could possibly have owned this strange concatenation of books. Is it someone who took a feminist literature course and is only now getting around to casting off the books? Does that mean the person's feminism has waned, or that the person has moved beyond the need to keep books like The Beauty Myth on the shelf as proof? Was this person a child of the suburbs who had resettled in the city (like me), or was this person just vaguely interested in a 1970s perspective on an evolving social concern? Most important, perhaps: Was this person a mod? A rocker? A mocker? Or were they someone like me who saw this book in a thrift store and thought it a kitschy artifact? What are people going to think of me when I throw it away?
It's easy to see how this mode of thinking reinforces itself and generates a low-grade cultural paranoia. It's easy to let oneself off the hook and say, Oh, it's human nature to perform such analyses and typecastings, as well as to use objects to define ourselves, but it seems ultimately more fruitful and hopeful to wonder what about our current society invites and provokes this sort of thing, which seems to trap our identities in things to a degree that seems unprecedented.
Anyway, at this particular treasure trove (I guess if I used Twitter I would have immediately posted the address so all my non-existent friends in the neighborhood could go check it out?), my attention was arrested particularly by one spine, which read "QUANT by QUANT." What was this? Was it the anonymous confessions of a hedge fund manager? Not exactly. It turned out to be this:
Very mod. Inside are a bunch of pictures of Mary Quant cutting clothes and looking at her own handiwork through shop windows. I also got a copy of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, a book about teen angst called Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis, and this book, which I have read before but whose cover I find irresistible:
I read this book a few years ago mainly because I liked the title and found it almost impenetrably strange. If I remember right it is a Heavenly Creatures-like story of girls acting out against the patriarchy in their own misguided way. (I hope that is not too glib.) I've probably owned three copies of it in the apst, all of which I have given away -- this is my fourth. I will probably tear the front off and use it as a bookmark.
Anyway, as I left the box behind, I immediately began to do exactly what I frequently complain about in other posts -- draw conclusions about what sort of person could possibly have owned this strange concatenation of books. Is it someone who took a feminist literature course and is only now getting around to casting off the books? Does that mean the person's feminism has waned, or that the person has moved beyond the need to keep books like The Beauty Myth on the shelf as proof? Was this person a child of the suburbs who had resettled in the city (like me), or was this person just vaguely interested in a 1970s perspective on an evolving social concern? Most important, perhaps: Was this person a mod? A rocker? A mocker? Or were they someone like me who saw this book in a thrift store and thought it a kitschy artifact? What are people going to think of me when I throw it away?
It's easy to see how this mode of thinking reinforces itself and generates a low-grade cultural paranoia. It's easy to let oneself off the hook and say, Oh, it's human nature to perform such analyses and typecastings, as well as to use objects to define ourselves, but it seems ultimately more fruitful and hopeful to wonder what about our current society invites and provokes this sort of thing, which seems to trap our identities in things to a degree that seems unprecedented.
Friday, July 15, 2011
"Projects for paying attention to attention" (26 Jan 2009)
PSFK linked to this post by Russell Davies, in which he explains his strategy to make himself actually pay attention to what he listens to:
That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It's a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn't what I want music in my life for -- to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I've compelled myself to consume.
Anyway, this makes me wonder if we really have in fact entered into the so-called attention economy -- the idea that our most precious currency is the attention we pay to something, since so much is freely offered and the competition amongst marketers for our eyeballs has never been fiercer. We do have a limited amount of time in which to concentrate our attention on things, but these limitations have not translated into a clear hierarchy of where to focus. Instead, we seem more bewildered than ever by all the possibilities, and we become more and more whimsical without necessarily wanting to. The need to pay attention to attention suggests that our culture has been too successful in promoting distractions; it may be that we can no longer tell distractions apart from things we want to be interested in. Distraction has become the common denominator of all leisure experiences; the only alternative is basically work, socially constructed as joyless.
(Bonus: My 15-song all-A playlist, judging by iTunes play count:
1. Abba, "Bang-a-boomerang"
2. AC/DC, "Dog Eat Dog"
3. Addrisi Brothers, "Time to Love"
4. Al Kooper, "Be Yourself (Be Real)"
5. Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"
6. Alice Cooper, "Under My Wheels"
7. the Arrows, "Toughen Up"
8. Allman Brothers, "Don't Keep Me Wonderin' "
9. Asha Bhosle, "Ankhen Meri Maikhana"
10. Andy Kim, "Shoot 'em Up Baby"
11. Angry Samoans, "Lights Out"
12. The Association, "It'll Take a Little Time"
13. Aerovons, "World of You"
14. A.C. Newman, "Battle for Straight Time"
15. Allen Toussaint, "Electricity")
unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.I'm sympathetic to the desperate feeling of being overwhelmed by all the music that's accessible to us, but I'm not sure that setting up arbitrary limits is the best solution. Ideally, there would be something at least semi-organic about how we pursue pleasure and pay attention. Is that the impasse we have reached, where we have to force ourselves to pay attention to the things we intended to do for fun? Maybe the "ambient haze" he worries about is actually preferable -- the best we can do nowadays. (And maybe that explains why people like Animal Collective -- and it's even in the A's!)
So I thought I'd try a 26 week experiment; listening to a new letter every week. Just to see what I notice. This is week A.
Projects for paying attention to attention. Those seem interesting now.
That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It's a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn't what I want music in my life for -- to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I've compelled myself to consume.
Anyway, this makes me wonder if we really have in fact entered into the so-called attention economy -- the idea that our most precious currency is the attention we pay to something, since so much is freely offered and the competition amongst marketers for our eyeballs has never been fiercer. We do have a limited amount of time in which to concentrate our attention on things, but these limitations have not translated into a clear hierarchy of where to focus. Instead, we seem more bewildered than ever by all the possibilities, and we become more and more whimsical without necessarily wanting to. The need to pay attention to attention suggests that our culture has been too successful in promoting distractions; it may be that we can no longer tell distractions apart from things we want to be interested in. Distraction has become the common denominator of all leisure experiences; the only alternative is basically work, socially constructed as joyless.
(Bonus: My 15-song all-A playlist, judging by iTunes play count:
1. Abba, "Bang-a-boomerang"
2. AC/DC, "Dog Eat Dog"
3. Addrisi Brothers, "Time to Love"
4. Al Kooper, "Be Yourself (Be Real)"
5. Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"
6. Alice Cooper, "Under My Wheels"
7. the Arrows, "Toughen Up"
8. Allman Brothers, "Don't Keep Me Wonderin' "
9. Asha Bhosle, "Ankhen Meri Maikhana"
10. Andy Kim, "Shoot 'em Up Baby"
11. Angry Samoans, "Lights Out"
12. The Association, "It'll Take a Little Time"
13. Aerovons, "World of You"
14. A.C. Newman, "Battle for Straight Time"
15. Allen Toussaint, "Electricity")
Necessary frictions (23 Jan 2009)
These are deep thoughts occasioned by playing 1942, so measure them accordingly. The problem I faced was defeating the first big plane you encounter, about 10 stages in. I found it to be ridiculously hard and was entertaining implementing the cheat code that let's a player destroy it with one hit. But then I began thinking about optimal frustration and about the difficulty game creators must have in finding the ideal balance between frustration and progress. Obviously games need to be just hard enough to keep you pressing reset (or, back in the paleolithic days of arcades, dropping another quarter in) when you are foiled. You have to be persuaded by the game that you can make it past the obstacle even as the game is at the same time thwarting you. What emerge from this apparent contradiction is a sense of how frustration structures the feeling of progress. When the cheat code is enabled, there is no sense of progress in 1942 -- only a curiosity about what's next keeps me going. Oh, neat: the red planes now criss-cross instead of flying in a spiral. The thirst for this sort of novelty only takes me so far, and in fact what's revealed is how idiotic it is to care about what comes next in 1942. (It's like the elementary-school teachers say: "When you cheat, you're only cheating yourself.") A measure of difficulty, of friction, is necessary to transform the arbitrary novelty into progress.
This dynamic perhaps holds true for consumerism generally -- we want more things because we imagine these things will enhance or enrich our lives in some way, offer some sort of progress toward a self-concept or goal. Consumerism seizes upon that impulse as the source of profit and thus seeks to gratify it. But because maximizing the volume of exchanges ultimately suits producers best, their efforts are focused on eliminating the difficulties that impede them -- they seek to enable the cheat code, as it were, and let us get what we want as soon as we think of it (and can afford it). But without any difficulty in accessing more stuff, our pursuit of novelty never gives us a feeling of progress or accomplishment. Without the frustration, our frivolous impulses can't ripen into meaningful desires. If there is no friction, our concentration is not engaged in the same way -- we don't stoke our creative problem-solving abilities or become invested emotionally. The problem (i.e. the new thing we want to integrate into our life) takes on no metaphoric resonance or depth. To make another maudlin videogame allusion: each new impulse remains just another dot to consume as wend our way, Pac-Man-like, through the meaningless maze of existence.
Obviously, as the internet facilitates our access to cultural goods, frustration becomes harder to find. In a recent post (via BoingBoing), tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly argues that more and more culture products will become readily available social goods. He argues that access is better than ownership, and therefore society will move in the direction of providing access while eroding the barriers set up by ownership.
But what also may happen, as the sources of friction that we are accustomed to are eradicated, we will produce new, synthetic ones -- we will create frustration to preserve our sense of making progress. Or we will cast about looking for frustration, though calling it something else to ourselves. My thinking about this is a bit inchoate, as you've probably observed by now, but it seems to me that consumer capitalism, by making it easier to get more and more things (while convincing us that this is life's end-all and be-all), has had the effect of preventing us from experiencing a feeling of progress -- we are trapped instead on a treadmill of novelty. But what makes this painful for us is that we may invent frustrations to make up for the lack of friction in our acquiring things, imposing arbitrary limitations on ourselves in the absence of external limits -- those problems of exchange that our existing social relations had equipped us to deal with. So these arbitrary limits can perhaps take pathological forms -- crippling self-doubt, optional paralysis, inertia, dysthemia.
Essentially, this is a variation on a joke from Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is tape-recording an idea for a short story (and this is a paraphrase I lifted from an Amazon.ca review) "about people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe." I think consumerism has distracted us from taking on the existential problems and hung us up with the self-created problems which turn out to be far worse, as they are not constrained by any real facts about our lives.
This dynamic perhaps holds true for consumerism generally -- we want more things because we imagine these things will enhance or enrich our lives in some way, offer some sort of progress toward a self-concept or goal. Consumerism seizes upon that impulse as the source of profit and thus seeks to gratify it. But because maximizing the volume of exchanges ultimately suits producers best, their efforts are focused on eliminating the difficulties that impede them -- they seek to enable the cheat code, as it were, and let us get what we want as soon as we think of it (and can afford it). But without any difficulty in accessing more stuff, our pursuit of novelty never gives us a feeling of progress or accomplishment. Without the frustration, our frivolous impulses can't ripen into meaningful desires. If there is no friction, our concentration is not engaged in the same way -- we don't stoke our creative problem-solving abilities or become invested emotionally. The problem (i.e. the new thing we want to integrate into our life) takes on no metaphoric resonance or depth. To make another maudlin videogame allusion: each new impulse remains just another dot to consume as wend our way, Pac-Man-like, through the meaningless maze of existence.
Obviously, as the internet facilitates our access to cultural goods, frustration becomes harder to find. In a recent post (via BoingBoing), tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly argues that more and more culture products will become readily available social goods. He argues that access is better than ownership, and therefore society will move in the direction of providing access while eroding the barriers set up by ownership.
Very likely, in the near future, I won't "own" any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won't buy – as in make a decision to own -- any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won't own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to "own" it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.That is a pretty friction-free world that Kelly is imagining, which will may erode some of the meaning that we derive from such cultural goods. Instead of engaging, it will be easier than ever to say, "Next?"
For many people this type of instant universal access is better than owning. No responsibility of care, backing up, sorting, cataloging, cleaning, or storage. As they gain in public accessibility, books, music and movies are headed to become social goods even though they might not be paid by taxes. It's not hard to imagine most other intangible goods becoming social goods as well. Games, education, and health info are also headed in that direction.
But what also may happen, as the sources of friction that we are accustomed to are eradicated, we will produce new, synthetic ones -- we will create frustration to preserve our sense of making progress. Or we will cast about looking for frustration, though calling it something else to ourselves. My thinking about this is a bit inchoate, as you've probably observed by now, but it seems to me that consumer capitalism, by making it easier to get more and more things (while convincing us that this is life's end-all and be-all), has had the effect of preventing us from experiencing a feeling of progress -- we are trapped instead on a treadmill of novelty. But what makes this painful for us is that we may invent frustrations to make up for the lack of friction in our acquiring things, imposing arbitrary limitations on ourselves in the absence of external limits -- those problems of exchange that our existing social relations had equipped us to deal with. So these arbitrary limits can perhaps take pathological forms -- crippling self-doubt, optional paralysis, inertia, dysthemia.
Essentially, this is a variation on a joke from Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is tape-recording an idea for a short story (and this is a paraphrase I lifted from an Amazon.ca review) "about people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe." I think consumerism has distracted us from taking on the existential problems and hung us up with the self-created problems which turn out to be far worse, as they are not constrained by any real facts about our lives.
Re-editing frenzy (14 Jan 2009)
I generally have my portable MP3 player on shuffle, playing random songs from a 5,000-track grab bag. In effect, this makes my device an ad hoc radio station, and as such, I find that it requires radio edits of songs that will be wrenched out of whatever context they originally garnered from their place on an album. I used to scorn the radio edits of songs -- the truncated version of "Green-Eyed Lady" is especially egregious, as is the radio edit of Fleetwood Mac's "Sara" in the original and disgraceful CD issue of Tusk. But now I am seeing their usefulness. When yo are not listening to the songs in the environment they were designed for, you must adapt them to suit your particular circumstances.
At first, for me, this was a matter of removing things like the tedious sound-clip intros on Wu-Tang Clan songs, and removing unnecessary space from the beginning and end of songs that once were hidden bonus tracks on CDs. (What a horrible trend that was.) Then I found that I had started to remove boring musical intros and long fades -- the sonorous organ solo at the beginning of Led Zeppelin's "Your Time Is Gonna Come," and the drum machine loops at the end of Eric B. and Rakim's "Microphone Fiend," for instance.
Emboldened, I now have even started to remove parts of songs I don't like no matter where they fall -- that pointless drony part in Nirvana's "Drain You," the noise solo in Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance" and so on. Who has the time? Just give me the hooks.
When I first began doing this, I felt like a philistine tampering with the artistic vision embodied in these songs. Before I could re-edit them, I had to deal with them as they were, as did everyone else. We could only differ in our interpretations and opinions about what we heard. Now we can all make our own customized versions -- the triumph of read/write culture! (Tom Slee makes some skeptical remarks about read/write culture in this review of Lawrence Lessig's Remix -- the key one, I think, is that hobbies in the digital age have become more subject to depersonalized commodification because the internet is eroding face-to-face interaction in localized, hobby-based economies -- what he calls small-scale culture. The internet can entice us with a limitless audience, prompting us to underrate, or worse, ignore, the ready-made audience of friends and family we would have had without it.)
Gradually, I ceased to have any qualms about my song re-editing. Now I wonder if I am going to end up in Girl Talk territory, composing my own Stars on 45 mashups, or somewhere even more radical. And I wonder if this is a good thing, a liberation from top-down, culture-industry domination. I wonder if I am making laudable strides toward making my consumption more like production.
Consumption always is production, in the sense that we are reproducing ourselves (reconstituting our labor power, as Marx would have it). The problem is that even though I am being "productive," I reproduce myself precisely as a consumer, an identity I alternately dread and wallow in. That's not what I'm usually hoping to accomplish when I exhibit a bias toward "being productive": I'm thinking instead about trying not being passive in the face of the onslaught of data and products and messages and images and such, but trying to engage it actively -- usually in a doomed-to-fail attempt to manage it all. (Hence so much of my "leisure" time is spent on organizational tasks.)
But the problem with consumerism may lie specifically in that kind of engagement with cultural goods, particularly when it fails to bring the pleasure that it seems to promise or delivers the pleasure in addictive microdoses that create prolonged interludes of suffering want. In such productive "creative" activity, I am still reproducing myself with consumerism's preferred tools and reinforcing in myself the desires that it suits consumerism for me to have -- though I am not sure if I have any alternative.
This is the problem with the Situationist approach of detournement. Derivative by definition, it seems neutered, forced, circumscribed. Its subversiveness never actually registers on the level it would need to in order to fundamentally alter social relations or capitalism; for all its confrontationalism, it's not actually disruptive. It just permits those subjected to capitalism feel as though they are struggling if they choose to; it permits us to redecorate our cages with more individualistic creativity, with signs of our unbroken but ineffectual spirit.
At first, for me, this was a matter of removing things like the tedious sound-clip intros on Wu-Tang Clan songs, and removing unnecessary space from the beginning and end of songs that once were hidden bonus tracks on CDs. (What a horrible trend that was.) Then I found that I had started to remove boring musical intros and long fades -- the sonorous organ solo at the beginning of Led Zeppelin's "Your Time Is Gonna Come," and the drum machine loops at the end of Eric B. and Rakim's "Microphone Fiend," for instance.
Emboldened, I now have even started to remove parts of songs I don't like no matter where they fall -- that pointless drony part in Nirvana's "Drain You," the noise solo in Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance" and so on. Who has the time? Just give me the hooks.
When I first began doing this, I felt like a philistine tampering with the artistic vision embodied in these songs. Before I could re-edit them, I had to deal with them as they were, as did everyone else. We could only differ in our interpretations and opinions about what we heard. Now we can all make our own customized versions -- the triumph of read/write culture! (Tom Slee makes some skeptical remarks about read/write culture in this review of Lawrence Lessig's Remix -- the key one, I think, is that hobbies in the digital age have become more subject to depersonalized commodification because the internet is eroding face-to-face interaction in localized, hobby-based economies -- what he calls small-scale culture. The internet can entice us with a limitless audience, prompting us to underrate, or worse, ignore, the ready-made audience of friends and family we would have had without it.)
Gradually, I ceased to have any qualms about my song re-editing. Now I wonder if I am going to end up in Girl Talk territory, composing my own Stars on 45 mashups, or somewhere even more radical. And I wonder if this is a good thing, a liberation from top-down, culture-industry domination. I wonder if I am making laudable strides toward making my consumption more like production.
Consumption always is production, in the sense that we are reproducing ourselves (reconstituting our labor power, as Marx would have it). The problem is that even though I am being "productive," I reproduce myself precisely as a consumer, an identity I alternately dread and wallow in. That's not what I'm usually hoping to accomplish when I exhibit a bias toward "being productive": I'm thinking instead about trying not being passive in the face of the onslaught of data and products and messages and images and such, but trying to engage it actively -- usually in a doomed-to-fail attempt to manage it all. (Hence so much of my "leisure" time is spent on organizational tasks.)
But the problem with consumerism may lie specifically in that kind of engagement with cultural goods, particularly when it fails to bring the pleasure that it seems to promise or delivers the pleasure in addictive microdoses that create prolonged interludes of suffering want. In such productive "creative" activity, I am still reproducing myself with consumerism's preferred tools and reinforcing in myself the desires that it suits consumerism for me to have -- though I am not sure if I have any alternative.
This is the problem with the Situationist approach of detournement. Derivative by definition, it seems neutered, forced, circumscribed. Its subversiveness never actually registers on the level it would need to in order to fundamentally alter social relations or capitalism; for all its confrontationalism, it's not actually disruptive. It just permits those subjected to capitalism feel as though they are struggling if they choose to; it permits us to redecorate our cages with more individualistic creativity, with signs of our unbroken but ineffectual spirit.
The alluring danger of dilettantism (9 Jan 2009)
I've been puzzled by the popularity of the game Guitar Hero, for what seems to me like obvious reasons. It's like karaoke minus the trouble of having to hear the sounds you make. If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar. I assume I am missing the point of it, the competitive thrill, but I can't help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty. (Sure TV shows may have become more "complex," but these remain passive, albeit more absorbing.) A society that requires such short cuts and preemptive blows in the name of the short-attention span surely must be deeply broken, our progenitors probably would have thought.
Since, lamentably, what we do for a living tends to lack meaning for us personally, we rely more on our leisure and consumption time to supply our lives with meaning, to afford us opportunities for self-realization. But consumption and self-realization may be at odds. In his introductory book on Marx, philosopher Jon Elster (who I'd encountered before as a theorist of precommitment strategies) makes an interesting point about consumption versus self-realization:
Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.
Perhaps there is an optimal balance for these two impulses that, if Elster is right, are antithetical. But if living in a consumerist society subjects us to all sorts of marketing pressures (derived from the need to sell all the junk we make at our unmeaningful jobs), that balance tips precipitously toward consumption, and potentially destabilizes the economy and our own psychological well-being. (This is what Marx seems to be suggesting in his concern with alienation from "species being.") Elster, paraphrasing Marx, writes, "In capitalism, the desire for consumption -- as opposed to the desire for self-realization -- takes on a compulsive character. Capitalism creates an incentive for producers to seduce consumers, by inducing in them new desires to which they then become enslaved." (The word choice here suggests Elster's skepticism.)
So, surprisingly, the way the loss of opportunities for self-realization plays out is not through a paucity of options but a surfeit of them, all of which we feel capable of pursuing only to a shallow degree before we get frustrated or bored. Consumerism and its infrastructure (meaning markets, market spaces like the internet, and the shopping-oriented personality type most readily developed within consumerism) keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena -- a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. (I encounter a stray idea, digest the relevant Wikipedia entry, and just like that, I've broadened my conceptual vocabulary! I get bored with the book I'm reading, Amazon suggests a new one! I am too distracted to read blog posts, I'll check Twitter instead!) But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.
With more "diversity" available, it's becoming harder to evade boredom, which more and more seems to be engineered socially (by accelerating fashion cycles, by making us always aware of what we are missing, and by making every moment a purchasing opportunity) as opposed to developing from some idiosyncratic internal curiosity in an individual. Novelty trumps sustained focus, whose rewards are not immediately felt and may never come at all, as Elster points out, if our focus is mistakenly fixed on something ultimately worthless. (I'm thinking of my long investment in Cryptonomicon.) Rather than taking advantage of that "increasing marginal utility" that comes with practicing something difficult, our will to dilettantism develops momentum.
To take a trivial example, let's say you decide you like psychedelic music and want to "master" it by having a deep familiarity with the genre. But then you stumble on the hardcore psych MP3 blogs, and you are probably at that point discouraged by the impossibility of ever catching up and listening to it all. There is simply too much that's now available too readily. You might still download everything you can get your hands on -- that costs nothing but disk space and a minimal amount of time -- but you'll never make significant use of the larger portion of what you acquire. Acquiring has supplanted inquisitive use as the self-realizing activity. You have become a collector of stuff as opposed to a master of psychedelic music.
This seems to happen generally, as what Elster calls "the marginal disutility of not consuming" grows stronger -- i.e., we have a harder time giving up the thrill of novelty, of exposing ourselves to new things. We end up collecting things rather than knowing them, and we display our collections in the hopes that others will recognize us as though we actually do know them. Or perhaps we have already reached a point where we all figure we are all playing the same game and that that distinction between owning and mastering is unimportant. (If I own a cool guitar, maybe a replica of no-name Telecaster or the Jag-Stang that Kurt Cobain used, does it really matter if I can play it?)
Dilettantism is a perfectly rational response to the hyperaccessibility of stuff available to us in the market, all of which imposes on us time constraints where there was once material scarcity. These time constraints become more itchy the more we recognize how much we are missing out on (thanks to ever more invasive marketing efforts, often blended in to the substance of the material we are gathering for self-realization). We opt instead for "diversity," and begin setting about to rationalize the preferability of novelty even further, abetted by the underlying message of much our culture of disposability. Concentration takes on more of the qualities of work -- it becomes a disutility rather than an end vis-a-vis the stuff we acquire. If something requires us to concentrate, it costs us more and forces us to sacrifice more of the stuff we might otherwise consume. In other words, consumerism makes the will and ability to concentrate seem a detriment to ourselves. The next thing you know, everyone touts Guitar Hero as a reasonable substitute for guitar playing and mocks the fuddy-duddy nabobs of negativism who are still hung up on the difference.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Album cover context (8 Oct 2008)
I tend not to be sentimental about the loss of great packaging for music. Stripping music of its container is of course impossible, but it remains in my mind the ideal worth trying to approach, so that in listening to songs I am not merely vicariously experiencing the thrill of getting to pretend to be the rock star who made it or believe I've joined some subversive cult of insiders or that I'm living some glamorous luxe life. But in some ways, pop music is the province of consuming cultural images and claiming ownership of certain aspects of the zeitgeist. This is why it is often inseparable from the hype that otherwise seems to encrust and suffocate it. If I were serious about approach my ideal, I'd probably invest more time in classical music, which comes with far fewer signaling aspects -- aside from the great big one that you consider yourself to good for common contemporary culture. It would inevitably betoken an unwillingness to participate in the now.
Anyway, the only place I see album covers in the flesh these days is in thrift stores, and I never know what the album covers of new records look like. I couldn't possibly tell you what a My Morning Jacket album cover looks like, even though I am pretty sure iTunes has downloaded little jpegs for them automatically. This hasn't affected my appreciation of the albums at all, and may in fact have enhanced it. If I knew how they were trying to represent themselves, I'd probably be annoyed; as it is I can pretend they are Neil Young and Crazy Horse.
But when I look at posts at the excellent LP Cover Lover blog, I realize that some album covers were far more important than the music contained on the vinyl within them, and that that music is basically unthinkable and certainly would have been unsellable without the context-establishing images the covers provided. Consider this cover, for A Moment of Desire by Jay Clever and his Orchestra. It's on the sleazy end of the spectrum, to be sure, but it's emblematic of scores of easy listening albums from the 1950s and 1960s, when adults made up the bulk of the record-buying public. The cover gives no indication of what the music will sound like, but that makes it even more likely that it will determine what we hear when we listen. Obviously the goal of the cover is to persuade consumers that this record will make a sexy soundscape in the immediate proximity of their hi-fi set. I'm skeptical whether music can be inherently "sexy," but the ambiguity of that question makes covers like this one effective; it opens the space for images to be created in one medium and translated into an entirely different experience. This is also how ads are meant to work; through contiguity and juxtaposition, products are associated with more or less unrelated emotional states. They tend to work because we want to believe its true, that instrumentally conjuring a feeling is just that easy.
Anyway, the only place I see album covers in the flesh these days is in thrift stores, and I never know what the album covers of new records look like. I couldn't possibly tell you what a My Morning Jacket album cover looks like, even though I am pretty sure iTunes has downloaded little jpegs for them automatically. This hasn't affected my appreciation of the albums at all, and may in fact have enhanced it. If I knew how they were trying to represent themselves, I'd probably be annoyed; as it is I can pretend they are Neil Young and Crazy Horse.
But when I look at posts at the excellent LP Cover Lover blog, I realize that some album covers were far more important than the music contained on the vinyl within them, and that that music is basically unthinkable and certainly would have been unsellable without the context-establishing images the covers provided. Consider this cover, for A Moment of Desire by Jay Clever and his Orchestra. It's on the sleazy end of the spectrum, to be sure, but it's emblematic of scores of easy listening albums from the 1950s and 1960s, when adults made up the bulk of the record-buying public. The cover gives no indication of what the music will sound like, but that makes it even more likely that it will determine what we hear when we listen. Obviously the goal of the cover is to persuade consumers that this record will make a sexy soundscape in the immediate proximity of their hi-fi set. I'm skeptical whether music can be inherently "sexy," but the ambiguity of that question makes covers like this one effective; it opens the space for images to be created in one medium and translated into an entirely different experience. This is also how ads are meant to work; through contiguity and juxtaposition, products are associated with more or less unrelated emotional states. They tend to work because we want to believe its true, that instrumentally conjuring a feeling is just that easy.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Is music still a product? (5 Sept. 2008)
Rob Walker links to this long, compelling post by Rhodri Marsden about the difficulty musicians have in making money. Marsden paints a picture of the misery of pre-internet record distribution, when warehousing middlemen absorbed the brute facts of consumer indifference, to contrast that with the current state of affairs, in which the internet lets bands track their own sales metrics. That blessed space of ignorance of the marketplace, which once bred fantasies of stardom, is now gone.
As Marsden points out, despite the hype about the long tail and Web 2.0, the internet doesn't give musicians new ways to make money. It creates conditions in which musicians are paid instead in a different currency, recognition, and whether or not this has any value depends on the context one's working in. If you need to sell music to feed yourself and pay rent, you are not cheered by the number of views your song's video has received. But if you are making money through some other job and make music for a feeling of cultural participation, the clicks count.
The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it's a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It's extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people's art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won't pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn't lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.
Now that we're put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who (a) don't need warehousing space for your MP3s, (b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, (c) don't care whether you're brilliant or whether you're bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn't mean we can sell them -- in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn't mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can't blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.So lots of people may be listening, but these listeners, when consuming music on the internet, are not shoppers. They are not in a mode where they are browsing for something to spend money on. Instead, they are paying for the music by paying attention, and that's all they are willing to give, and really, that should be enough, considering all the competition for it.
It hurts because web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they're from, even which web browser they're using. We've got information about the reach of our music that we couldn't have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they're listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can't fucking sell music to them. And we're starting to obsess about it. We can't stand the fact that we have 2,739 friends on MySpace, several of whom have posted highly encouraging messages such as "thnx 4 the add", and yet none of them are prepared to dig in their pocket, or Paypal account, and just send us a few quid – despite the fact that we've poured our heart, our soul and our cash into the whole endeavour.
As Marsden points out, despite the hype about the long tail and Web 2.0, the internet doesn't give musicians new ways to make money. It creates conditions in which musicians are paid instead in a different currency, recognition, and whether or not this has any value depends on the context one's working in. If you need to sell music to feed yourself and pay rent, you are not cheered by the number of views your song's video has received. But if you are making money through some other job and make music for a feeling of cultural participation, the clicks count.
In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they're there. And if, against the odds, you've been given some cash, you've managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god's sake don't get angry. Don't see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you're freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you're almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn't make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it's worth nothing.
The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it's a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It's extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people's art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won't pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn't lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)