Vinyl Sales Surge (9 Dec 2009)

The NYT had a mostly anecdotal piece this past weekend about how more people of the "iPod generation" are suddenly buying turntables and vinyl records. I don't know if I am demographically part of this generation, but I can relate -- I've been reacquiring albums I used to have in an effort to recapture the listening experiences of my youth, in which an entire side of a record would get digested in the full flush of analog warmth.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”

It makes sense for music companies to push vinyl since they have no choice but try to reorient consumers to the meaningfulness of physical objects. So it is hard to take Jbara seriously here as he spouts marketing propaganda. Nevertheless I think listening to records is appealing at this moment precisely because it is inconvenient, and maybe inconvenience is, as Jbara suggests, part of the essence of love. Overcoming obstacles is a feature, not a bug, as they say.It brings weight to the experience, makes it contrast with all the experiences that commercial culture has made easy (which in turn makes us consumers passive).

Yeats's "The Fascination of What's Difficult" seems relevant here. He seems to be arguing the opposite:

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.

It's the myth of "spontaneous joy" and "natural content" that has ushered in the "iPod Generation" and its peculiar restlessness, its voracious, overstimulated cultural appetite, its demand for instantaneous distraction. The absence of "natural content" -- the fact that satisfying oneself requires effort -- opens the possibility of substituting novelty for deeper satisfactions. When something doesn't spontaneously please us, we are invited to think the solution is to try something different, not work at the "difficult" thing that has failed us. The vinyl fascination may be the stirrings of a counter-movement that fetishizes difficulty as a way of fixing value, as measured in attention and consumption effort rather than ease and monetary cost.

Or perhaps it is just an expression of a nostalgia for material souvenirs of our taste. Records are a way to make my musical taste seem more substantial to me -- see, these are the albums I really care about, the ones I like so much, I listen to them on vinyl. On my computer, I have everything, so none of it will seem like it is special to me. The record collection is different; it requires sacrifices. Vinyl is the new way to signify that you are "serious about music," since having access to lots of songs and being familiar with lots of different stuff no longer suffices.

One thing I have learned in my return to vinyl is that records that skip are not endearing; they are totally annoying. And it doesn't take very much to induce a record to start skipping.

Going analog (28 July 2009)

A few days ago, in an attempt to recapture some of the deeper pleasure I used to take in listening to music, I hooked up my turntable, which had been sitting in a closet on top of a milk crate holding the few remaining records I didn't give away when I moved two years ago.

When I finally got the cables straightened out and dropped the needle on a record (The Other Woman by Ray Price), the first thing I noticed -- something that I had totally forgotten about playing records -- is that each time you play one, it sounds a little different. There are many contingencies: static, dust, the needle's fidelity, the speed at which the turntable revolves. Records get worn out, obviously; they develop skips and so on. Some of the skips on records I had as a kid are burned into my mind, so that when I hear "Born to Run" on the radio, I still brace myself for a skid across the "wha-uh-uh-ohohoh" part at the end that never comes. I have this unique (albeit mostly useless) relation to that song because of the specific damaged record I owned. (Who knows? Maybe people will come to sentimentalize imperfections in the compression of their audio files. I tend to delete them instead.)

It's silly to sentimentalize skips in records, but they alert me to the fragility of the entire musical encounter, they hint at the miracle of performance that we typically take for granted. It figures music as something rare, something requiring care and preservation, something that is still sanctified despite its commercialization. It seems that digitization has destroyed once and for all that palpable sense of sacredness in music. Music still has its functionality, but it seems less autonomous from the culture industry -- because of its materiality, analog has built-in friction to hypermediatization, to infinite copies and regressive recursivity and the production endless simulacra of simulacra. With analog, the signal degrades, and in that there seems to be a sort of salvation these days.

I am attracted to the possibility of negating aspects of music consumption that in recent years have made it more "convenient." I'm strangely hoping to make listening to music purposely inconvenient. Instead of delighting in being able to take my whole music collection anywhere on a MP3 player, I'm returning to the quaint idea that I have to go to a particular place to indulge in my music, a de facto listening booth. When I go into the room with the turntable and put a record on, I'm specifically interested in hearing music, not making a soundtrack for my life. Instead of being a pretend DJ for my own household radio station, I put on an album side, from the very limited selection available to me, and listen to every song the producers decided to put on there, for better or worse. No skipping songs impatiently, no opening an audio editor to delete boring parts, no metadata editing and star ranking and image file curating. The music just plays.

If I grow tired of the few records I have, I can't just go to an MP3 blog online and get some new ones. Instead I'd have to go to a thrift store in the neighborhood and pray that something worthwhile will be buried in there. In my mind is a vague wish list of records it would be nice to discover, many of which I used to own but of course got rid of in the excitement over digital convenience. It's hard to explain why, but these seem like records that make more sense as vinyl artifacts: Paul McCartney's Red Rose Speedway. Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. And Hard Nose the Highway by Van Morrison. Bob Dylan's Street-Legal (even though the mastering is horrible).

It's a pure nostalgia move, I know, trying to re-create the listening conditions of my 11-year-old self, and it seems like a counterproductive road to be on, one that leads to becoming a prisoner of history. What am I going to do, only listen to music from the LP era for the rest of my life, or become one of those extreme audiophiles who spends $40 on limited-run vinyl pressings of new material? Of course I'm still going to listen to music through my computer, but I'm hoping to rekindle the memory of an alternative -- as if going analog is some form of cultural resistance, a faint form of negative dialectics. At a time when we can access as much music as we want pretty much anywhere we want, I'm trying to restore a sense of limits to my listening, develop a relationship to songs again as mediated by the physical object of the album. Does this make the medium the message to a degree that the specific content of the records is obviated? That, I guess, is what I am going to find out.

UPDATE: This FT article (via PSFK) details Apple's rumored efforts to rekindle the fetishization of albums. It's like Apple and its minions are one step ahead, preemptively co-opting any efforts to create a sphere of culture immune to its influence. My fantasy is about detechnologizing my relation to music. Apple apparently is trying to leave no escape routes, not even into the past.

Digital fetishes (8 May 2009)

This is not a post about online pornography (though I expect it will attract a lot of comment spam). Rather it's about this essay by Llewellyn Hinkes, which wonders about the status of fetish objects -- he seems to have in mind the phenomenon of being seduced by the tangibility of an object for reasons above and beyond its usefulness -- when digitization is making culture more and more virtual.

Having something like this stored digitally, where a single hard drive failure can destroy years of hoarding in an instant, is frightening. It’s as if mother-destroyer can enter your house at any moment, chop off the super-ego, and then throw it in the garbage. For a time, I hoarded gobs and gobs of mp3s of obscure psychedelic music: Japanese-Brazilian lounge albums, avant-garde noise compositions, anything by Gary Wilson. Then one day, I saw it all disappear. I made a stupid mistake when moving files from an external hard drive that cost me my entire music collection. And what frightened me was that it didn’t really mean that much.

I completely relate to this and not because I am also a fan of Gary Wilson. Still, I am trying hard not to be frightened by this new intangibility but to instead revel in it, experience it as liberation, or at least a step toward freeing myself of the hoarding impulses.

I know it is probably futile to resist the way emotions get bound up in objects, the way we see our history or traces of our former dreams in the things we've carried with us: I have lots of things similar to what Hinkes describes here:

I have an old paperback copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach sitting on my bookshelf that’s torn to bits. It’s missing its cover and the spine is falling apart. When the spine finally disintegrates, I’ll probably just use a rubber band to hold it together. Trying to read the book in this state would be impossible, yet it’s one of my prized possessions because of its connection to a point in my life, like a tattoo made of wood pulp. Even if the whole thing dissolves into a small corner of paper, I’d still treasure it and prominently display the remaining nub in the same location on the shelf.

I have a box of cassettes from the 1980s under my bed, though I don't even have a cassette player anymore. They just seem inexplicably like important documents of my life, necessary to the never-to-be-written biography of me. Objects like that seem to earn their place in our lives, but it's hard to deal with all the objects that are competing for that honor -- the pathos can get overwhelming once we've projected emotion on all the things competing for it, and once we sort through all the marketing claims trying to imbue objects with prefab emotionality from outside our lives.

Rather than jeopardize fetishes, digitization seems to be intensifying that pathos for physical objects; it's creating an opportunity for a more intensive fetishization of the material objects that remain. Recently I saw a copy of the Beatles' Revolver in a thrift store, a record I already own in several different formats. But I couldn't resist the impulse to buy it again, simply because the opportunity presented itself, and it seemed to me that owning it on vinyl would somehow better convey to myself my love of the pre-Pepper Beatles. Even though I knew how weird it was that I would find myself needing convincing of that, I went through with the purchase anyway, in a weird act of quasi-historical preservation. That copy of Revolver deserved a better fate than languishing in a Maryland thrift store.

My persistent fear is that little drama I experienced in the thrift store gets played out over and over again, and itself becomes an addictive experience. We rescue objects from their doom the way the sentimental heroes in late-18th century novels rescued orphans and fallen women.

In the past week's Consumed column, Rob Walker looked at the inverse of this -- the rise of "digital collectibles" and a new "immaterialism" that retains the ideology of a materialistic society, only without the stuff. An example:

Alamofire’s new project is called Gowalla. This time, the product is more tied to mobile devices like the iPhone and involves “collecting” digital icons by (nondigitally) visiting certain spots in various cities. Really, he figures, it’s not so different from what inspired earlier generations to collect postcards or other gewgaws. But, Williams adds, without “all the physical crap.”

If conspicuous consumerism is all about scoring points, all you really need is the scoreboard, and networked iPhones seem designed precisely for that function. The depressing conclusion is that digitalization can be used to reinforce the ideology of consumerism just as readily as it can be used to dismantle it -- in fact, it is already pretty far along in the reinforcements. Walker's final anecdote is about a digital birthday gift he received through Facebook, an otter that cost someone a dollar: "It was a pretty effective gift, just like a traditional, physical birthday card, which expresses a sentiment but really has no other utility." What I don't understand is why we tend to regard a simple acknowlegedment -- a happy birthday email, say -- as inferior to the purchased thing, digital or otherwise. It seems to me that a person has paid a dollar to avoid having to write that email, with the expense serving to legitimize the evasion. I often end up paying $2 for a birthday card whose doggerel, mortifyingly embarrassing as it always turns out to be, seems more convenient than writing a few sentences of my own. But the card's status as a professionally made good stands in for my failure and redeems it. This seems to be one of consumerism's great triumphs; turning the expenditure on junk into a substitute currency for the hard work of generating spontaneous and convincing emotion.

Ain't gonna hang no picture frame (13 Jan 2009)

Rob Walker recently posted about Polaroid's efforts to survive in the digital-camera era. It now intends to offer the PoGo, a digital camera that comes with a built in printer. Judging by the AP review Walker cites, both the camera and printer are somewhat rudimentary, yielding small, low-res prints. This, Walker suspects, will prove to be a feature rather than a bug, since "the imperfections and limitations of actual Polaroid pictures were, in a way, part of their appeal."

This got me thinking about photos as artifacts, as specific objects that acquire a patina. Part of what makes photos worth saving is not their content alone, the image itself, but also the history that the object itself accumulates as it becomes like a heirloom. And as printing an image becomes more onerous and unnecessary, old photos seem to become valuable in and of themselves, as souvenirs of lost technologies, like old 78s or rotary phones. I wouldn't want to take the photos I have in box, scan them all, and throw them away (as I did with my CDs after I ripped them to my hard drive). The physical collection has a gravity to it that would be lost and would probably become inconceivable if it were digitized. Handling the objects seems to affect the feelings I have about what I am seeing. (I feel the same way about my long-since-scattered record collection, sacrificed because of NYC-apartment space constraints.) Paging through photo albums, too, is utterly different than scrutinizing image pools online. (This line of thinking makes me wonder if I should print my blog out and bind it, stick it with my college notebooks.)

With actual printed photos, there is a sense that something delicate and ineffable has managed to survive, a small miracle amidst the rampant image destruction we experience in our disposable culture. They seem to have an occult power, as pictures in lockets sometimes seem portentous, mystically imbued with significance. Digitization, though, puts photos in the same category with flickering TV images, meant to be consumed and forgotten after being experienced as entertainment. A physical archive seems to put them in a category with paintings, which invite us to take the time for contemplation. Digital photos are pushing prints further into the rarefied realm of fine art, the audience for them will most likely become reduced to those with the appropriate cultural capital -- the aesthetic appreciation training and so on.

Anyway, as a result of all this, I find digital-image frames strange and sad. Would you really stop to contemplate an image in a digital frame? Particularly one that will rotate new images into view like the billboards on bus shelters rotate ads? A certain contempt for memory seems to be built in to this technology. It encourages us to regard nothing framed as permanent, and by extension it prompts us to consider every impulse we might have to frame and preserve a particular image as provisional. The disregard for permanence embodied in such devices as this may establish a kind of material base for institutionalized forgetting. (I typed that sentence a few minutes ago, and now have come back to this and have no idea what I was getting at. Talk about forgetting.) History could be effaced, 1984-style, but worse, we could be convinced by the sorts of things we have in our culture that we shouldn't even bother with memories. (When people from my high school who I never talked to contact me through Facebook as though we were friends, I have this sense that memory is already under attack -- technology affords such interconnectivity that it seems to undermine the finality of choices made in the past, as though they never happened.) There may be no reason to automatically assume that memory preservation is inherently important to us. Given the right conditions, and a certain kind of society fixated on novelty, we could end up with every incentive to try to forget as much as possible, and have new images in our digital frames on a quarter-hourly basis.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

Crowdsourced art (17 Jan 2008)

I've been reading Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch, which argues that computing power has become a centralized utility, like electricity, and the consequences of this will be nothing like what such utopians as Kevin Kelly, et al., have predicted. It won't be a force for unleashing innovation and personal freedom; instead it will enact a more thorough state surveillance capability and be a powerful disincentive for creating intellectual property, leaving our culture awash in dilettante-produced mediocrity. Rather than pay an elite group of talented content-creators, companies can instead draw from the pool of free, user-generated content, a boon of unpaid labor, and monetize it in a way the individual workers can't. (Management consultant types call this crowdsourcing. In a blog post, Carr called it digital sharecropping.)

Carr acknowledges that people have good reasons for donating their labor -- namely, they are paid in recognition and the work is usually a creative outlet. But you still get the sense that it annoys him that amateurs are able to amuse and inform one another, that they are taking bread out of the mouths of anointed media professionals. Carr quotes a photojournalist who says that "the internet 'economy' has devastated my sector." And presumably we are supposed to feel sorry for him, though what this means is that more people are sharing more images documenting more of the world's activity for people to make use of as they see fit than ever before. Photojournalism is no longer strictly a matter of having the privileged connections to get work publicized and have one's talent sanctified. If photojournalists feel threatened, its because they are being made aware how much of their distinction is a matter of access to travel and equipment and high-profile places to publish their work. If their work was so far superior to the work of amateurs, wouldn't publishers and collectors be willing to pay for it, since everyone would see the difference and it would be something that could be marketed? The difference in talent may not equal the savings, and may never again. That seems to be what Carr is arguing, and lamenting: "Many cultural goods remain expensive to create or the painstaking work of talented professionals and it's worth considering how the changing economics of media will affect them." Hmm. I've considered it, and I'm inclined to say good riddance.

Being an obscure nobody, I'm strongly tempted (it probably already shows in my tone) to revel in schadenfreude and gloat about the misery of established artists or creative workers. How one feels about the fate of the poor photojournalist may be a litmus test for what one believes overall about talent. I've tended to think talent is far more subjective and ineffective that it's generally held to be -- that is, that it has no measurable value in mometary terms, but can only be assigned an approximate dollar value residually after other explanations for art market variances are accounted for -- and that determination and connections are more important to success. And maybe, since these are somewhat destructive attributes to have, despoiling most personal relationships and making everyday life somewhat of a prod and a torment, they deserve to be amply compensated; those who are cursed with them are driven to produce the stuff we in our leisure can happily consume, while we enjoy things like family life and interpersonal relationships. We may need an airtight system of intellectual property rights to entice these miserably ambitious people to make commercial art, but that art, cherish it now though we may, is not the best or only art there is. It just happens to be what our economic system privileged and yielded and lauded, with a whole adjunct commercial system of reviewers and appraisers and collectors with a vested interest in it. If such work is "crowded out of the Web's teeming bazaar" that may not be such a crushing loss. It may simply mean we need to recalibrate our aesthetic understanding of what we dub to be brilliant art to be something other than that which is created by an individual and possessed by a wealthy collector. We may have to accept art that is made collectively, distributed for free, and is never quite in a finished form. We may have to understand creative work as a process rather than a product. Horrible, I know.

Digital books (29 August 2007)

Why would anyone buy a digital book reader? I found myself asking this question while reading this somewhat nonsensically titled BusinessWeek piece, "Making Digital Books into Page Turners." (Huh? I guess they thought best-seller and head turner were too cliche, so they went for an only tangentially related set phrase. Does "Turning the Page on Digital Books" make more sense?)

The market for digital books is nascent, and Sony, despite the Reader's less-than-splashy debut, still sees its potential, believing people will eventually warm to reading on a flat screen everything from books to the magazine you're holding now.

The strange thing is, I've already got a machine that can do this, and in fact I read those very words on its screen. I wasn't holding a magazine at all! No, I'm not a magician or a time traveler from the future; I've got this thing called a "laptop" and it can do many other neat things beside display the pages of a book. It displays these things called "web pages" that have all sorts of information on them, and I can even use what's known as a "search engine" to find just about any information I want. When prices of cheap laptops are going ever downward, who the hell wants a stupid toy that only displays proprietary pages? What was in Sony's mind, besides greed, when it decided to limit its digital reader to its files alone? When will media companies get it that no one is going to pay for digital information the way they did for collectible things?

Book buyers like to collect things; reading the books is somewhat incidental. If they wanted merely to read, they could go to library. And no one likes reading on screens; they will do it however if the content is free. They are never, ever, going to pay the same amount for a digital book, as Sony seems to expect, as they would for a real one -- they will not pay for the eyestrain and the absence of an object to arrange on their bookshelves. Only when real books cost $150 will people consent to explore the possibilities of digital ones for $20. And at that point, people will have mastered the art of distributing books as pdfs anyway. I'm sure you could search torrent sites now for pdfs of just about any best-seller as well as just about any magazine. People will go to the trouble if its free. If they wanted to pay, they would buy the actual object. So this makes no sense:

To stoke sales, Sony has knocked $50 off its original price for the Reader and rolled out a new print ad campaign in publications such as The New York Times (NYT ), USA Today, and Vanity Fair. As part of this marketing push, Sony is offering new buyers, who are also registered Connect users, credit for 100 free classic titles, such as Great Expectations and Moby-Dick. "In terms of timing, with people going back to school, there is a lot of interest in classic literature," said Jim Malcolm, director of marketing for Sony Electronics. "It gives people an incentive to buy."

But you can download classic novels, for which there is no copyright, for free already. You can get many of them in cheap print editions as well.

Perhaps Sony has seen what digital music has done to company balance sheet and are trying to get ahead of the curve. The digital-music-marketplace logic seems to be this: when distribution costs zero, you only have to sell a few to be profitable. So then if you can guilt some small proportion of the public into paying for digital content with the intellectual-property boogeyman or the specter of your crack legal team, you might still have a viable business. But music and books are not particularly comparable goods. Music affords an immediate experience and often serves as a backdrop for setting a mood or manifesting an identity. Books require attention, a commodity becoming rarer all the time. When people have the attention to pay, they'll invest it in such a way to maximize the pleasure and utility it affords them -- that means getting comfortable with a printed book, or getting utilitarian with a wide array of digital materials to that may be cut and pasted and reincorporated in whatever it is the user is trying to accomplish.

Photographs as heirlooms (22 August 2007)

With the digital cameras relatively cheap and ubiquitous, it may be that the printed photograph will start to assume some of the qualities vinyl LPs have taken on in recent years. The new ones being made seem hokey and anachronistic, while the authentic old ones have acquired an aura, have become rare, on the cusp of vanishing completely. Of course, there will always be fine-art photography, and people who school themselves in the arcane arts of the darkroom, but it seems that we should be beginning to mourn the death of the clumsy amateur snapshot, now that any images haphazardly captured digitally can be cleaned up after the fact by anyone who has downloaded Picasa. Already, the idea that we once had strips of negatives to go with our pictures seems as peculiar as the idea of having recorded answering machine messages on little tapes; yet the analog qualities of the film medium seem more recognizable than ever, more legible -- odd to think that photography was once regarded as a near-transparent medium, now that digital photography has supplanted it, providing even more convenience and immediacy. Since we have arrived at the end of the photographic-film era, we know that the amount of legitimate snapshots -- ones taken in full knowledge that snapping the shutter had real consequences in the the physical universe, that an image would be burned onto a surface, and film and money would be wasted if the frame was poorly composed -- is now officially finite; this makes that corpus of browning pictures in family albums seem exceedingly rare, much more like heirlooms, irreplaceable antiques. Our children will have absolutely nothing like them to pass on to their children. Sure, they'll have digital archives of many, many more images of themselves and their loved ones, but somehow, I can't help but feeling (with the bias of one whose way of life is rapidly becoming moribund) they will have captured less. Already it seems like real pictures, from film, have more soul -- just as the scratches on a jazz record make the music seem more intimate and true.

Now that there is no cost to capturing a digital image -- if the image bores or doesn't turn out, it can be deleted without a second thought. This has the effect of making old prints of accidents, mistakes, and faulty exposures seem suddenly precious, as they have become an endangered species. I have always been attracted to these discards -- pictures of just streaks of color, or of an accidental landscape, or of someone's finger over the lens -- but now I feel like there's even a greater urgency to gathering them up. (I used to find such shots on the street routinely, in drug-store parking lots or inside library books; now I never come across them.) When no one uses film, no one will make these serendipitous images of nothing in particular and nothing intended that somehow, because of that, capture something integral about the ephemeral nature of our existence in our media-saturated moment in time. I can't be the only person who feels this way. Maybe I should do a search for the sites of people who have scanned in their botched, blurred and poorly developed snapshots and made photo sets out of them.

People take pictures of each other (12 July 2007)

A sentence in one of Walker Percy's essays from The Message in the Bottle has had me thinking of this Kinks song: "People take pictures of each other, just to prove that they really existed." It's one of my favorite Kinks songs, partially for the perfect timing of the first snare drum hit in it but mostly for the lyrics, which would be cynical if not for the overriding sadness. (This is how I sometimes see myself.) The verses end with this: "Pictures of things as they used to be, don't show me no more, please." For a song on an album album often accused of reveling in nostalgia, it's a pretty stark sentiment. "The nostalgia is sickening," these lines seem to say, "I've wasted my life being a spectator of myself."

The sentence from the Percy essay comes after a discussion of the dilemma humans are confronted with in the modern era. Because science makes a general case out of all individual cases, and scientific discourse is regarded as the only authentic discourse, people find themselves to be inauthentic, recognized only insofar as they resemble other people. "This is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible." This struck me as another way of understanding the overwhelming urge people have to mediate their lives through communication technology -- recording themselves and their impressions in an endless stream of digital photos and blog posts and text messages and so on. The cell phone seems above all a portable self-mediation device, capable of recording anything and reliably putting people at a remove from whatever situation they find themselves in. In that way it works most of all like a security blanket, making sure one is never abandoned to naked reality, forced to really experience what is there and nothing more, with no ability to preserve it or project it in to the future, to put oneself in a position to consume it rather than experience it.

Percy makes a similar argument about tourism, that people surrender their sovereignty over interpreting what they experience in order to be able to consumer their own experience as something packaged, something storeable and fungible -- we may secretly prefer experience as currency rather than something ineffable and irreplaceable. Or as Percy claims, we are made vaguely uneasy by the fact that we are deprived of our own ineffable life experience, but we are powerless (due to our habit of language) from preventing ourselves from commodifying everything. "The consumer is content to receive an experience just as it has been presented to him by theorists and planners," Percy suggests. We consume representations and we remained estranged from things in themselves, and we judge experience in terms of how well its been translated into information -- by what kind of story it would make, by whether others will be jealous, etc. I wonder if there are any alternatives, though.

Web sharecropping (27 April 2007)

Via Chris Hayes, a link to an essay by Nicolas Carr equating blogging and other user-generated and/or user-organized web content to sharecropping. His point here hinges on the way social networking sites are at once monolithic and composed of millions of highly individualized pages.

What's being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.

In other words, you maintain your social life on a corporately-owned networking site while that corporation reaps advertising rewards for the vibrancy you bring there. What do you get? The right to broadcast your life to millions of potential viewers on a branded portal.

It's a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It's only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.

In an earlier essay, Carr challenges the technophilia of proselytizers for Web 2.0 and the inevitable evolution in human consciousness its most zealous proponents argue for.

When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.
And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents - participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism - become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so? Is there a counterargument to be made? Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good?

As evidence he cites some egregious Wikipedia entries and wonders "when the intelligence in 'collective intelligence' will begin to manifest itself."

No wisdom of crowds for Carr. He argues that our enthusiasm for the technology of Web 2.0 leads us to value what it makes possible and ascribe goodness to it automatically -- we commit the teleological fallacy and assume all change is always for the better, that the quest for greatness is what always motivates lasting historical change. So amateur content and aggregated opinion become bastions of truth and authenticity as opposed to the decadent moribund world of professionalized media and individual experts. Carr rejects all this, siding with the professionals over the amateurs. His argument is pretty compelling, though he sometimes seems unduly defensive, as if he were one of those moribund experts trying to prevent the commercial value of his expertise from eroding.

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

This is what the Tsarist bureaucrats and petty bourgeois mensheviks must have sounded like to the bolsheviks in October 1917.

He's arguing for the economic value of gatekeepers, but the argument seems predicated on the idea that a flood of ideologically sanctioned amateur-produced junk will make us all forget real quality when we see it, and I'm not sure that's true. For an elite group of futurists and technonerds, Web 2.0 is ideologically salient, but I think most people respond to user-generated content in the opposite way, viewing it not as faultless but as illegitimate, and they cling more to sanctioned brands in a confusing and chaotic marketplace of ideas. Good filters are more valuable than ever and perhaps this is Carr's point in the later post I initially cited-- the more free content produced, the greater the value of the paid filter, be it Google or something else.

Difficult poetry (25 April 2007)

The other day I was complaining about the way we tend to promote the notion that entertainment's main function is to facilitate self-absorption as a kind of escape. Pop culture often offers vicarious entertainments that are rather undemanding and that flatter us for our limitations, seeming to efface them as we give ourselves over to the entertainment product. In other words, they congratulate us for not thinking.

Having just floated that argument, I found this recent Slate piece by poet Robert Pinsky (a former U.S. poet laureate, if that means anything) serendipitous. He celebrates difficulty, almost for its own sake:

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

Difficulty, in short, makes accomplishments meaningful and require us to focus our energies rather than dissipate them. But the problem with difficult poetry is not just that it's hard to understand after a casual breezy read. It's proudly elitist, in that it rewards those who bring the necessary intellectual capital (the result of time and money investments in education as well as what is inherited from literary-minded parents). Pinsky tries to circumvent this by suggesting that poetry can be enjoyed even if you don't really understand what the author may have intended (after all, you wouldn't want to be found guilty of committing the intentional fallacy) and that's almost seems like claiming you can still enjoy chess just by moving the pieces around the board any which way. But it's more that he advocates reading poetry as a rewarding process regardless of the end result, provided it's undertaken with the proper seriousness of intent.

But again we confront a habitus problem -- the necessary attitude for the interpretive process is a learned skill, and its rewards are learned rewards -- we learn to feel rewarded by certain sorts of insights and conclusions, and what they signal about our intelligence and perceptiveness. Reading difficult poetry is no different from listening to difficult music; it opens one to the accusation of pretentious showing off. The question is whether it is possible to separate the enjoyment one gets from reading the poem from the pleasure given by being recognized for reading it. Can you read poetry without consuming it like a lifestyle product, and if so, does the difficulty of the work have anything, really, to do with the distinction?

Elevated (24 March 2007)

I recently began working in a building that has a TV screen in all of its elevators. I don't know how common this is in office buildings, but it seems pretty extravagant to me. It shows a loop of news items, and weather updates and sports scores and that sort of thing -- it's a cross between the aimless facts projected at theaters before the movie starts and the info on the digital billboards mounted on the roofs of New York City cabs. Sometimes, when I get in the elevator when its crowded, I almost feel embarrassed to look at it, which is especially foolish, because it seems as though the screens were installed to alleviate embarrassment and give strangers in elevators something to do other than stand there fidgeting uncomfortably. It's as though I want to make a show of not giving in to the ubiquity of media distractions, prove to everyone I'm drawing on inner resources to quell myself for the elevator ride and that I don't need any crutches. So I stare at the floor instead.

But when I am alone in the elevator, I relish the screen the most and the random pieces of information I glean from it. I'm not sure where the news in the elevator comes from, who edits its content. It seems almost haphazard. There is a surprising preponderance of NHL scores -- maybe unbeknown to me there are a bunch of Canadians working somewhere in the building (or perhaps the building has contracted with a Canadian news service.) Today I learned that Six Flags amusement parks are going to initiate a concierge service that allow patrons to pay extra to cut in line (an idea that economists are sure to love, I'm sure, since it allows for further price discrimination among customers and theoretically more efficiency -- it's a bit like road pricing). Alone in the elevator with these small bits of information coming in, I feel strangely isolated from the world, more so than I would without the screen. It's a desert-island feeling, where you feel thankful for scraps of news in an environment that you suddenly realize, away from your computer for the first time in hours, is blessedly bereft of informational overload.