I miss scarcity

The challenge of questioning technology is not to try to put issues into an "either/or" framing but to see what is gained and lost, specifically. The gains of exploring new music and easy access to entire catalogs is, well, pretty obvious by now. This is the easier thing to talk about. This is a post about thinking about what is also lost.

Yeah I get it, but you still have to consider both sides and not just what we’ve lost.  Would you give up what you have today to get back the things you’ve lost?  If the answer is no then you’ve gained more than you’ve lost, and even though we can certainly lament some of the things we’ve lost along the way we’re still overall better off than before.  It is sad on some ways, but that’s progress — it rarely if ever comes free.  But I too struggle with the sheer amount of info coming at us from all different directions in many different forms and being able to even keep up with it all much less appreciate things on a deeper and more appreciative level.  In that way I feel sorry for my kids that they’ve grown up on their devices just “keeping up” and not sure they’ve learned how to appreciate and savor taking time to enjoy things to the deeper levels as we did growing up.  I try to hope that maybe it’s not better or worse and maybe just a different type of enjoyment and fulfillment and that maybe I’m just old and don’t get it, but I have my doubts.  Anyway, here we are. 

I love streaming, especially this time of year with all the Best Of lists coming out...still do lots of CD and some LP ... but something has absolutely been lost...can't compare or measure or rate...

Hey @parkergetdean take your politics elsewhere buddy. 

@soix 

Yeah I get it, but you still have to consider both sides and not just what we’ve lost.  Would you give up what you have today to get back the things you’ve lost?  If the answer is no then you’ve gained more than you’ve lost

I think you’re missing my point just a little bit. No, I don’t "have to consider both sides" in a way that requires me to choose whether I would "give up what I have" because I’m not weighing them against one another to reach an either/or. 

There are other purposes for comparison than either/or choice. I’m considering them to compare them. I have no intention of giving up streaming -- that said, I have friends who are reintroducing CD’s to their system to make more forceful the option of limiting data-flood and re-instituting a kind of focused listening they are missing. That kind of adjustment to the system is a benefit of comparing without an either/or.

I too feel sorry for kids who are breathlessly just “keeping up” and finding it hard to appreciate and savor. My daughter, though, has friends at Oberlin who are much more into long form attention. She came home from her first semester telling me one of her favorite albums was "A Love Supreme" and that she’s a huge Steve Lacy fan. She is tired already of Taylor Swift. And she likes to listen to whole albums or sides of albums. 

Some of this is her friends -- musicians studying long form music -- and some I would say comes from our discussions about technology.

@audphile1 you can as always just focus on something else, e.g., it is your filthy world out there, enjoy it.