@jl35 "there are some interesting articles out there about the psychological process/impact/effects etc of listening by streaming or CD or LP ...not good/bad or right/wrong but interesting differences in the process and effects of each"
Exactly.
@soix one last try (and good vibes to you and thanks for engaging):
I am pretty sure you’re missing my point, and it’s a philosophically significant misunderstanding. You keep returning to a utilitarian calculus: weighing gains against losses to determine net benefit. Your framework assumes that critical reflection on technology must culminate in an either/or judgment about total value. This is precisely what I am resisting.
My point is phenomenological – I am trying to attend carefully to how these technologies reshape our patterns of engagement with music—our habits, impulses, and modes of appreciation—independent of whether we’d "trade back." You treat this focused attention as incomplete analysis requiring a verdict. I am saying: no, the analysis itself has value, and premature weighing obscures important details.
So...I think we’re working with different purposes for comparison. You’re weighing to judge overall value—that’s legitimate. But I’m comparing to understand how different technological configurations shape our relationship to music, not to decide which era was ’better.’
The issue isn’t nostalgia. It’s recognizing that streaming’s abundance changes the structure of attention. When every recording is instantly available, there’s less friction, less commitment required for any particular listening choice. This can cultivate—often unconsciously—a browsing habit rather than a dwelling habit. The scarcity of the CD era forced a kind of focused attention: you made a choice, you lived with it, you went deeper because you were there.
This isn’t rose-colored memory—my daughter and her musician friends at Oberlin are rediscovering this now, deliberately choosing whole-album listening and long-form attention precisely because they recognize something streaming’s default mode doesn’t provide.
The point isn’t that we should abandon streaming or that the old way was better overall. The point is that different technologies afford different relationships to music, and streaming’s default affordances may undermine certain modes of appreciation we value—modes dependent on constraint, not just content access.
Understanding this lets us make adjustments (like my friends reintroducing CDs) rather than simply accepting whatever habits the technology’s design encourages. That’s why comparison without choosing matters: it reveals possibilities for intentional use rather than passive accommodation.
I abhor the new religion of technocratic techno-cultism....
I dont miss scarcity no but i miss humanity ...
@mahgister Agreed. Even back in 1981 the Police were exhorting us to "rehumanize." Boy, were they right then and they're right now.
