sumit/blogs

The Walkman is the watermelon seed on which the music empire slipped and fell, according to Jennifer Brayton, assistant professor of sociology at Ryerson, a specialist in technology and media studies, and a DJ for 20 years.

“If you didn’t want to listen to pre-made tapes manufactured by record companies, you could suddenly make your own and take them wherever you travelled, and put the music to all kinds of uses, as an accompaniment to walking, exercising, commuting, sailing a boat.

“It gave young urban people a new kind of geographical freedom, a world without parental supervision, an environment they could make to their own liking.”

But the self-creation of personal musical landscapes is anathema to the recording industry, a threat to its revenue, and the industry fought back by lobbying successfully for levies on blank tape and blank CDs, Brayton says, but ultimately to no avail.

“The Walkman and its digital offspring have changed the way music is made and marketed now by millions of individual artists working as independent businesspeople. They brought an end to music as a monolithic industry.”

The emphasis is mine: that phrase is a perfect distillation of what I hate — what I’ve always hated — about the music industry. From a good article about the influence of personal musical technology (one of several published recently). But it goes on:

And the machines invite an odd sort of social overture, she adds. “You see kids asking each other what they’re listening to on their headphones, implying a sense of sharing but without the actual experience. Music used to be a communal experience. The technology initiated by the Walkman hasn’t increased social connections. Quite the opposite.”

Marshall McLuhan observed 50 years ago that the more technology humans use, the more isolated they become, notes Bhesham Sharma, a musicologist at University of Western Ontario and author of Music And Culture In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.

“And the Walkman embodies that notion: It is a remarkably alienating device whose key effect was to change music from a communal event to a personal experience. Because music resides in the cognitive faculties of the individual, it provides the means to construct a customized soundscape that can inspire the listener, trigger all kinds of sensations at will in an environment that shuts out the world. In fact, the world is at odds with the user.”

My emphasis again, and I’m not sure this is true. The emergence of the new technology has spawned a plethora of new ways to share the musical experience that go way beyond simple P2P file-swapping. Why is it so much easier to focus on technology’s supposed role in fostering our alienation from those in close physical proximity, rather than its role in encouraging us to preserve and extend our social bonds with those who are physically distant?

Isn’t it better to celebrate the fact that I can now invite friends hundreds or thousands of miles away to enter my personal musical landscape, rather than mourning the fact that I no longer have to share a random ambient environment with disinterested strangers?

Thesis: In an age of omnipresent mass media, choosing what not to watch is a more significant act than choosing what to watch. In that spirit, here are ten “unreviews” of things I haven’t watched recently.

Actually, I haven’t watched anything at all very recently because I just got back from a long weekend at Llanthony Priory, where there was no TV or internet access. But here are some things I’ve chosen to not watch over the past couple of weeks.

1(a): The Nick Berg decapitation video: Not so much because I thought it would gross me out — like any inveterate surfer, I’ve come across my fair share of repulsive-yet-mesmerising imagery — as because I thought it would make me feel sad and tired. And I kept getting pointed towards it, with the frequency of mentions rising in a classic bell-curve profile, until it began to feel like an act of civil disobedience to not watch it. Or at least, of social abdication:

One can find anything on the Internet, from the Paris Hilton tape to the Taguba report to the Nick Berg decapitation, and those who watch these tapes or read these documents have the satisfaction of knowing that they have joined a new band of cognoscenti. Indeed, the images on the Internet seemed to advance the Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg stories not because seeing is believing or because everyone wants visuals but because mainstream print outlets don’t have the same cachet of knowingness as the Internet, where you have to navigate your way to the plum — itself a form of knowingness. So the Internet not only provides the opportunity to see what one could not see elsewhere; it plays to an emerging sensibility that regards finding and then watching these images not as horrors to be shunned or terrible realities to be viewed but as pieces of information one must see because not to see them is to be left out, which is why the hand may not linger long over the mouse before double-clicking. It is less voyeurism than a kind of validation. Man, have you seen the Nick Berg tape?

I want out. I’ve got over the novelty of being able to find anything — anything — on the Internet. Some of it’s basically sensationalist, some of it’s basically worthy, but I’m no longer convinced that the mere fact of its existence is sufficient reason for me to watch it. And to the usual suspects who claim such reticence stems from an inability to deal with the ugly reality of the world: first, I think engaging with this kind of material is proof of a different kind of inability to deal with the world; second, I don’t buy this notion that seeing something necessarily clarifies it; and third: who needs to seek this stuff out?

1(b): There was a thread over on Barbelith (now deleted, apparently) about some infantile-sounding art that juxtaposed the Olsen twins with stills from the Berg video. It was almost more tempting to look at that, in the sense that it would present something easy to deal with — feeble shock tactics — rather than the potently upsetting footage itself. (And stills, not motion). Variation on that theme: the conspiracy theories. There’s more/less than meets the eye. A riddle to solve, not a recorded act of icy-cold, stark brutality.

2: That German safety video with the forklift truck. Pointers to the Berg video tailed off in bell-curve fashion, just as they’d ramped up. This, however, is one of a number of memes that just will not quit. I dunno what the frequency distribution would look like for this. Probably lumpy and definitely long-tailed.

3: Angel. Never mind Tivo and all that, TV’s big challenge is getting STORIES to make a comeback. I’m fed up of interminable, apparently directionless series, particularly those spawned as increasingly lacklustre franchise offerings (hellooo Star Trek), held together by a bit of branding, characters who only get to develop during sweeps week and increasingly impenetrable mythos and continuity. I freely admit that this is largely eye-of-the-beholder stuff, and mostly confined to genre shows. Angel is a strong, well-written show with decent leads and storylines: in point of fact, it’s a measure of my discontent with the format that I’ve stopped watching what I consider to be about the best programme of its kind. (Update: while drafting this post I did watch the very last episode: classic stuff, enormously better than the travesty that ended Buffy.)

I’d like to see more defined storylines played out over set viewing times: think 24, although that has itself become an over-involved franchise. To use an unfashionable term, miniseries. Think how much better a Picard miniseries would be than either a new Trek series or a new Trek movie. Or a Giles miniseries would be than a Faith series. I’d like TV execs to quit searching for that Star Trek/Quantum Leap “problem of the week” format. And quit mixing arc plots with one-shots. And quit worrying about getting a critical mass of episodes for syndication.

OK, none of these things are likely to happen, presumably for commercial reasons. And I’m sure I’d think otherwise in some parallel universe where I wrote TV shows for a living. But I like to think that if they did, we might get some respite from the tyranny of the hit-driven business model — and consequently, the abrupt cancellation of anything that doesn’t break out within two episodes of launch. (See also: comic books.)