3 ms·

I think its actually a more substantial shift. With media being so accessible it almost feels that the generational cultural gap is blurring and narrowing. I ha

I think its actually a more substantial shift. With media being so accessible it almost feels that the generational cultural gap is blurring and narrowing. I have access within moments the entire popular culture catalog of music, films, and TV shows going back decades. There seems to be a great convergence and preservation of culture. I'm as likely to listen to 60s & 70s David Bowie as I am to listen to the new Arcade Fire album coming out later this year. The past two decades almost seem to blur into each other culturally. People basically dress exactly as they did 20 years ago as far as I can tell. Maybe that's because these two decades and the coming decade are my prime years and so I lack perceptive as a late 20 something who is still neither quite young nor yet middle aged.

ashark 9y ago
Something lost on second-half-of-millenial-generation and up will be just how inaccessible media was, even well into the 90s. Movies took years to be released on video. What you could buy was mostly whatever the local stores chose to stock. You'd probably not even know about all kinds of media because it never showed up anywhere you could see it, unless you read lots of industry/medium specific magazines or something. Music? Hope your record/CD store has it or will order it. TV show? Didn't record it when it aired? Gone. You can watch TV Guide and try to catch a rerun. In a few years maybe it'll be one of a handful of episodes released on VHS (full seasons? LOL no, or incredibly expensive in the unlikely event that they are released). Want to see some family photos from someone across the country? Call them, oh they're out, leave a message on their answering machine that you'd like them to go get prints made and mail them to you. You may see them in a month. You'll have no idea what you're getting until they show up, unless you've seen them in person before. And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha, what's that? Maybe a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some point for home projectors. A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music? Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room. That'd be nice. We're not that far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world, rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost. Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely.
- Nav_Panel 9y ago
  > Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely. Yeah, this is part of the driving force behind the resurgence of vinyl, cassettes, VHS, etc. Scarcity and physical presence are great ways to imbue a sense of meaning into media. This is something I have difficulty expressing to my older colleagues (I'm in my early 20s, many I work with are in their 40s or older). "We" millennials no longer see a vinyl record as a means to the end of producing audio, the medium itself supposes to provide intrinsic value: the idea of "fidelity" has disappeared (remember "Hi-Fi"?) and has instead been replaced with some idea of "maximizing the experience" of engaging with the media. The concept of "fidelity," is, in a sense, nonsensical in the world of fully electronic music (in the realm of movies, most audiences already have some sense that movies are inauthentic/there is no comparable "live" experience, so perhaps this discussion does not extend into that domain. That said, old VHS tapes are a fun source of obscure video footage, and digital video can still be somewhat hard to track down!). The word "fidelity" itself means (in my own words) "qualitative closeness of a reproduction to some original source" and what is the "source" for something produced completely in a studio, often without any acoustic instruments present whatsoever? In the world of DJs and FL Studio or Ableton, many instead deal with some idea of "emotional fidelity" rather than "acoustic fidelity": how closely and intensely can we personally experience the (intended?) aesthetic/artistic qualities of a work? It is a meaningfully different experience to listening to one of my favorite disco records on vinyl (a record that, for all I know, buying secondhand in NYC, may have been played at the Paradise Garage) vs on YouTube. This reminds me of the idea of "Hyperreality" in Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" -- music with its own internal aesthetic and emotional world, its own language, its own norms. Almost no relationship to some sort of physical reality (guitars, drums, etc) other than the fact that we must experience sound via acoustic waves. > We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost True. After a while you wonder what's the point of all these intense emotional experiences, does it really satisfy any of our needs as human beings? Does it bring us any closer together? Just because something feels more meaningful, does that actually make it more meaningful? There will be some interesting reflections on this period of digital abundance in about 20 years.
- 9y ago

ashark 9y ago

Something lost on second-half-of-millenial-generation and up will be just how inaccessible media was, even well into the 90s. Movies took years to be released on video. What you could buy was mostly whatever the local stores chose to stock. You'd probably not even know about all kinds of media because it never showed up anywhere you could see it, unless you read lots of industry/medium specific magazines or something. Music? Hope your record/CD store has it or will order it. TV show? Didn't record it when it aired? Gone. You can watch TV Guide and try to catch a rerun. In a few years maybe it'll be one of a handful of episodes released on VHS (full seasons? LOL no, or incredibly expensive in the unlikely event that they are released). Want to see some family photos from someone across the country? Call them, oh they're out, leave a message on their answering machine that you'd like them to go get prints made and mail them to you. You may see them in a month. You'll have no idea what you're getting until they show up, unless you've seen them in person before. And shortly before that, it was even worse. Home releases of movies? Haha, what's that? Maybe a super-expensive 16mm print will be available at some point for home projectors. A short while ago mass media was far more ephemeral and inaccessible than it is now. Before that it didn't really exist, outside print. Want to hear music? Know anyone who can play it? No? You're out of luck. Better learn an instrument. Film? What's that? Maybe you can catch a stage show at the local harvest festival. Maybe your kids will stage something in the living room. That'd be nice. We're not that far removed from those times. This has been a huge shift in people's relations to one another (to paraphrase Vonnegut, people's small artistic talents used to be very valuable to their friends, family, and community, but they're now in competition with the best in the world, rendering any expression of those talents low-value and eccentric) and to media itself. We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost. Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely.

Nav_Panel 9y ago
> Sometimes it feels like we're drowning in media, and I'm not sure the trade-off of being able to watch Hogan's Heroes or whatever at a moment's notice rather than waiting for a rerun is entirely worth centering our lives on screens and speakers so completely. Yeah, this is part of the driving force behind the resurgence of vinyl, cassettes, VHS, etc. Scarcity and physical presence are great ways to imbue a sense of meaning into media. This is something I have difficulty expressing to my older colleagues (I'm in my early 20s, many I work with are in their 40s or older). "We" millennials no longer see a vinyl record as a means to the end of producing audio, the medium itself supposes to provide intrinsic value: the idea of "fidelity" has disappeared (remember "Hi-Fi"?) and has instead been replaced with some idea of "maximizing the experience" of engaging with the media. The concept of "fidelity," is, in a sense, nonsensical in the world of fully electronic music (in the realm of movies, most audiences already have some sense that movies are inauthentic/there is no comparable "live" experience, so perhaps this discussion does not extend into that domain. That said, old VHS tapes are a fun source of obscure video footage, and digital video can still be somewhat hard to track down!). The word "fidelity" itself means (in my own words) "qualitative closeness of a reproduction to some original source" and what is the "source" for something produced completely in a studio, often without any acoustic instruments present whatsoever? In the world of DJs and FL Studio or Ableton, many instead deal with some idea of "emotional fidelity" rather than "acoustic fidelity": how closely and intensely can we personally experience the (intended?) aesthetic/artistic qualities of a work? It is a meaningfully different experience to listening to one of my favorite disco records on vinyl (a record that, for all I know, buying secondhand in NYC, may have been played at the Paradise Garage) vs on YouTube. This reminds me of the idea of "Hyperreality" in Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation" -- music with its own internal aesthetic and emotional world, its own language, its own norms. Almost no relationship to some sort of physical reality (guitars, drums, etc) other than the fact that we must experience sound via acoustic waves. > We've gained a lot, but more than a little's been lost True. After a while you wonder what's the point of all these intense emotional experiences, does it really satisfy any of our needs as human beings? Does it bring us any closer together? Just because something feels more meaningful, does that actually make it more meaningful? There will be some interesting reflections on this period of digital abundance in about 20 years.
9y ago