We need to spend more time with objects
I’m still on this subject: thing-ness. I’m bothered by our micro-technology culture and our adoption of etherized encodings of the world. Newspapers are crumbling. The magazine industry is suffering. Two years ago, the excellent Comes With a Smile shuttered its doors. What is left is a website locked in 2006.
We’ve adapted to a world where we get news on tiny screens and forwarded from friends. We read the Times online but we are losing our touch. We’re losing our souls. Where we used to flip through the paper and read things, discover things, we now make hyper-leaps, take a fleeting look and disappear. Yes, we see more, but do we feel more?
I am the pot calling the kettle black. I know that. My connections are more varied and more diverse now, and I “know” more about the world than I did ten years ago. I can find information on anything. But I wonder what paths are being forged in my brain, and more importantly, wonder which old ones are becoming overgrown with weeds. My brain has changed because of all this technology. I can feel it.
This is a time of “old with the old, in with the new.” I agree. But I want that thing in my hand: the touch of old paper, a leather binding, weathered steel strings on a 1960s guitar that was made on uncalibrated machines. In fact, I myself want to uncalibrate.
This message was typed on a Blackberry (from work), listening to music on an iPhone (for pleasure) sent to a Mac and posted to a blog that doesn’t really exist anywhere. I see the irony. That’s why this is called “someplace” about music. You need to find your own, real physical, place. And stay there for a while.
