It’s been a while since I’ve actually picked up an album or two that I really, really like. Recently got Demon Days, by the Gorillaz, and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, which I’d heard plenty of way back, totally, totally forgotten about, and was reminded of again while watching House (they use one of the songs off Mezzanine for the theme).
It’s also been a while since a song has really put me in a mood, but Teardrop never fails to elicit a sort of melancholy calm, which makes it perfect working music. Strangely, it’s also perfect running music, because the spare drumbeat happens to be exactly my 6.5mph pace. So, yes – running with a melancholy calm. Very odd, but it works.
Gorillaz has one song on the album, DARE, which Ei-Nyung pointed out, is pretty generic disco-y music, except for a guy shouting the lyrics in the background (doubling up a disco-y female vocal). It’s that small vocal flourish, and a slightly more modern beat that completely change the whole feel of the song. Great stuff. Feel Good, Inc. is my other favorite on the album, but there’s a pretty wide variety of entertaining listening to be had.
…
I write a lot. It’s not like it’s a new revelation to me, and I’m surprised by it, or anything. The weird thing is how satisfying it is. Take the blog – it’s not like I’m really saying anything that’s world-changing. I’m not offering commentary on anything of any particular importance. But it *feels* like communication. I know there’s a number of people out there who read this, and when I see them after not having seen them for a while, there’s no period of “so… what’ve you been up to?” – generally, they either know my story in some detail, or I know theirs. It’s quite odd, though, because in some sense, it’s replaced “real” conversation and communication with fake, pseudo-one-way communication.
So, it’s sort of like getting to talk all you want, and not having to read the room, and realize people are bored. If they’re bored, they just stop reading.
But it raises a really weird question for me – what about the future? When I grew up, we talked to people. I didn’t use the phone much, and any social contact I got was generally face-to-face. I felt some “urge” to communicate – to interact with another person, and so I did. I learned how to do so, and what various signs meant. You learn the whole vocabulary of interaction, and develop at least some meager skill for it.
But now, there’s blogging. There’s IMing, e-mail, whatever. Are children learning to socialize through IM? Text messaging? LiveJournal? What percentage of a developing child’s time is spent socializing face-to-face? What sort of longer-term ramifications does some pervasive change in the way people communicate have over the long term?
I suppose this is probably the same question people thought when everyone got a home telephone. Then the cell phone. I’m sure every generation asks themselves, “what of the generation that follows?” and for the most part, we’ve always been fine. But like Al Gore’s slide on relative CO2 concentrations, it’s almost like information has become so dense, and so … ubiquitous, that the whole paradigms of communication have changed.
It’s no longer about whether you can find stuff or not – you want information, it’ll get dumped on your in reams – it’s about sorting the validity and the *worth* of that information. For me, a lot of that comes from learning how to judge whether someone’s a worthy source of information or not. Grammar, communication skills, persoanl presentation, etc. With the pervasiveness of unfiltered data, and a degredation of the metrics that *I* use to judge the validity of a source, what kinds of adaptation will I need to understand the future generations’ communication?
*shrugs*
I’ve been wondering the same thing about blogging. It’s great that folks know what I’m up to, but it does feel awfully empty to not have the interactive discourse that face-to-face provides. Sometimes it’s good – I need the time to sit and think and write for a bit to develop an idea. But other times, I really need somebody poking back at me to tell me when I’m full of it, and blog comments don’t necessarily provide that.
I’m not sure what my point is. Probably that, like all technologies, these new communication technologies will have a variety of consequences which will be perceived as good or bad depending on the observer. How’s that for vague?
“Fearless on My Breath” — Is that like Binaca? 😉
I’ll be your guinea pig if you like. When my parents uprooted me from Ventura to Palmdale between my grade school and high school days, my communication switched from face-to-face to tech. I would call friends in Ventura sporadically; and I immersed myself in the world of AOL IM and hand-written letters. I even preferred writing letters to my girlfriend of nearly 3 years, over a real conversation. And yes, it is a complete hinderance. Thankfully, most are simply bad habits I can overcome. I have learned a lot by reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” But to this day, I much rather prefer the impresonal chat room setting over a party. :/ (/me puts QC2 headphones on as he heads to the “el” station to go home).
I’ve used LJ for several years to keep track of friends who have moved to far-off places, and have generally found blogs to remove that awkward part of catching up when we do meet.
Instead of trying to figure out the boring bits of where they are in their lives (what’s your job about? Who do you see on a daily basis? What have you been doing for fun?) we can proceed directly to the higher-level discussions on these same subjects as if we were living in closer proximity. (What do you plan to do about the aspects of your job that suck? Tell me why you like this new activity so much. I have some particularly good gossip regarding someone you’ve recently blogged about.)
If it’s ONLY on-line discussion I agree that we’ve lost something; if we periodically refresh our dialog in person the blog enables us to make better use of our time.
Shared experience is not something to be dismissed lightly, and blogging allows for at least partial transmission.