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CHICAGO
— Why did they call it “The Cloud”?
Couldn’t
they have chosen a better metaphor? Clouds burst. Clouds
darken. Clouds disappear.
But then,
I have problem with The Cloud — with that vague
digital ether where our books and music and movies
increasingly reside, always available, unshackled from
the bonds of physicality, hard format or even a home
computer. It doesn’t matter if it’s Apple’s new
iCloud, Amazon’s cloud-based media storage, or the
streaming service offered by Netflix. Each does
basically the same thing — they provide me with
digital real estate to store music, movies and books I
own, freeing up space on my hard drive. And each has
undermined how much I actually care about watching,
listening and reading those same bits of media.
A few
years ago, while cleaning out my grandparents’
basement, I found a large, old, cardboard box that had
been gnawed on by field mice, the kind of box that once
held a dishwasher or refrigerator. It was crammed with
music cassettes and VHS tapes and Marvel comics and
copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland — a chaotic
landfill of tangible stuff, a mess of touchstones from a
childhood of pop culture consumption, the kind of stuff
I once lingered over, ran fingers across, coveted, then
likely tired of and forgot about. The box was so big,
the pile so dense, I imagined a diamond at the bottom,
fused by a crush of videotapes of “Late Night with
David Letterman,” issues of “Black Panther” and
junked Styx records.
At the
bottom, instead, there was a Memorex cassette. Its case
had probably been lost for decades and the thing itself,
the audio cassette, carried only the crumbling yellowed
remains of a label once stuck to its side.
I clicked
it into the tape deck of my 10-year old car. The sound
wobbled around for a moment, screeching and murmuring
before coalescing. It was a cassette of songs I had
taped off the radio, circa 1979. If you were born before
the Reagan administration, you remember when this was
necessary, an affordable music-owning option for an
adolescent, albeit it an imperfect and frustrating
solution — every tune on that cassette was choppy and
began a few moments into the song, often with a wildly
excited DJ announcing the song’s title, and every song
ended abruptly after the first few seconds of the next
song or a car commercial.
Listening,
I was reminded of a time before our appetites were
scattered to the wind, when there were songs that
everyone knew and TV shows that everyone watched. (These
days, if you grow exhausted of hearing the same songs,
or watching the same TV shows, you have no one to blame
but your iPod shuffle.)
And
listening to that tape again, it seemed even more
poignant, and more vital. No longer did it remind me
that people were becoming hyper-focused information
islands and mass experience was dead; that war’s been
fought and lost. Instead, now it simply felt like a
reminder of a time when I cared about the music I owned,
when I was engaged enough to literally sit by the radio
and grasp at it. Because lately, though I am no less
interested in music, excited by movies or anxious to
read books, I don’t know what that enthusiasm means
when I can access all of those things on a few digital
files: Do I appreciate my music, movies and books less
when the format is digital? When there’s nothing more
concrete than a binary code?
If I’ve
opted for convenience over shelf space, why don’t I
listen to music more often, watch more movies?
(EDITORS:
BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
The other
day I was telling Theaster Gates about this, because No.
1, he is a Chicago artist whose work is centered on the
reclamation of old media, No. 2, he is 38 (about my
age), and No. 3, he remembers a time before every song
ever recorded was available via mouse click, every film
ever made could be ordered through an online service and
every book ever published in the history of man was
moments from reading.
“Of
course I would tape songs off the radio as a kid,” he
said. “It was a way to cheat the system. You grabbed
it off the air. You captured it. And something about
that process made music less ephemeral.”
Yes, I
said, ephemeral, that’s how I feel about the media I
download. And it doesn’t matter if I love it or hate
it, anxiously await it or ignore it — and it certainly
doesn’t matter if the work is a classic or a hot
of-the-moment property. The ease of that download
generally lessens its impact and makes it more
disposable.
“Because
that’s how we are about the things we possess,”
Gates said. “It’s always the woman you want who
isn’t available, right? Something about the
unavailability of stuff, music, art, books, makes me
value it more.”
(END
OPTIONAL TRIM)
———
Of
course, there’s a touch of financial anxiety in this
— as Paul Buckley, creative director at the Penguin
publishing house, the guy who plans the art and design
on print editions, told me: “The Cloud is the black
cloud over my head. It’s the black cloud hanging over
everybody I know in print media and book publishing. Do
I want to even be digital? I assume there will always be
something tangible to hold, right? Or maybe I’m just a
narcissist in this new world? Either way, your Cloud
issue: This is something I worry about hourly.”
But much
worse than losing a job, I think, is losing a connection
with the arts that made life more vibrant. And
unquestionably, the Cloud has flattened my relationship
with music and movies. It’s given me the gift of
instant gratification and endless access, but
inadvertently reminded me that appreciation and
availability are closely joined at the hip. To be
specific, I have several thousand songs on my hard drive
at home but I seem to listen to music less and less now;
I often download new music from blogs, iTunes, Amazon,
and usually, forget to listen to it. Last month, I
bought the new Wilco album the day it was released. I
haven’t listened to it. In fact, I doubt I have
listened much to any of the albums I have bought in the
past six months.
(EDITORS:
BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
Erik Hall
is a Chicago musician, a staple of the indie scene,
leader of bands such as In Tall Buildings, all of which
still release CDs and vinyl records — partly, because
“MP3s are a wash.” It may be how he finds new
listeners, “through music blogs and Spotify or
Bandcamp or whatever, but it’s still seen as just an
MP3, one of a billion, easier to ignore. That’s true
for myself, too. Music is music, right? I should
appreciate it no matter the format. Then why am I much
less interested in playing a file than pulling a record
off my shelf?”
(END
OPTIONAL TRIM)
At one
time I would hunt through plastic cases and record
sleeves for what I wanted; it was a pain. But the simple
act of scrawling through a list on iTunes — or even
simpler, typing in the title — is bloodless, dreary.
There is no ceremony to the click, no connection.
Likewise, once I would disrupt weekends just to see a
movie — if it was leaving a theater and down to a few
showtimes, I would cancel whatever I had planned, just
to ensure that I did not miss it. And now, when that
same scenario pops up, I have the security of my Netflix
queue to fall back on. Which means, to scrawl through my
queue is to scrawl through a graveyard of titles that I
had to see and now feel no rush to actually watch; even
worse is that many of those same titles can stream
through my Xbox 360, and since they will always be there
presumably, I rarely stream a new movie.
I sample,
I dip in, but rarely watch.
(EDITORS:
BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
I am like
that Walt Whitman child, going forth, “and the first
object he look’d upon, that object he became/ And that
object became part of him for the day or a certain part
of the day.” Or like, 10 seconds of a day.
(END
OPTIONAL TRIM)
Of course
this is not lost on media companies.
Executives
at Rhapsody, for instance, the music streaming service,
recently began asking itself a question as simple as
this: What does it mean to listen to music now? Are our
notions of listening antiquated? It’s well established
that iPods have pushed us from an album-listening to a
single-listening culture, what does it mean that
Rhapsody users, with access to a vast library, often
listen to less than two minutes of anything?
“What
we found,” said Jon Maples, Rhapsody’s director of
product development, “is more of a sampling culture,
less of a depth culture. (Digitally streaming music)
have been great in many respects, but it leaves
something on the cutting room floor. We’ve come a long
way in providing access to all of the media in the
world. We haven’t done a great job providing the
relevance that should come with it.
“As my
boss says, we give people a bulldozer and let them pull
up to the warehouse, then we say ‘Get it.’”
Meaning,
something is missing, a connection that people feel with
their music, their movies, their books.
(EDITORS:
BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
Or as
Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and author of the
manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” puts it:
“Information systems need to have information in order
to run. But information underrepresents reality.”
———
“Look,
I’m not a Luddite,” Gates said. “And I bet
you’re not, either.”
He’s
right, I’m not. I bought an iPod 10 years ago, the
week the original device hit stores. I bought an iPhone
the week that device debuted. I have an iPad and a Mac
laptop and TiVo and three video game systems that will
stream Netflix; in the mid 1980s I had an early version
of the Mac and my family even had CompuServe, the first
commercial online service, and I remembering buying a CD
from its crude music store, mostly because of the
novelty of digital transactions (it cost about $20, in
‘80s dollars).
“No,
you’re not a Luddite at all,” Gates said. “Just as
I don’t, in collecting all the stuff I collect,
imagine myself a hard-core materialist. I like to text
message. I tweet. Those things are conveniences, but
it’s just fraudulent for people to suggest that those
vehicles, or any digital vehicles, contain as much
historical value or memory or meaning as my things, my
books my music, whatever. It’s wrong to say my stuff
is being replaced by things I can’t touch. It isn’t
being replaced, because it isn’t the same stuff
anymore.”
(END
OPTIONAL TRIM)
Have you
seen that TV commercial for the Apple iPad? You know the
one, with Peter Coyote’s wizened, folksy voice,
narrating images of people poking around digital copies
of their family photos on an iPad and curling up at the
end of a couch beside a window and turning a digital
page. “We’ll never stop sharing our memories,” he
says, “or getting lost in a good book.” A twinkling,
nostalgic piano score runs throughout.
I can’t
help think of the giant, evil teddy bear in “Toy Story
3,” warm and friendly and disingenuous.
Perhaps
because, at the moment, my relationship with books is
pretty solid. It hasn’t changed that much. I download
some, but I still buy plenty of print editions, and
though I am constantly in need of new shelves, it feels
like no bother. That Apple ad reminds me of something
the writer Susan Orlean recently said to me: “Ten
years from now, a digital format will be standard and I
don’t even say that with regret but because that’s
the way technology has moved, and it doesn’t really
matter if I approve or disapprove, that’s just
inevitable.
“The
upside is that it gives a writer eternal life.”
Like a
vampire, I thought. Virile, but soulless. And here’s
Apple, gently reminding me I have no choice but to join
them. My long-term fear, I suppose, is that my tastes
become nothing more than a clickable line on a file; or
as the novelist Zadie Smith wrote in a recent essay,
about the way that Facebook undermines, “To (Mark)
Zuckerberg, sharing your choices with everybody is being
somebody.” But in the short term, choosing a digital
book over a real book feels like a false choice. “That
may be nostalgic of you, in the sense you can’t do
anything about a drive toward digital media,” said
Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
professor who specializes in technology and alienation.
“But what is so nostalgic about reminding yourself
there was something valuable in our relationship with
our objects? I think that is the next challenge of
technology, to recapture that relationship, instead of
just repeating, that’s how things are.”
(EDITORS:
STORY CAN END HERE)
She told
me about a woman she knows who hands down every book she
reads to one of her adult children. It’s a family
tradition, and her kids have come to expect it. But the
woman recently bought a Kindle, and now she downloads
her books. So, to avoid fraying that relationship with
her children, she now buys most books twice — one
digital copy and one hard copy, “because there’s no
meaning in passing along a file.”
Indeed,
MIT itself has a small department, the Tangible Media
Group, tasked with “researching how we can bring some
of the feeling of a physical object to our digital
bits,” explained its founder, professor Hiroshi Ishii.
That goes some way to solving one problem — the need
for a piece of tangible media to carry a soul, “to
provide you with that little pang you feel for a writer
when you can clearly see that no one has checked his
book out of the library in 37 years,” said Richard
Todd, author of “The Thing Itself: On the Search for
Authenticity.”
Which, if
you believe Rob Sevier, co-founder of the Chicago-based
Numero Group record label, known for its elaborate
reissues of obscurities, is not a problem at all: The
more availability there is, he said, the harder it is to
find anything, digital or not, “which leads to the
real problem with the Cloud, that there is a threshold
to comprehension and you can only have a personal
relationship with a certain number of your things
anyway.”
To borrow
from Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, “On Photography,”
and its prescient essay on collecting: We live in a
world “on its way to becoming one vast quarry.” And
yet what is the value of a quarry with no bottom,
inexhaustible and plundered without much effort and
available for mining every day, at all hours?
There was
a time when Laurie Anderson, the experimental artist,
lamented not having recordings of her early shows —
films of herself performing on the street, concert
recordings. “But I can no longer say how I feel about
having hard media versus nothing. Sometimes I wish that
it wasn’t such a blown-away world,” she said. “And
now I think I’m happy to be the medium myself, that
people watch me doing whatever I do and it goes into
their memories, and maybe gets lost in there. Or maybe
they savor it.”
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