So, after my last “technology is changing my life and I might want to get off this ride” S.O.S. post, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m truly anxious about in 2010.
When everything is available, what is special (and how on earth are you supposed to find it)?
We’re drowning in a sea of choice, and though we learn daily how to more effectively deal with our new reality, it’s still often a source of significant stress and anxiety. How can we even begin to discover things to love and admire when wading through this much stuff? I find myself perversely shutting down to new experiences as more and more of them present themselves.
Everything is forever and yet nothing is forever.
In our digital lives, there are no magazines to recycle when all the articles are online and no music collections to move when it’s all in the clouds, yet servers fail and things disappear, sometimes with witnesses to sound the alarm, sometimes without comment or explanation. Though I have letters from middle school, every email I sent before 2005 no longer exists.
Keeping up with how technology is changing our lives feels like a marathon I am about to lose.
As technology increases the pace of our lives, will a backlash come? I can’t help but imagine a coming trend in which a group of people very consciously makes the decision to unplug themselves from this culture of constant digital sharing. There will be stories about these people deleting all their social networking accounts and turning in their smart phones. People will praise and disparage them with a shocking intensity that reflects their own personal struggles with these changing social paradigms.
I am a *music* *journalist*.
Sometimes I feel like I’m standing with a foot on the deck of two different sinking ships. Right now pretty much any venture that counted on selling copies to pay the bills looks like a toppled game of Jenga. As we begin 2010, we remain in a period of redefinition and recalibration, but we seem to be getting a better handle every day on how to develop even as problems and their solutions continue to morph and change before our eyes. The fun, if we’re optimistic and flexible about it, is in figuring out how to restack these blocks into a relatively stable form: distilling things down to what is essential about these pursuits, and coming to terms with what is merely disposable (and dated) window dressing–the superficial, if comforting, shells that we continue to cling to at our peril.
UPDATE: The future, or the journalism part at least, solved! Classical music, however, seems destined for a bumpy ride.
Yes, there is Huge choice in the digital age. Similarly, I find I would rather eat at a fine restaurant that has a large menu than a a fast food joint with little content that I would comfortably digest. You can’t eat everything on the menu– It might be harder to Choose but I would rather have the Choices of what we want and ignoring the rest.
I remember this interesting back-and-forth at our discussion with the adminsitrators at Lincoln Center:
Us: Aren’t you afraid of the graying of the audience, that Classical Music as we know it is going to disappear?
Them: Newspapers will disappear before Classical Music disappears.
(sudden chilled silence)
Gha!–MS
I really liked reading this post, as it is written almost from the opposite perspective of a technologist. It sounds that way, at least. How refreshing! The metaphors are especially enjoyable.
“Everything is forever and yet nothing is forever.” This is an issue that I have great interest in. It’s sometimes referred to as “bit rot.” Imagine you’re a scientist in the year 2050 and you need to open an Excel 97 file that has very important research data in it. It almost certainly won’t be possible — rendering said data useless. History will be stored in the cloud, which has a half life of about 5 years. What will our great^5 grandchildren know about us if they can’t read what we’ve written?
At the same time, it’s not like the system that exists now is any different. Occasionally stories pop up about a very old document found rifled away in a drawer in a random library, discovered by an intern. This “physical bit rot” is identical to its digital relative. Just because something has been recorded, doesn’t mean people will know where to access it 50 years from now. I’d argue physical bit rot is why the concept of religion exists today, but that’s for another comment.
Thanks for tossing in your perspective, Mykel! Coming at this from “the other side” so say, do let us know if you have any words of guidance or thoughts on how technologists view things these days. Maybe I/we could learn valuable things from them.–MS
Much of the population planet isn’t drowning in a sea of choices. Quite the opposite in fact. I think we in the U.S. are drowning in a sea of distractions as opposed to information that might help us and help others – or discover meaningful art.
Maybe if we take time each day to remember this fact, some of this angst might sort itself out?
Sorry to sound self-righteous but damn people…
Terrific piece, Molly.
Awww, thanks for stopping by Steve!