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Tom Waites Once said that Songs were a form of "Time Travel", 'Three-minute bubbles floating forward through decades, carrying with them everyone who'd ever listened'.
Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of Radio Communications, believed that every word, whisper or scream ever uttered, perpetuates through space and time forever.
A belief I suppose, which supports the possibility that someone, someplace later in time could “catch your drift” long after it’s uttered. An idea in a song perhaps, or Deja vu. The potential epiphany that communications pass through objects propagating like ripples in a pond infinitely. This may support Waites' Time-Travel theory. It may account for seemingly random inspirations, which strike us as if by a muse.
Listening to Records really loud is fun and is far better with friends and a kick-ass stereo, but marketing put an end to HiFi. And Machines select your music.
Music is a primitive language, which does not require literacy to listen, or understand. Only attention is required, and a real stereo. Not a sound-bar, and definitely not a portable thingy. But we lack attention, and no longer own kick-ass High Fidelity Stereos.
Before the written word, our illiterate culture stored most of what we knew in songs, and in pictures. Sticky mnemonic devices, holding ideas together. Magnetic tape attracting tiny particles of what we'd considered important. Didactic graffiti on a cave wall --A rhyming work chant, a sailor's ballad like a chill we can't shake, sticks to us, and is shared. Apparently primitive, these techniques conveyed more than the subject and context, but the whole form of communication, as with a photograph and later film would shape a feeling. Stop Time.
Perhaps the Post-it, would signal the dismantlement of written expression, a contraction of cohesive thought into disposable fragments. A short-hand synopsis of THE THING is just that! Not actually the thing, not the whole incantation, but a few notes. This is also what happened to Music. Consolidation of High Fidelity into a “Smart-speaker and then a phone. Marketing’s penchant for miniaturization, compressing a thing until it loses ifs identity, ends in ruin.
Reading carries with it our own subjectivity, which is why we've enjoyed it for centuries. Like listening to music, or a storyteller, we gather far more than the text, or subtexts, we envision something. Somewhat like how each person sees time, or a calendar in their head, as a shape, in a nebula like a disc.
School children’s best days are when the teacher reads a story.
But Marketing Destroyed language, and in particular humanity's ability to read it. And technology made marketing far more prominent, and nefarious post Google. Whereas there are still TV and Radio Ads, Billboards, and Print -- The internet now decides most things, and how those selections are made are not up to the individual. The Goldilocks dilemma where we try stuff out endlessly to find comfort, ends in ruin. Every option compressed under 7 inches of glass.
Parsing a real tangible thing into a bite, a post-it, 'Cliff's Notes', a sample, a taste, just the tip, -- But NOT the actual thing, sucks. Options encircle us like debris in a twister; with no windscreen, or filter to prevent collisions. We have simply too much whirling around us to be coherent. Smaller and more portable, personal-sized, but completely un-sharable.
We are distracted by these little bits, spouting dubious facts as party jargon. What gets absorbed is generally fleeting and meaningless trash-talk -- But it seems clever in the moment. Recanting something from the internet, becomes short-hand for interesting -- trash talk in lieu of a great story fails mostly because telling a story well, requires practice, and the ability to see the story in one's head. We simply lack the bandwidth.
People cheat at Book-Club because they don't want to read -- Using Audible to get a feel, and then showing up for the Sauvignon Blanc
Try for example to write down six telephone numbers. Six friend's addresses, six sequential street names in any direction from where you live.
Memory has been ceded to the phone as well. If you'd lost your phone in the third world, you'd be screwed.
Marketing is a jeopardy contestant, whose knowledge runs a mile wide, and as deep as newsprint. Meaningful Paintings, and Photography are perhaps the truest media supporting subjective human experience. At least up until these too became fake, the image of a cyclist reading the morning paper and sipping an espresso, conjured a story. A fiction which perhaps engaged something within us -- from elsewhere.
But This Image was not created by A.I. We are adrift now heading toward a singularity which squeezes all of the fun out of a thing, in exchange for convenience. Just as Surround Sound destroyed social music enjoyment, the consolidation of recordings, pictures, and books into a phone, has wiped away the fun. A few blocks from my home there is a new storefront full of Photo-booths, pushing back against the abolition of a physical record. People line up outside for prints. Dressed up and in costume, to produce a tangible record of their shared experience.
Down the same block is a new place that develops Film, and prints it in any format. Kids drop off rolls of Ilford HP5 and FP4 in hopes of circling a contact sheet for printing. These are a minor push back against the trend to obliterate shared experience. Imagine if NOT everything were found on the internet and actually existed outside of one’s phone.
Today, it seems as though every image contains some sort of brand, or logo. Every shot contains dimensions, a price, a discount, or QR code. Everyone and everything is "for sale", you just happened to be coming along at the right time.
We have become post-literate. Not because we can’t read, but because we don’t really. We could read, but choose not to, and can't make much sense from what we have read anyway. We are only able to decipher some nuance, some contextual queues, through the ranking of things. A lower order filter is applied, just before we swipe left or scroll down. Illiteracy or Post-literacy is not merely the casualty of a diminished attention span -- It is the outgrowth of marketing's adaptation to sustain consumerism by compartmentalization.
Scholastic Reading comprehension is the lowest in American History. Subtitles now fly past, far too fast for comprehension. Everyone gathers context from cues invented by marketing. Lip color, jacket tailoring, shoe logo's, all to weigh in, to assign value to a person, or object. But music and in particular listening to music with someone can cure a lot of what has diminished in our screen-ranked culture. Exactly like printed film pictures can exist without the internet.
If Techno, and DJ's subsumed ballads as a musical genre, the bubble floating through our culture will carry only background noise throughout time. -- Without the context of our imagination, there can be no Time-Travel. As with books and film, music is a form of travel. We gather some items for the trip, perhaps a cup of tea, and endeavor into escapism.
On the other side is a replenishment, a revery awaits as if on the other side of a dream. But when we cannot read, and when film and music is too blunt, and blasé we take nothing away from the experience. When advertising injects itself into every nuance of our daily life, we are either swept down with the current, or we find sanctuaries in quiet spaces without screens.
It's no wonder that we have already returned to the cave, to communicate.
Tagging and Graffiti remake every wall as a stencil of our post-literate expression. Repurposed Billboards, boast someone's inevitable tag, six feet high. And some of these become revered artists.
Everyone wants to be heard, but everyone’s wearing Noise Cancelling headphones.
Graffiti is Perhaps counterpoint to marketing's oversaturation, where a gigantic prick and balls, covers an AD for GLP-One. Some guy named Robo, Mickey Mouse with an Uzi... cave-paint counter-culture re-scripts the Ad copy.
A modern Lexicon rattles insurgency from a cryptic spray-can, flattening idioms and paraphrasing dull expression into flash-cards, where marketing fails.
Insta, and Tik-Tok replaced the magazine, and the paperback, the live read, and the billboard. Everyone wants to be heard, but everyone’s wearing Noise Cancelling headphones. Nobody was paying attention when the internet turned the world into ghosts. The DNS decides how and what we see. While in the tactile world, Graffiti adheres to rules of Marketing 101: Make your Brand Ubiquitous, and Repeat, Repeat, Repeat.
On the other side of the cave wall, is a new canvas to tag. To express yourself someplace other than by phone.
When newspapers & magazines were everywhere, most held ad's for "Speed-Reading" classes. Speed-reading, like short-hand was an invention to make humans more efficient, and more literate. This evolution made us more capable of retaining important information in less time. Encapsulating key themes in compartments. This was back when You knew the phone numbers of a dozen friends, by heart.
Today, postliterate cultures crave data, in cutesy single-serving bites. And like a speed-reader, the entire commuter train is drowning in doom-scrolling, as if panning for gold. Everyone coming up with sand and poor posture.
If we do read, we don't know what it means, and we can no longer paraphrase what we've read.
Post-Literate People don't read reviews, they just glance at the star count. Won't read the negative stuff, because they seek affirmation to purchase. Comprehension gone, nobody possesses the attention span to summarize what they've read. We now simply watch mashups. Influential idols, (pop-stars) publicly selecting their favorite creams and crisps, spoon fed by Marketing execs. We listen to 4-star reviews, queuing catch-words, with "(um-like) emojis and stuff".
Decades ago, every library shelf was turned upside-down, and dumped into the Internet, and your librarian was replaced by A DNS Look-up. Your DNS decides for you which books, and how much of them to redact from view. Selective search hands different textbooks to different contestants --A novel hunt to find subjective facts.
Literacy went belly-up when Google DNS began to reshape free-thought, as your intellectual gate-keeper.
By slow increment, Marketing jargon re-shaped language into Polls, and Numbers, Figures, increments, and superlatives...Absolutely everything has been distilled down to Superlatives -- And through internet marketing, every conceivable thing has been miniaturized and made, "One Louder".
Because the actual one you own is Passe. You will need this year’s model.
Your Kick-Ass Stereo replaced by five speakers, and because those were too imposing the speakers were shrunk into tiny cubes. With Surround sound came the concentration of everything good about music into a sanitized array of shit speakers. The 5.1, 6.2, 7.4, so many speakers, until the spouse demanded a sound-bar, and inevitably only and aenemic “smart speaker” remains. Parallel with this phenomena came the cleansing of the collection, and the consolidation of musical choice. The cocky record store kid, was replaced with Google DNS, the iPod, and inevitably the Algorithm. You don't get to choose your music, the machine does, and it's all on your phone. I wonder sometimes when we will see the phone we hold now, like we see the kick-ass stereo, or the 8-Track Tape, or the Telegram. Eventually and inevitably this too shall pass. Now we simply let Google and Comcast decide what we listen to.
I recommend to everyone to change there DNS look-up servers, and to use a VPN.
8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 75.75.76.76 76.76.76.76
Today music arrives (if it arrives at all), as a tiny sterile version of the fun it once was.
After Training wheels, the wheel-size grew up around the rider, until the 10 speed. Today, the tire sizes make little sense and the circumference no longer correlates to your enjoyment, only to marketing another gadget.
From 20" BMX, to 26'r, to 29'r, to 32'r, we have "R-R-Rrrrr'd" the fun out of going for a bike ride.
From deliriously stupid Aero-bike gains to Sock Doping... One's performance won’t be what one strives for, UNLESS we buy the new thing which will make us "one-faster". Marketing says that I could be that much faster with one more gear -- So I suppose I'll take 13 speeds. Or [perhaps] if my rubber were one-inch longer, and a half-an-inch wider. But my performance and my health will likely improve, if I'd enjoy one less glass of Bordeaux. Consumerism is a product of marketing, and choice is the cause of one's boredom, not its consequence. How many is bikes are enough, How many speakers, and how many tire sizes before Goldilocks finds a good fit.
Too many options remove the joy, and too many iterations will stall the fucking fun right out of the machine.
What happened to listening to records, with friends. What expansion led to the demise of social music listening. Those Cozy sessions with a drink, a joint, popcorn, and the warm glow of vacuum Tubes. That's all Gone. Dancing V.U. Meters, scratchy records, cassettes CD's were replaced by Marketing. Music didn't need a re-package to become more compelling. But as it got more convenient, it also lost it's soul.
I blame Surround sound for so much of what goes wrong in a system, and anecdotally it serves as a lesson in the expansion and inevitable extinction of an entire system into post-literate singularity.
The “Smart-Speaker”.