Using Versus Playing

 

 Playing musical instruments demonstrates just how slow the brain is in gaining new skills. Computers are a nice shortcut to aptitude that don’t involve years of practicing. Operating systems and most software are committed to being user-friendly. (It is interesting that practice as a concept has progressively devolved. We don’t practice using a computer, we tend to simply use it, like an appliance.) Hands-on crafts can seem too slow or dated, but there is just as much intelligence involved in doing them. Since they are inherently slow, accelerating cognition probably destroys the process. Computers, since they redirect attention, probably naturally repel manual learning, and consequently starves it off, although people who write code essentially are craftspeople in that they are focused on making the things run smoother, or be more well-designed, but only for the eyes and the mind, not the hand, eyes and the mind, and in the process letting the manual process slowly erode through non-use and irrelevance. 

 “...for the time being we still have hands with which we can grasp things...hence we can see the approaching totalitarianism doing the programming for what it is: a non-thing [and] shows how ‘outdated’ we are.” (Flusser, The Shape of Things, p. 94) Very true.

We use everything now. We never used TVs or radios, we just watched or played them. The main conflict now is that we are using tools at the same time that we are passively watching or listening to. Everything is now an active task, not passive, meaning we are endlessly busy. Use also used to mean “borrow”: “Can I use your boombox?” Now we use apps to listen to music (which have their own usability problems). It also uses your data to create algorithms, which nourish the network and the ecosystem of producers and ‘artists’. So the usury process has circularity. 

There is something oddly natural about that process however, but something was torn down in the process, and older people that remember the old system have cognitive dissonance as a result. The gaze has been shifted towards screens, and away from humans, that can be unnerving to many.            
The more things have changed the more they have not stayed the same.

9/16/2015 

[9/16/2024: Even if you keep handwritten journals, software is much more effective in shaping the finished product, although there are too many ways to endlessly change it. However, in the flow of endless options are things that wouldn’t have happened if it had not been for software. I can jot down musical phrases or riffs in a notebook but eventually it’s going to end up in software. You can make more copies with much more variation. Painters used to make multiple identical copies of paintings that people liked. Now each copy is different–sometimes an entirely different work. That wouldn’t have been conceivable in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th.]