Why Do We Stop? (Cont.)

 

Meandering Stream

 Media consumption has always been a matter of time investment. In the 19th century, people read books--or anything in print--that's where they were spending all their time. They'd spend eight to twelve hours at a job, and in the evenings they would read or play the piano. There was no radio or television yet.

Once other media start to be invented, it takes time away from the other ones, and it is a continuous process. We stop doing things and start doing something else, or engage with them in new contexts. After TV, we stopped watching TV as we once did in the 50s and 60s, and began to watch TV with an influence of the internet as a multi-tasked, simultaneous experience.

"Discuss the evolution of media from newspapers and magazines to radio, TV, the internet, social media and AI"

What's happening now, especially with podcasts, and for the people that make them, is that they've switched from book-writing to real-time riffing as a form of journalism. Imagine Walter Cronkite doing all his writing by making a private "broadcast" first and then calling it journalism. Journalism is now an opinion done spontaneously. We stopped doing actual journalism by analyzing facts. It's just faster and we like that convenience.

Book-reading is still on the decline. I don't do as much as I used to, and sometimes use AI to produce a Cliffs Note from author interviews on YouTube, then perhaps get the book at the library. Sam Harris has even said that it's hard to get through a 300-page book. We're focused on things that aren't in books anymore because it takes too much time. Podcasts have supplanted books in many ways, and YouTube videos, of course. [Interesting: Why is it "YouTube video" as opposed to a video from somewhere else? It's the fact that it's more social. Why does reading and knowledge have to be social? Because it's a cool medium, and we're never going back to the hot medium days].

I think video is actually kind of annoying. When you go on news websites, say CNN, you have to expect to watch videos because that's its roots. All I want to do is read a couple of paragraphs; I don't want to watch a video. But everything needs a video these days.

I like cooking videos, but I was thinking, "Well, all I need is a recipe, I don't need to watch somebody chop an onion. I've watched hundreds of videos of people chopping onions--overhead shots of chopping onions--what's the point? Why waste your time on that? If you tallied up all the time you spent watching people chop onions, you could have been doing something else."

In music, we also stopped doing things, and we're now doing them a different way. Everybody has to have a video; everybody watches a video in order to learn how to do something in music. It's like getting a lesson from somebody who just sits there and plays. I've taken some of those lessons, and they're totally useless.

Once you learn how to do something yourself because you've studied it, there's no reason to watch a video. The only video watching I did in the 80s was videos that I had to buy, and I didn't buy many because they were expensive, and magazines weren't, so I used those. Sometimes the library had them, but even when I watched the videos, I didn't really learn that much. It always redounds to applying the skills, and you have to work to achieve them.

Perhaps you can get to some level of skill from watching videos, but it's a very narrow learning. Once you learn the system of music, you don't need videos; you don't need to continuously watch somebody do something. At concerts in the 70s, we used to bring binoculars to watch guitar players. But once you learn some of that, you don't have to sit and watch them do it. It's another example where we stopped doing something because we learned a new and better way, but sometimes at the expense of institutional knowledge. As far as music is concerned, all you need is to spend a couple of weeks of music theory 101, and then you're off to the races. There's no reason to ask questions on Quora or Reddit. You can spend all that time creating and playing instead of having to make social displays.

People can't do anything themselves these days; everything has to be in a group, so it's no wonder that we are where we are. Everyone has to be part of a tribe, which is interesting because it can be a useful framework. But I think that only works if individuals and the underlying system are strong, and both aren't now.

So If you keep stopping what you used to do, you won't ever know who you are because who you were has been thrown out with the bathwater. 

One of the great things about AI, especially AI music, is that I can revisit things I was doing 30 years ago and make something new out of them. Admittedly, it is a kind of a leftover, but if you use the leftover as an ingredient, then it's the potential beginning of a new recipe.

[A "wriff" from a riff on 10/22/2021. Riffing is not writing; The act of writing creates a different cognitive experience. I find this is the case with composing music manually as opposed to AI-generated music. I may have written lyrics to use with a generator, but it's not the same cognitive experience. AI-music is essentially a listening experience. When you're writing music, the listening is an inner listening--very different].