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Digital Communities
Industry Members
Digital vs. Analog Life
January 17, 2012 By Ulf Wolf
Where exactly does life take place these days?
Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was a British physician and psychologist, writer, and social reformer who for me made his mark with the astounding remark that “Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?”
In some ways I envy him, or rather his times, for life then was pretty clear-cut, and fairly distinct from dream. You were either awake or asleep, for life was then—in the main—lived through the five senses. It was rather easy, I suppose, to tell it from dream. All so analog.
Can we say the same today?
You read stories about Tokyo youth who never leave their darkened bedrooms for months on end, living their lives absorbed in the soft glare of computer monitors; or of those poor American souls that would rather lose their sense of smell than give up Facebook (see my December 27, 2011 blog). Is that living?
Then again, is reading a book—whether papery analog or Kindley digital—living? In many ways I’ve often thought that it is. The fictional wind blowing in your face, your heart beating faster with the suspense or of love. A well-written story will transform you, make you fall through the page of words and into the fictional dream, and live it just as fully as a dream, or as that walk in the woods. Is that living?
These days we have a new word: binge-watching; some call it television binging. A new concept made possible by digital streamers like Netflix or Hulu: An entire season of The Practice in a day. Two seasons of 24 over a weekend. This takes dedicated viewing. It means shutting down the rest of the day, turning off the cell, dimming the lights, don the headphones, then go. Barely break for food. Immerse yourself into the life on the screen and the fates of the actors to such a degree that for the next twelve hours, nothing else exists. Heady stuff, but is that living?
It seems to me that these days more and more living is taking place internally rather than externally. Without the need of smell, or taste, or touch.
And it seems to me that we are living more and more digitally, where the actual thing has partly evaporated.
I grew up with Long-Playing (LP) records. Vinyl. Analog. A good foot in diameter. Large and black. A sizeable sleeve. Lots of space for text and images. A thing. To touch, to care for, to collect, to cherish.
I did find the CD seductive when it was first released in the 1980s. So compact, so silvery, so, well, modern. And quite collectible. I must confess to gathering three thousand of them at one point. But in the long run, not quite the same.
And then even the CD was made obsolete by that thing that is and has no thing to it: the mp3. The only thing to tell you that you own it (or have stolen it) is a statement on the screen that says the file is there and that you’ve used up so much hard disk storage to save it. Yes, you can play it, and it sounds the same—to my ear anyway, though the pundits will tell you that nothing sounds as good as the analog vinyl. Musically it is there, but it is all cloud now. No thing to touch.
I recently uploaded (more as a backup than anything) some of my CD and mp3 collection to Google Music. So far I’ve uploaded 700 albums. 700 albums that in vinyl would have weighed far too much for me to lift (probably at least a couple of hundred pounds), and which would have occupied the better part of a good size walk-in closet—if racked and stored properly—has now been reduced to a Google Chrome bookmark. Click, and I’m there.
Yes, Google Music allows you to add cover art, which helps (but weighs nothing, of course, and is no thing); and Google being Google it does offer an amazingly well-honed search facility. But it is no thing. It is all cloud, all invisible bits and bytes chasing each other at the speed of light between me and some continent of servers we have yet to discover and chart.
But is that living?
I think I would like to go back now, close the door on mp3s and CDs, and return to my vinyl collection. I think I’d like to close the Internet and toss my cell, and don a pair of hiking boots, and take my living outdoors and into the five senses. Sun on my skin, wind in my face, forest in my nostrils, the cry of birds in my ears, the earth beneath my feet, the vistas real.
I think that is living
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I am not entirely in the digital age. Have Wi-Fi, x-box, a cell phone, e-mail, etc. Burned brush outdoors today. Got a workout. Got fresh air. Renewed my spirits. Miss my 8-track player, cassette deck and the snow on my analogue TV.