jmtd → log → inert media, or the explotation of attention
It occurred to me recently that one of the attractions of vinyl, or more generally physical media, could be that it's inert, safe: the music is a groove cut into some plastic. That's it. The record can't do anything unexpected to you1: it just contains music.
Safe.
There's so much exploitation of attention, and so much of what we interact with in a computing context (social media) etc has been weaponised against us, that having something some matter-of-fact is a relief. I know that sometimes, I prefer to put a record on than to dial up the very same album from any number of (ostensibly more convenient) digital sources, partly because I don't need to spend any of my attention spoons to do so, I can save them for the task at hand.
The same is perhaps not true for audio CDs. That might depend on your own relationship with them, of course. For me they're inexorably tied up with computing and a certain amount of faff (ripping, encoding, metadata). And long dead it might be (hopefully), but I can still remember Sony's CD rootkit scandal: CDs could be a trojan horse. Beware!
- I'm sure there are ingenious exceptions.↩
Comments
(I was about to respond to an email from you but got (nicely) distracted by this
I do still have (some) LPs but actually have the same reaction to CDs as you report with Vinyl. Over the break, I made a serious trial of (2) streaming sites but have cancelled both and revert to my physical music storage. Part of the reason is that my choice is for classical music and the meta-info is poor - furthermore, I certainly don't want to shuffle the movements of a symphony or the arias of an opera! But there is something satisfying about picking up a storage item - opening the booklet - and playing it through.
The number of ways in which things are now split into units of less than a minute is, I suspect, one of the reasons that UG students now walk away from lectures of a "micro-century" (von Neumann)