After reading the rest of Paul Miller's Rhythm Science, I came to the conclusion that I enjoyed reading his last half of the book better than the first. It seemed like in the first he was mostly talking about himself and personal experiences while in the second half, he connects those with today's technological and digital advancements along with what direction we are going which I was much more interested in. There were two appealing quotes that caught my eye. The first was in the section titled "Rhythmic Space" and goes like this:
"Speaking in code, we live in a world so utterly infused with digitality that it makes even the slightest action ripple across the collection of data bases we call the web." - pg. 89
When Miller makes this statement, he means one of two things. First, he says that we are "Speaking in code". We have gone from a time where people wrote letters in physical ink by our hands in order to deliver some sort of English message, to where we let technology organize different bits and bytes to form statements to a friend through Email or texts. The downside to this is that our now 'digital ink' is now public on the Internet and not as easy to just throw away. This leads me to the second part of the quote where Miller states that "even the slightest action ripple across the collection of data bases we call the web". A celebrity figure on Twitter just wakes up from a nap and tweets her thoughts, "Ah! I just dreamed that lynxes were extinct! Then where would my fur coat be?" This simple act of publishing this celebrity's thoughts may have caught the attention of PETA, who might have then spread the Tweet to national news medias and so on. It doesn't have to be a complicated act on the internet to cause a big stir. The second quote that I liked appeared in the section, "The Prostitute":
"It's a voodoo economics of the information era. You pay the price and expect to receive satisfaction" - pg. 108
I want to focus on the second sentence of this quote. In today's technological era, the human race has become a group of impatient individuals who expect instant gratification. I was on YouTube last week and when a particular video wouldn't fully load in twenty seconds, I was appalled. I mean, the website's videos always load quickly, what is going on now? As our bandwidth increases, our wait time for data decreases. When we can't get immediate access to our ON DEMAND movie that we paid for, shouldn't we get fully reimbursed for it not being ready the second we hit "Purchase"? Servers are not expected to have downtime anymore. That was ten years ago. The next quote came from "Rhythmic Cinema":
"Whenever you look at an image or listen to a sound, there's a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order" - pg. 81
Especially with today's digital age, with everything amassed on the web, our brains must select what first to look at, then what to read or hear. Before we can understand the information on that computer screen we have to organize it first to make logical sense. The next quote I found was under the "Errata Erratum" section:
"With that in mind, I ask that you think of this as a mix lab - an "open system" where any voice can be you." - pg. 93
It seems to me that Miller is comparing his mix lab to the Internet and the sense that they both are "open systems" and anyone can be anybody on both. Technology has allowed us to alter our voices (for better or worse) to our targeted audience by being quoted in HTML or a song track rather than our vocal cords. The next quote came from the "The Future is Here" section:
"Once you get their basic credit information and various electronic representations of that person who needs the real thing anymore?" - pg. 101
What Miller is referring to here is the impact of social interaction on the Internet and the seemingly dehumanizing aurora it gives off. Instead of going to a bank and conversing with the teller about how much money you have or you need money put in, we have online banking where we can do both and much more. Will we ever not need bank tellers? Probably.
On the website http://www.whosampled.com/, I chose the song 4 Myself by Mac Dre feat. Devious and Dubee. The track sampled Hall and Oates's I Can't Go for That (No Can Do). In looking at the related songs, I find a couple connections between my song's genealogy and a quote that I previously mentioned. After listening the Mac Dre's track and scroll down, there are about twenty other songs that all sampled I Can't Go for That (No Can Do) in their songs. It then gives me about five covers of their song, and lastly one remix I can check out to see if I like it. This site is consistent with the idea of my second quote, "You pay the price and expect to see satisfaction". This website gives you other songs that you may like based off a selection of one track. (Similar to Amazon, iTunes, etc.) The Internet has a way of making us always want more of something and whosampled.com uses that want to make us dig deeper into the site.
I liked the “You pay the price and expect to receive satisfaction” quote too, I almost included it in my post. You’re right about the internet fostering an immediate satisfaction mindset; I remember a “Calvin and Hobbes” comic referring to exactly this situation, where technological advancements meant to save time simply raise everybody’s expectations about how quickly things need to get done. I guess Bill Watterson was a bit ahead of the game here.
ReplyDeleteAnother part about this section of the book (The Prostitute) that I found interesting was when Miller referred to our demands of a person being based on their willingness to play a role, and not just the price paid. This sort of seems to apply to internet culture too; everyone chooses a role on the ‘net and we will expect certain things from them. For example people will complain endlessly if some service they have become accustomed to is not quickly forthcoming whether or not they are paying for it. Say if a free webcomic is late with an update, or if Twitter or Facebook were to be unavailable…
I totally agree with the fact that we are an 'i need it now culture'. We are just like the girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who turns blue and rolls away like a blueberry. We can't be patient and wait for more than a second for the computer to load, we want instant gratification without effort. I think it is why so many relationships are failing personally. With no patience left we are a continuing cycle of frustration because we never learned to wait for people to understand us, and for us to understand them. I find myself snap at my mom when she isn't clued in quickly enough to things going on in my life or even something simple about the computer. My need for instant understanding is a detriment because it becomes about quick quick quick, now now now. We have become the very thing we invented computers to expedite. Information driven, speed machines. We take the phrase time is money, much too seriously, i think.
ReplyDeleteWe gain this sense of entitlement partially because fast response has been rewarded - if you take the path of least resistance and get good at using it, you get to your answers faster... They may not be the right answers, but they're the fast answers. How many times have we Googled a question instead of making sure we get the right answer? Or just asked our friend who always makes something up rather than bothering to check?
ReplyDeleteI used the same quote as you in your rhythmic space section but I liked the example you used about a celebrity tweeting something silly they dreamed about and all the sudden getting the attention of numerous groups of people. It is expected for those kinds of things to happen nowadays but what's so crazy to me is when some regular every day person puts something on the internet that becomes some big phenomenon kind of like Mr splashy pants.
ReplyDeleteGreat job on this post. Nice unpacking of the quotes, and great connections to the song. Kudos.
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