I was out with a friend the other day,
a very dedicated activist and highly effective organizer who I happen
to know is on Facebook fairly regularly. When I asked her how she
thought Facebook had affected her life, her emotions, her brain
functions, her response was, “hm, I never thought about it.”
I don't know how many other people
haven't given this subject much thought, but for me, the influence of
all kinds of technologies on society, and on my individual psyche, is
something I've been thinking about a lot. Especially since the
internet came along, which happened when I was well into adulthood,
and had lived without it successfully for a long time already. And
then after having a child seven years ago, around the same time that
Facebook and internet-capable (“smart”) phones became
commonplace, more thoughts on this whole phenomenon were inspired.
Probably none of these thoughts are new – thoughts rarely are –
but I thought I'd lay out my thinking here, in case it might be of
interest to anyone else. It occurred to me that it might be,
specifically because I think it's fair to say that I am a good
example of someone who has benefitted tremendously from the internet,
as a professional independent artist. And yet, I still think we
humans would be far better off without any of this stuff.
The advantages of interactive
technologies for DIY culture
First,
let me lay out the good sides, because that itself is controversial.
Some of you reading this remember when artists like me would send out
postcards every so often, announcing a new CD or an upcoming concert
tour. Some of you remember making copies of recordings onto cassette
tapes and sharing them with friends. The internet has made this sort
of thing immeasurably easier and cheaper, and as a result of taking
advantage of this medium – by giving away my music online – well
over 2 million of my songs have been downloaded by many thousands of
people who, I'm guessing, would otherwise never have come across my
music.
The
brilliant thing about the internet is it's an interactive technology
that tends toward democracy -- although it's far from immune to the
efforts of big corporations and governments to influence how it works
and what happens on it. The fact that most Tweets are apparently
related to what's on TV is an obvious case in point. Despite that,
the phenomenon of free downloads has changed things in a significant
way for independent musicians who take advantage of it. The music
industry tries to convince us all that free music is theft, because
it benefits them to do that. Many independent musicians believe this
hogwash, to their own detriment. Those who see through the lies reap
the benefits of this interactive technology that allows us to
circumvent, to some extent, a broken and decrepit music industry.
In a
nutshell, it goes like this: you put up your music for free. People
like it, they share it. You gain fans. A small percentage of your
new fans come to your shows. A much smaller percentage of them
organize paying gigs for you all around the world. So if enough
people like your music, you make a living, if you know how to
communicate with people effectively. Is this an ideal way to do
things? Maybe, maybe not – most of us DIY musicians doing it this
way might happily take a major record deal and gain much more of an
audience that way, but for the vast majority of us this will never
happen and we are completely locked out of corporate airplay, so we
make do with what's available to us, which is the internet.
OK,
so you might say I like the internet, the democratic nature of it,
and I've benefitted from it professionally. But every day I wish to
live in a world free of screens, speakers, and everything else you
plug into the wall.
How it was – the Luddites
The
brief, historical movement of the Luddites in 1812-13 provide us with
an interesting example. It was the early days of the industrial
revolution in England, when most people in England worked the land,
or made things with their hands. When some people started building
factories to mass-produce the things people had, for millenia, been
making in small workshops in little market towns, the artisans
revolted, and set about to burn down the new factories in the middle
of the night, when no one was looking. After a lot of people were
hanged and the factories kept springing up everywhere, they gave up,
and ultimately changed strategies, admitting the inevitability of
mass production and the loss of their lifestyles and livelihoods, and
the movement to destroy the factories eventually, you could say,
transformed into the labor movement – a movement to make the best
of the new situation, and at least get paid a living wage for this
alienating, repetitive factory work people were being forced to do.
The
movement was crushed violently by the state, as movements usually
are, but it also fell victim to the idea that “there is no
alternative.” The Luddites proclaimed they would destroy
technology that was destructive to community, but ultimately had to
accept this community-destroying technology, because the artisans
couldn't compete with it – especially when the state was
systematically forcing peasants off their land and essentially giving
them no option but to work for starvation wages in smog-filled
cities, where for the most part they died at a very young age of
disease and overwork. For those who could afford to buy the
mass-produced products created in the new factories, there were great
benefits to be reaped, and as long as you only visited certain towns,
you might think England was becoming a more prosperous place. But
for the majority of the people, the industrial age brought only
misery, alienation, and death, which can be illustrated through lots
of statistics which I'm not going to bother with.
Kill your TV – and your radio, CD
player, and record player, too
For
the first decades of the industrial age – and for millenia before
then – it was still the case that if anybody wanted to listen to
music, they had to play it. There were some notable exceptions, but
for the most part, there was far less of a division between
“performer” and “audience.” Most people filled both roles.
Still today, even in some of the more remote parts of Europe and
North America – and to a much larger degree in many other parts of
the world – you can find communities where it is the norm, not the
exception, to be a stellar musician. It is the norm for someone to
play multiple instruments, sing well, and have at their fingertips a
thousand different songs and tunes. And then came the phonograph,
and later, radio. And with it, the professional musicians.
One
story I heard about (on the radio, of course – illustrating how
life is full of endless contradictions) involved a farming village
somewhere in the south Pacific. Every evening after a day in the
fields, the people of the village would sit together and sing songs
for a couple hours – everyone would sing. Then came their first
local radio station. After that, every evening the villagers would
sit together after their day of working in the fields – and listen
to professionals sing the songs they used to all sing together.
Now
multiply that story by a million, and you can probably see where I'm
going with this. Eventually those villagers, and all of the
villagers and city folk everywhere else, stop sitting in a circle to
listen to the radio. Eventually they all get radios, and listen to
the songs in smaller groups, or individually. Eventually they stop
singing at all. Whereas before they all knew how to sing, just as
they knew how to talk, after a while most of them forget how to sing.
Those few people who are obsessed with music -- those few strange
people who continue singing despite the ubiquitous radios and boom
boxes that people now think of as a hallmark of their newfound
“development” -- now become the “professionals.” Or at
least, some of them do – in the new age of recording technology
there's only room for a very few “professionals.” Some very few
of them become “stars.” They get “big.” Everybody else sits
around, listening to them sing, and wonder why they're so depressed
all the time.
And
then comes TV, and people not only forget how to sing, but they
forget how to talk, too. They forget how to tell a story. If they
try to tell a story, people tune out, and tell them they're talking
too much. Or they talk while the storytellers are trying to tell a
story, because people have not only forgotten how to talk, but
they've forgotten how to listen, too. Because when music and stories
– radio and TV – are no longer participatory, and they're
constant, ubiquitous, 24/7, it naturally becomes “background.”
So then those few people who continue trying to sing and tell stories
have to attempt to teach other people what they used to know
naturally – how to listen.
The
more I work as a musician, doing hundreds of gigs every year, the
more I find that the most difficult gigs are the children's gigs.
But not because of the children. The children, for the most part,
haven't yet learned what “background music” is. For them,
everything is still so interesting. When the birds chirp, they look,
and listen, and they're fascinated (the young children at least).
When people speak, or sing, they find that fascinating, too. They
haven't been turned off yet. So when I show up at a library to do a
gig for kids, I don't need to tell them to sit quietly – they do
that automatically, because it's what they want to do. They're ready
for a story, or a song, they want to be transported to wherever I'm
going to take them.
It's
their parents who are the problem. It's the parents who are standing
around on the periphery of the room, chatting, ignoring the music,
ruining the gig for the kids. It's the parents who think the
appropriate thing to do with a visiting performer is to “multitask”
-- paint the faces of the kids while the performer is singing
background music. This doesn't come naturally to the kids – it's
forced behavior. The kids who learn to tune out live performance are
the ones who always have the TV on at home, and even for them, it
takes years of constant background noise before they learn how to
ignore it.
People
ask me what kind of music I listen to. I never know how to answer
that question. It's like asking me what kind of people do I know.
How do I answer that? Hard to put them in a box – thankfully, the
people I know are a fairly diverse bunch. When people ask what kind
of music I listen to, what they mean is, which CDs do you have in the
background as you're doing other things. My truthful answer – none
– is not the answer they're expecting, and also doesn't quite
answer their question, really. Because it's not that I don't listen
to music – I do – but not that way. I rarely listen to recorded
music, and when I do, I rarely listen to the same CD twice. There
aren't many people like me, I've found. But the few out there who
are like me in that way are other musicians, those who somehow
haven't learned to stop singing, despite the radios and TVs
constantly, implicitly telling them to shut up.
The “golden age” of radio
Radio
had a golden age, they say, at least in the United States, in the
1960's and 1970's. This is probably true, but only in comparison to
what came afterwards. When the hopelessly corrupt Reagan
administration – and every government in power since then –
deregulated the media and allowed a few massive corporations to
almost completely take over the airwaves, fire most local journalists
and DJ's, and play the same 300 songs over and over again throughout
the entire country and much of the world, ignoring the millions of
other great songs out there, this certainly represented a low point.
A low point which has been alleviated, you could say, by the
existence of the internet.
And
to be sure, in the “golden age,” when most radio stations were
independently owned -- and, although commercial and profit-driven by
nature, programmers had infinitely more leeway to play local music,
and much more variety, etc. -- what they were replacing by the very
existence of their independent radio stations, was live music.
People lament all the radio programmers and journalists who lost
their jobs in the 1980's because this happened within living memory
for many of us. But what of all the musicians who lost their jobs
when the radio stations figured out how to play records, and all the
musicians before then who lost their jobs when the phonograph became
a status symbol in most homes and businesses in the industrialized
world? This was an infinitely greater loss. And greater still, the
loss of community – the loss of all those “amateur” musicians
who used to play music together in the pubs, cafes, barber shops, and
sidewalks. Even in much of the “developing world” today, this is
a thing of the past. Good luck finding the Buena Vista Social Club
in Cuba today – all I found when I went there were people blasting
Mexican salsa through shitty little boom boxes. During the three
weeks I spent bicycling around the island, I didn't once
see
anyone sitting on their front porch playing an actual musical
instrument.
Social
media – connecting and disconnecting
They
say now with Facebook and Twitter we're more interconnected than
ever. In a sense, this may be true. That is, it is now more
possible than ever to have superficial relationships with more people
than you ever imagined being able to have superficial relationships
with, all over the world, as long as they speak your language and own
a computer or a “smart” phone. But what this “connectedness”
has done has disconnected us from each other – from our real
friends, our neighbors, people in the cafes next to us, our
classmates, our coworkers – more than ever. Just when I thought it
couldn't get any worse, with the impact on our brains and our
societies of TV and radio, then came the internet. The interactive
nature of the medium is what is so attractive about it – same
attraction that game shows and “reality TV” has for so many
people, but multiplied – but the impact it's having on our society
is to make us less connected with each other than ever before.
In
the circles I travel in, a recent study reported in some media has
made a lot of waves. Although the internet may have been helpful for
those organizing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, it
was only when the Mubarak regime turned off the internet that the
streets started to really fill up with people. They couldn't see
Tahrir Square on Facebook anymore – they had to go participate at
that point. And for all of you technological optimists who think
social media or the internet is essential for organizing mass
uprisings, you are profoundly ignorant (sorry). Long before even
books and magazines became widespread, in 1848, peasant uprisings
spread across borders throughout Europe and overthrew every monarchy
on the continent, with the exception of England and Russia.
I
know, you're staring at your computer screen or your phone reading
this, so in a sense I'm just contributing to the problem with every
blog post, with each new song I upload to my YouTube channel. I
doubt the solution for most of us is to stop using this technology
completely. But we can at least be aware that its influence, like
the influence of other technologies – radio, TV, record players,
the telephone, the private car, nuclear power plants, even central
heating and central air conditioning – is mostly negative. Mostly
destructive of community, of society, and of our psyches. We can be
aware of this, we can be aware of the fallacy of “multitasking,”
the fallacy of “connecting,” of “friends,” and of the idea
that the internet or the existence of other forms of media is
bringing us together in any significant way. And we can consciously
try to limit our engagement with it, and consciously try to increase
our engagement with each other, in the real world. Because for the
most part, our “connected” world is very, very disconnected.
