Digital culture is fast, light — and lazy
Recently I started plowing through a bunch of YouTube prog-rock videos from the late ’60s and ’70s, amazed at the musicianship of the bands in live performances: Here were Gary Brooker and B. J. Wilson of Procol Harum on piano and drums respectively playing “Pilgrim’s Progress,” there was Keith Emerson of the Nice rolling through his take on Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto on his Hammond in “Brandenburger.”
Every note played was analogue, on real physical instruments, with no digital fixes added. In songs with lyrics, there was an unexpected level of complexity and poetry. Sadly, Emerson committed suicide in 2016, trolled to death by heartless fans.
Compare this with today’s pop stars, from Drake to Ariana Grande, from Katy Perry to Justin Timberlake, where we experience massive spectacles, over-produced pap and a lyrical void.
Yet we can only partly blame the current generation of artists for this over-production and simplicity. They grew up in the era of the iPod, now fading thanks to the omni-functional capabilities of the smartphone, where listeners cycle through tunes with bored nonchalance. The album died. In the studio, producers have access to banks of computers that can sample any sound imaginable, and use Vocoders to turn the worst voices into angelic choirs.
This speaks to a strong underlying current in our culture, our willingness to use digital devices and applications to make things easy, regardless of the social effects of this ease.
Here’s the general rule: If there’s an easy and a hard way to do something, almost everyone will choose the easy way.
Increasingly, this involves choosing the digital over the analogue.
We see it everywhere. In music, we moved in a few decades from the record to the CD to the disembodied digital file, accepting the mediocrity of compressed sound.
When we shop, we use self-checkout on digital scanners, even though it means a few more people without jobs. Indeed, shopping itself has become a video game: We click on items on Amazon, Best Buy or eBay websites, expecting them to be magically appear on our porches a few days later.
The “sharing economy” fares no better. Here’s the iron rule of communications on Kijiji: Short rude messages without capitals and punctuation mean the potential buyer is using a cellphone and will never show up on your doorstep. The medium is the message.
In education, the arrival of digital networks has been a both a blessing and a curse.
In theory, students can use the spelling and grammar checkers on advanced word processors to hand in pristinely worded essays; in fact, what they give us is often riddled with language errors due to last-minute rushing and the lack of an internal schoolmarm created by years of reading good books.
In theory, the web promised access to millions of books and articles; in fact, students read far fewer serious works than their pre-networked ancestors. To make things worse, in many cases students cannot even process literary complexity, whether it’s Austen, Lovecraft or Nietzsche: The words on the page no longer make sense to them.
Hookup culture, the Amazon of romance, is propelled in part by dating apps like Tinder.
Time compresses: People cancel meetings 10 minutes before they’re planned with a few words on SMS. And there’s the arcane abbreviations of texting itself, with analog conversation replaced by ROFLs, YOLOs and BRBs. Indeed, in some cases, the digital leads to the death of the social itself — in analogue spaces like buses, bars and cafés the first impulse of many is to whip out their smartphones, stick in their earphones and hide.
The analogue is work, the digital lightness and speed. But the digital is also a refusal to commit, a reluctance to engage with others, and laziness.
This is only the beginning.
If there’s an easy and a hard way to do something, almost everyone will choose the easy way