Real Guitars are for Old People: Music in the Age of Continuous Partial Attention |
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| Written by Kris Millett |
| Thursday, 29 January 2009 15:05 |
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These days, no matter how engaging an online article may be, chances are I will have checked NME.com twice, searched for a guitar tab, and begun composing an email to someone before getting through its opening paragraph. So with that in mind, take a moment right now to update your profile, check for new headlines at CBC, or read part of Steve Dominey's article before we contemplate the role of music in our era of information overload. It can wait. ( ...) Okay, a couple of months ago, I tagged an article at the bottom of my 'MySpace' piece entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In it, 
"Can you remember the last time you actually listened to music?"
Carr is concerned with a lost ability to appreciate the printed word - but if the words "book," "prose," and "reading" are substituted for, say "album," "song," and "listening," the statement reveals something different, but similarly problematic: "Immersing myself in an album or a lengthy song used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of music. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three songs. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. The deep listening that used to come naturally has become a struggle." Can you remember the last time you actually listened to music? While not working, doing dishes, or chatting on the Internet? 
Judy Garland
The pitfalls of multitasking, and the mental state of ‘continuous partial attention' it produces, are addressed by Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You. He admits: "It's nice to be able to watch TV, talk on the phone, and read your email all at the same time, but it's a superficial skill. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but keeps you from really studying the fish". So, then, why must we do this? Johnson argues that our minds naturally gravitate towards more thoroughly engaging media. When that is unavailable, we compromise by consuming several types of old media at the same time. Humans are innate problem-solvers, and our mental appetites are always searching for more complex stimuli. This, in turn, tasks the creators of video games, television, and film to align each medium of entertainment to our increasingly sophisticated demands. Johnson notes that even the ‘crap' from today, like Survivor, contains story arcs infinitely more complex than 1970s' brethren such as Love Boat or Joanie Loves Chachi. Unfortunately, Johnson leaves music out of his analysis, leaving us to wonder whether it is too passive an entertainment on its own to actively engage our cognitive appetites. He does concur with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's (Being John Malkovich) assertion that film is a dead medium, noting its narrative ceiling has historically constricted complexity.
"Our use of the Internet has fundamentally altered the way we read and think."
Charlie Kaufman can call film a dead medium, but I doubt he'd say that storytelling or the motion image is dead. Video games employ these devices to create virtual worlds where the consumer actively participates in the outcome of the narrative, as opposed to passively absorbing it -- i.e., instead of speculating how James Bond will complete his mission, you decide how to complete the mission and you pay the consequences. If the sales of music-related video games mean anything, then we are probably more deeply engaged in music than ever before; it's merely a changed involvement, as the established media used to access music in the past loses significance. People bemoan the current state of popular music, our lack of world-changing artists, and offer plenty of explanations: "compressed music sounds like crap," "bands don't try to make great records anymore," or "it's all Simon Cowell's fault." But this is, as Jack White would say, "taking the effect and making it the cause."Music has and always will be affected, in positive and negative ways, by the media it befriends to reach the masses. In the 1970s, FM radio provided a platform that encouraged the creation of longer, more artistically challenging pieces of pop music. The rise of MTV in the 1980s and ‘90s caused, in many cases, the accompanying video to become more crucial to hit-making than the music itself (see Grohl, D., Spears, B.). As we witness the decline of the audience and the rise of the actor, the consequences of music's latest seismic media shift remain unclear. 
"Why should any kid today merely listen to a piece of music, when he can participate in its performance through video game technology?"
In the meantime, we must accept the depreciation of solely listening to recorded music as an art form, as a trade-off to the population's increasing participatory engagement in it. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules. Why should any kid today merely listen to a piece of music, when he can participate in its performance through video game technology? For traditional music lovers, the immediate future may look bleak, but the most universal of all art forms will adapt and continue to thrive, just as it did before the post-war popularization of purchasing recordings as product. Until music properly transitions to new media, we will continue to ask, "where are the Bob Dylans of today?," grumble about poor-quality audio files, and lament as our favourite bands exclusively release new material for Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Fortunately for us, vinyl is still cheap and readily available, and so is weed. RELATED ARTICLES: THE NEW MYSPACE MUSIC: The Record Industry Turns To The Recent Past In Its War With The Future Further reading/viewing: Steven Johnson: Everything Bad Is Good For You (New York: Riverhead Books) South Park: Episode 1113 (#166) "Guitar Queer-O" Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic Monthly – July/Aug 08. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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Comments (5)
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kris, this was a great article!! i have certainly realized how internet has changed the way i read (case in point - i sent a couple of emails and finished some work in the middle of reading this article) but never thought about how my music listening has changed in a similar way. i can't remember the last time i actually listened to a song that wasn't being performed live in front of me (and even then, im usually multi-tasking).
Re: Shankley
Of course I've never listened to "The Queen is Dead", or Judy Garland "Live at Carnegie Hall". |
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