Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Nancy Roth's avatar

Very thoughtful, Kyle, and thanks for bringing Walter Benjamin’s illuminating essay to the fore.

As a child of the 20th century I have often wondered why people turned to posting their personal memorabilia online in the first place—as opposed to keeping their artifacts to themselves, to be shared selectively and in person. It seems to me that the moment one embraces an Internet-enabled technology as a medium for sharing one’s lived experience, one is implicitly relinquishing control over those experiences.

So a prequel to this essay might be a description of one’s first post, to Tumblr or FB or whatever: what it was, what made the poster want to put it out there, and what was gratifying about the experience. And where it went from there: what was accomplished, and how/if the individual was changed by it.

Some people started posting photos of family events to FB to get them out to the event participants faster. It seemed to shorten the distance among family members, both in time and place. That really felt good. That I can understand.

But to me it seems something changed along the way, such that the event, the lived experience, became subordinated to the posting. A recent, tragic example: the “van life” being documented and posted for all the world to see, by those two pathetic, dysfunctional individuals, who ended up losing everything, while their “followers” looked on and multiplied. It’s feels like a new kind of sickness, really.

I don’t have any answers, especially for the music, podcast, and other content subscriptions we’ve all been seduced by. The services offer us extraordinary consumer convenience and choice. But convenience always has its costs, some of which turn out to be hidden and unexpected. And painful.

Expand full comment
Skyler Schain's avatar

Thanks for writing this. The cultural shift from active to passive engagement with music (or all art) is notable and unfortunate. There are obvious benefits of something like Spotify, which a tech-optimist would be quick to point out: the ability to discover more new things, the convenience. And we've seemingly made that collective choice. So then we have to ask ourselves whether the convenience principle outweighs the benefits Benjamin is talking about. And even if we think it doesn't, how can we ever go the opposite direction? Personal reckoning and lifestyle change? Or can we collectively somehow overcome the tidal force of convenience as the presumed "most important thing"?

Expand full comment
59 more comments...

No posts