The Painful March of Progress

You could say I’m in transition between my former and current analogue life and my current and future digital life in terms of reading books and listening to music. Although I enjoy a lot of the conveniences of digitized literature and music, the transition has been a pain in the ass in many ways, and it remains to be seen how long that will last.

Moving from reading physical copies to screens has coincided with moving between and within three states in the last 20 years. While I’ve successfully limited my hoarding to four categories—literature, music, rocks, and brewing equipment—each collection has followed me every step of the way and represents untold hours of moving, storing, and sweating. And now, after a recent house remodel, the only collection that’s currently on display and useable is my rock collection, and that’s up at my parents’ place in Heber. In the meantime, digitization has filled some of the gaps in very practical ways.

My office space is still in shambles, and my prized books are still in cardboard boxes waiting for me to build or buy bookshelves. So my Kindle library has been growing a lot faster than my physical library, which is a net positive. Reading books on my Kindle took some getting used to, but I really love it now, in some ways, at least. It’s fantastic to be able to reach over to my bed stand and pick up my library. I can even read in the dark so I don’t wake up my wife. Tapping on a word to see its definition or jumping onto Wikipedia to explore further context has made reading a lot more convenient. And I can still have my coffee while reading the morning paper online. What is missing in my Kindle is the tactile sensation of turning and flipping through the pages, and knowing where I am in the text and remembering where a passage lies, recto- and verso-wise. 

Similarly, there are advantages and disadvantages to digitized music. I stream radio stations from all around the country while I’m working, which is very cool, and I’ve stored most of my CDs in iTunes. Spotify exposes me to music I’ve never heard, or haven’t heard in years. We have iThing docks and Wi-fi speakers in all the strategic locations in the house, and they’re handy (when they don’t lose the signal), but they still don’t sound much like my 3-way, 15-inch-woofer JBLs, which are still in storage with my 100-watt analogue amp, receiver, dubbing deck, CD player, turntable, and long-play stereophonic vinyl albums (haven’t found the perfect place to set all those up yet, for the first time since I was a teenager--sigh). 

All told, having grown up paging through books and grooving to concept albums, I haven’t yet found the degree of “continuousness” (Manovich 28, 112) in digitized media platforms that I enjoyed in analogue. I know it’s probably just a matter of getting used to the newer formats, but there are still things I miss from the old.