shuffle culture

i'm thinking there is a tectonic shift in people's emotional relationship with music and other cultural content, which proceeds from our different technological relationship with it. I'm calling it the rise of 'shuffle culture' until I think of something better.

speaking very broadly, the 'old world' of media and content, in which a few companies tightly controlled the distribution of the stuff we like, encouraged very intense relationships with certain genres, certain artefacts, mainly because there were fewer of them and we had more time to get to know them. So you were a Mod or a Rocker or a Goth - each of those 'worlds' had its own set of behavorial norms, cultural codes, and so on. Or -your favourite band was Led Zeppelin and you'd listen to their new album over and over, getting lost in it, worrying over every chord change, deciphering every lyric.

the new world - in which choice is infinite and content is far more freely distributed and disaggregated, and easier for consumers to get and discard and manipulate - encourages a pick and mix, skimming and shuffling relationship with it all. And arguably a thinner emotional experience.

this is clearest in music. I know from my own experience that I rarely become immersed in an album or genre any more, but instead download hundreds of individual tracks from different artists and genres, enjoying them for three minutes at at a time, rarely going deeper. A friend of mine with a thirteen year old son described the other day how ruthlessly efficient his son is at picking the tracks he wants from a new album and discarding the others. The idea that he'd take time to get to know an album, sink into it or let it sink into him, is alien. He's on to the next thing.

Of course there are still people who become obsessive about certain bands or artefacts, but there's far fewer of them. For most of us, an increase in choice has meant a decrease in the emotional intensity of our relationships with content. Thoughts prompted in part by this interview with the brilliant music critic simon reynolds:

the landscape is completely transformed by all these massive changes in retail, distribution, media...I put the references to Top of the Pops and Radio One in the introduction to indicate that my particular expectations of pop are very much the product of an era, a particular apparatus that created certain kinds of intensity. A new landscape is emerging that is doubtless generating new ways of experiencing and discovering music, new forms of collectivity around music, yet it’s hard for me to see the changes as anything other than dis-intensifying. The web has extinguished the idea of a true underground. It’s too easy for anybody to find out anything now, especially as scene custodians tend to be curatorial, archivist types. And with all the mp3 and whole album blogs, it’s totally easy to hear anything you want to hear, in this risk-less, desultory way that has no cost, either financially or emotionally. I sense that there’s a lot more skimming and stockpiling, an obsessive-compulsion to hear everything and hoard as much music as you can, but much less actual obsession...