Digital media and a changing materialism

A couple of years ago I was a collector. Or maybe a little more than that. I collected a lot of things. A large part of my identity revolved around the acquisition and accumulation of books. I also collected CDs, DVDs, comics and other cultural ephemera. I kept movie tickets, clippings of articles, flyers, interesting things I picked up. I couldn’t bear to throw these out because I thought that there might come a time when I might need something —like, say, my readings in Sociology 101 from the year 2000. Who knew when I would have to define the sociological imagination? Or when I would need to define the political dynamics and do a comparative analysis of the authoritarian leadership styles of Lee Kuan Yew and Saddam Hussein based on my studies of Politics and Change in the Third World in 2001? Oh and there were empty liquor bottles signed by friends from the early Noughties wishing me a happy nineteenth or twentieth birthday, and lord knows a situation might arise when I might need those too. My little condo, which grew exceedingly smaller as I surrounded myself with these acquisitions, could not hold all my stuff. I had to throw my clothes out. I had to start sleeping next to my books. I had to start storing my books in other people’s houses. And that’s when it happened, the thing that would change my whole perspective on collecting and accumulating things. The Great Flood (of information) After I moved out of my faculty office, I left all of the books that I used for teaching, as well as a lot of other books, DVDs, CDs, and other things with someone who sadly fell victim to the Ondoy tragedy. I have to count myself lucky that nothing happened to my family or me, and I was generally spared from an event that took so much from so many people. Heck, all it took from me was half my library. Still, that loss led to a renewed sense of the temporariness of things, of the transient nature of the things that I was spending money on. Having lost half my library, I started out devastated. I had spent so many years and so much money collecting all of those books only to lose them. And yet, I found myself wondering: how many of those books did I still need? I had stopped teaching —at the time anyway— so what did I need the manuals for English 1 for? And with things being what they are, new knowledge arising every day, new content being produced, those old materials would have been cycled out of my syllabus after a year or two anyway. And so I started going through the rest of my books. Falling out of analog: Going digital I got myself an e-book reader and I downloaded copies of my favorite books, ready to be loaded up from a hard drive or a cloud drive whenever I want to read them again (Full disclosure: I kept a lot of my old books and I have a lot of books loaded up on my Kindle, but I rarely reread books because there are so many I haven’t read yet, but I still keep those copies with the faint optimism of one who will one day have the time to return to them) or just in case I would need to reference them or quote them. And the rest of my books? I gave them away. Or most of them anyway. I’ve still got some that are in a box, waiting for takers. After getting rid of those books, I got to work on my CDs. It took time, but I converted almost all of my music into digital formats. Sure there are people who will argue for the importance of liner notes and album art. And for a long time those things were a large part of the music buying and listening experience. But you can read those liner notes only so many times. And it’s not like I would need all of the liner notes and original packaging of all the CDs that I had bought. Sure I’ve still got some special box sets hidden away at home, collectors’ items and favorite CDs. But on the whole, and with the near 500 gigabytes worth of music that the collection turned to in digital format, the physical manifestations of packaging were far from essential. Then I moved on to my DVD collection, using Handbrake and other means to acquire digital versions of the films that I loved. And so I pretty much threw out all of the physical manifestations of the content that I consume, in favor of hard drives. How does this change things? Now when I want to find something from a book, I don’t go through the bookshelf or the closet, find the copy of the book, and then thumb through it trying to find that specific passage. Now I flick my Kindle awake, input the key phrase in the search bar, and find the thing I’m looking for, that whole process quicker than the time it would take me to stand up and walk to the bookshelf. Movies? Rather than going through the DVD collection, popping the disc into the player, and other processes, I’ve got hard drives hooked up to my PS3, and all I do is turn on the PS3 and flick through the menu to find what movie I want to watch. Ditto music. And it’s even easier to listen to different albums on a whim just because of the easy access that digital media affords. What it means to love things to bits Space, convenience, and accessibility. These are the advantages I see in digital, in the favoring of bits over atoms. I know and I understand that there’s a lack of sentimentality if not a kind of coldness when one eschews the physical trappings of things. But this doesn’t mean that the meanings, emotions, and power of the text, nor the feelings and memories that we associate with these things disappear or are necessarily diminished. A lot of it remains, and some of it is displaced and put up elsewhere in another format. Where you might have written a note on the margin of the book you now highlight the text in your Kindle and post it to your twitter feed. Where you might have taped a song and put it on a mixtape for someone, you now post a link of it on their Facebook wall. What does this mean for content? Hopefully a ubiquitousness of it. At present there are still region restrictions on books, music and films. This measure is supposedly to deter and control piracy. What escapes those implementing this region-blocking is that rather than prevent piracy, it actually promotes it. If we want to read a book, listen to an album, or watch a movie or TV show, make it easy for us to get it. We’ll pay. But make it hard to get it through legal means, or make it easier (or only possible ) to acquire it through extra-legal means and you drive people to piracy. With the transitioning of entertainment media from atoms to bits, limitations of stock disappear. We don’t have to go to another branch in another mall when one place is sold out. At best we log onto our accounts and start watching things on our preferred devices, be they tablets, phones, desktops, laptops, or home entertainment systems. So too, without the need to go through manufacturing, packaging, delivery, distribution, and retail, the costs to acquire our entertainment media should drop. When all we’re essentially paying for is the server space, processing fees, and the content itself, then hopefully subscription services similar to Hulu and Netflix will become available to us, making our viewing selections that much greater. The same goes for our books and music. If the content comes in digital form, containers cease to matter so much (except probably for books, as I do hope that authors will innovate and make texts that take into account the properties of the page), and costs drop, then we will be consuming most of our content digitally, through digital downloads and on complementary devices. We ain't through with Analog yet! Does this mean the death knell for analog? I don’t think so. I think that the common user, and people who take their culture in a disposable manner, will prefer digital. They will consume the media and then get rid of it. That’s how it is. If you make content that isn’t meant to last (say a quickie romance novel, a Hollywood blockbuster, or a catchy yet meaningless pop song) then expect it to be consumed and then erased from someone’s ipad/kindle/music player/smartphone once they are done with it. There’s only so much digital space one can allot for that kind of disposable content. However, collectors and content that is rewarding through multiple sittings will find a way to be relevant in analog. Notice the resurgence of vinyl as a format. After having been “killed" by newer, more compact formats, vinyl’s superior sound and its collector-factor are making a resurgence. If you’re a serious music collector, these days you are collecting vinyl. It’s part technological acknowledgement of benefits of the analog product, and part cool factor or credibility; as if to say to be a real music lover or music collector, you should have that phonograph and vinyl collection. This appreciation of the analog and the acknowledgment of analog formats as markers of commitment, sophistication, and cool will surface soon enough, depending on which form we are dealing with. We’re seeing it now with music (box sets, collector’s editions, physical manifestations of the music and support for the artists like tour merchandise) and soon enough I think with books. We will see that carrying a book around will be like a kind of badge or symbol to your commitment to books. Beyond mere badges of cool though, analog will still have clear advantages beyond the loss that occurs when transferring to digital. As tech editor TJ Dimacali explains, no matter how cumbersome it is to deal with analog, it’s still easier to “decode" those than digital formats. To illustrate, we can play a vinyl record by using a hairpin and a paper cup, while in digital formats we will always need electronic equipment. This isn’t a major concern for us at the moment because of the ubiquitousness of techonology and the availability of power. But this is a serious concern for scientists. What will happen to all that digital information in the event of a nuclear holocaust? Or what if a solar flare breaks through the atmosphere and fries all digital equipment? Contrary to popular belief, the Internet —and most digital tech— won't likely survive WW3. The impermanence of things and digital dreams That's why all the information that we've sent into outerspace —the plaque that we left on the Moon and the Voyager satellite’s Golden Record — use analog technology, because it would be easier for possible aliens to decode. Historians are also concerned about our over-use of digital technology, because recording standards are always changing and digital storage isn't as permanent as analog tech. CDs, for example, have a maximum life of about 10 years. And even if the digital media did survive, we'd still need to be concerned about making sure that future generations have the means to decode them. Think of the problems we have now with the kinds of file formats we use, the pickiness of certain formats, DRM constraints, and other issues that attempt to hinder our ability to access files. Which is really to say that despit all of the glorious things that digital allow us, we still cannot escape the need for analog. This also means that in the future, as digital takes care of our entertainment needs, other things, the non-digital aspects of our lives, will be given more attention and thus value. For example, I believe clothing will become more relevant to those who did not practice fashion much before. With the proliferation of media allowing costs of content to go down, and the cultural exposure afforded to the viewers/readers/listeners, a higher standard of dressing will emerge, and the analog thing, the clothing, will find much more value than it did for most people in the last few decades. All of this is to say, really, that what we can hold physically, in the real world, will have more and more relevance and value as we take the majority of the aspects of our life and world into the digital realm. I dream of having a paperless office, and yet I find that there are times when nothing will do but a notebook and some rough sketches. I wholeheartedly embrace the march of new technology, but I am left wondering how we will value the things we can buy and the things that we can hold. Will possessions in the real world lose value as people shift to digital media and the benefits of it? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I believe that the value of commodities is based on scarcity. And so even if all of those movies/songs/books/TV shows are so cheap and accessible, we will still wind up looking for real world equivalents through which we can express our love and support of these various media. And it’s there that analog will have its resurgence and flourish. — TJD, GMA News Carljoe Javier has been called a geek maven, and is at the forefront of digital publishing in the Philippines. His short story collection, was the first book to have simultaneous digital and print releases. His latest book, The Pop Criticultural Infindibulator, a collection of essays on pop culture is available online as a free digital book.