Why I Prefer CDs

As I look across the room, this is what I see:

This is part of one shelf of my CDs. I don't actually feel I "have" a recording of a piece of music unless I have the CD. Like previous physical manifestations, the wax cylinder, 78s, vinyl LPs and, shudder, cassette tapes, it represents the durability of recorded sound. A year or ten years from now they will still be there. Streaming music, which is fast replacing the CD, has enormous advantages, of course. With it you have access to nearly everything. But at the same time, it also has something of the ephemeral nature of musical performance: here now, gone tomorrow. Your preferred streaming service might go out of business or be bought up by another company, might change its policies, might raise its rates, or might for whatever reason cancel your favorite recordings. YouTube is an incredible resource, but I don't feel at all secure that whatever is there today will be there tomorrow, let alone ten years from now.

This observation is part of a more general thought: the private space that we each have is being diminished and hemmed in by an ever-more pervasive public or collective space. This is, of course, a consequence of the growth of the internet and social media. What seemed at first to be an unalloyed good might have its drawbacks.

A few years ago I decided that I wanted to "de-digitize" parts of my life. I was spending too much time online reading ephemera. So I started reading actual books, not Kindle books, every morning. Even more recently, with non-fiction, I have taken up the practice of making pencil notes in every book I read. What am I reading instead of blogs and mass media? The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, the King James Bible (so far, just Genesis), Tehillim (the Hebrew Psalms, but in translation), 20th Century French Poetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and so on.

Other ways of de-digitizing: I took up sketching, though that didn't last too long, and journaling, which has, also I now compose with pencil on paper instead of with music software. I have also returned to writing poetry after having let it drop for a few decades.

One result has been to spark the realization that being immersed in the social and mass media space tends to enervate one, leaving you tired and cynical. It also seems that there are some more critical trends, such as that towards what has been called "networked tribalism."

Networked tribalism has rapidly emerged to wage moral warfare in opposition to Israel. We have seen it drive rapid shifts in consequential public perception in the recent past, at both domestic and international levels, in situations ranging from anti-racism (Black Lives Matter) to anti-Russia/Putin/fascism (Ukraine). Tribal moral warfare bypasses traditional media by directly delivering information and moral framing to people using social networks. It has proved highly effective at persuading—and coercing—traditional media companies into alignment with its preferred moral frames.

Networked tribalism is a new phenomenon, derived from changes (including changes to our neural wiring that we struggle to understand) in how we process information and connect with others online.

If this is replacing traditional epistemology, then we have a rocky road ahead of us...