Recent Thoughts On Media

"Media" is kind of a terrible term as it is so unspecific. But here's what I've noticed recently:

1. I Want To Own More Of The Media I Care About

For the moment this mostly consists of music - as I am neither a regular TV shows watcher nor big into movies - but I actually recently bought an external drive to let me rip DVDs/Blue Rays and plan to use it on my also recently bought DVDs/Blue Rays of the Gone Fishing program (which I adore and which is not available in other forms in my market).

In any case, I feel that music streaming services have killed my interest in music and I basically have stopped listening to music as background noise for working, reading, walking, whatever. I very often go for YouTube in the background (most recently described in my yearly review) or listen to Endel (a soundscape app), but I want to at least reintroduce music into my life, as I noticed in my experimentation with Jellyfin that listening to the albums I love is a nice change of pace when it comes to music listening.

2. Music Listening Observations

This - the fact that music streaming has killed my interest in music - is relatively surprising to me, because there was a time, where I really enjoyed the novelty streaming music services brought to my ears: I think it might be that I don't enjoy novelty in my music as much as I have gotten older, or it could just be a result of overexposure: Too much novelty drowned out the pleasure of relistening (and rediscovering) an old gem from an album I love, for example.

Another aspect of this is that I tend(ed?) to be a person listening to songs more than to albums. There were albums I listened to regularly, sure, but my main engagement with music was through playlists of individual tracks. The streaming service I am using - the terrible YouTube Music - makes playlist management extremely unpleasant. I don't know if it's on purpose or what, but it leads to "just put something on" behavior instead of my past MO of curating playlists for certain moods. With my own music library in Jellyfin on the other hand, I tend to prefer full album listens. I think that makes sense that I would buy the albums that I really like vs. the individual songs that I really like as that looks untidy and incomplete in my library and therefore fosters an album focused listening approach. However it has lead to me not creating many playlists so far as buying music just for the sake of it is prohibitively expensive. Even at ~1 € per track or ~10€ an album I can maybe afford to invest ~20€ per month.

I don't know yet what to do about this, as I am unwilling to invest into another streaming service just for better playlist management (Something from Europe or, sigh, Apple Music).^[1]

To me the whole thing is at least in part motivated by ethics, so I have reservations about using piracy to backfill my library.^[2]

3. Social Media Is Destroying My Sense Of Self

I like scrolling through social media from time to time. Seeing a meme, an interesting observation, a slice of life post, an interesting link to something I didn't know I was interested in is great low-barrier and low-stakes fun. Social media - for me that's mostly mastodon and blogs - at it's best is an alternate or addative world(-part), a different space in which people show off their talents, develop new ideas, share their experiences and let us glimpse into what environments they physically live in (which is fun because we are so far apart, but then connected at the same time, thanks to the internet). It's delightful, (mostly) peaceful, kind and creatively invigorating. At times it even manages to make me question my own beliefs and values in a good way.

The problem is that I do the scrolling too often and I see much more of the things I do not enjoy whatsoever: Namely pseudo-intellectual discourse, reification of society in social media. As if being angry/sarcastic/informed online is the same as taking part in society... I mean, maybe it is (to an extent) but it is less so than one could surmise by the way social media looks and feels online sometimes. Just generally being "overinformed" is another terrible trait: As terrible as ICE raids are in the US of A, it only marginally impacts me here. That doesn't mean that I condone any of this, but I literally can't do anything about it either. I do feel bad for all kinds of stuff.^[3] But that things are generally bad in the world is not the point of this section. It is related, yes. But the point I'm trying to make here is how I perceive the world through social media. In that sense it asks questions about the terms "world" and "self" and how media (or mediators, if spoken like a Latourian) present what we might think of as our self and the world we are living in.

On a basic level seeing murders and other crimes being committed by state's workers on video (or whatever the flavor of shocking/trauma inducing content people decide to share this week) really fucks up my sense of security. The ever increasing spiral of purity-based argumentation - my name for the idea that you either follow all the rules (of, for example, LLM (non)-use) and therefore behave ethically or you are the worst person on earth - fucks up my sense of justice, of good and bad, right or wrong.

More generally speaking: When talking about social media, we tend to prefer metaphors like bubbles to denote on the one hand a sense of a secured place that keeps certain things out - using filters, blocks, or muting (people, topics, tags) or on a less technical level through community policing - i.e. codes of conduct, moderation, etc. On the other hand bubbles are inherently delicate and what that means in practice is that they do not protect very well from the onslaught of awfulness or even just annoyances: things that I might not agree with in tone but are fine with in general or with slight modifications. It is in part a volume problem: Overindulging in social media and believing social media is more important than it is are two sides of the same coin. When social media becomes more than a way to add to your actual life, i.e. when your sense of self is mostly felt when engaging online, then I think things are out of whack. And I think that somehow happened to me, somewhat.

Now, if you'd look through my social media posts, this acute feeling is not obviously reflected in my posts, per se. Maybe sometimes, like in the way where a post resonates with me, but instead of writing about it in a blog post or my own thread, I become an accidental reply guy. But also in the way I could respond to certain posts, how I chose to read and interpret them, how my mind reacts emotionally to them. I find this state of mind where I only use the "fast thinking system" to make snap judgements about people, their thoughts, their struggles and so on to be a more primitive form of being. Being too long on social media turns me into a goblin to the point where I could start to believe that I am actually a goblin as well. Being too online also makes me lose my voice and makes it hard for me to steer my life. As corny as it may sound, it make it harder to listen to my heart this way.

Social media is somewhat important to me because I don't have a lot of friends and thrive being by myself. I feel like I'm "full up" with family and work interactions alone. I don't crave much contact beyond that. Maybe once in a while I actually do want to say something nice/snarky/insightful/whatever to someone else. Social media has been a great outlet for that.

As with most things, I don't have all the answers, but I do know that there are ways in which I can relate to social media that is more wholesome than what I do now. I think on the "publishing" side going (mostly) through the blog is a good idea, slowing down and recontextualizing my impetus to just be the reply goblin, turning it into energy to produce my own thoughts. And on the consuming side, I think the answer is simply "do less". I don't think that the people I follow are bad follows at all, but I have to limit the influence the medium has itself over me and my sense of me.

4. I Want To Start Reading Again

Reading is important. And I want to do it more. The story of "I was reading a lot throughout all my life, but somehow lost the interest to do so..." is an all too familiar tale. With the state of the world such as it is, I feel like that I am not reading is in part also the result of wanting to books to do more than entertain. I found this YouTube video - although meandering - made an interesting point in this regard. I am paraphrasing here, but they basically said: All people, but especially men in particular read less, because the feel like they need to be productive. Reading for fun feels bad. When it comes to novels in particular this quote was very good, I thought:

Jake: I don't think young men especially want to have a good time. They want to die in a war, you know? Or maybe I'm speaking generally, but I think that there's not a lot of social value from reading a book unless it is like, um, you're conquering something like, uh, we were just talking about guys who haven't touched a book since high school wanting to read Ulysses or Moby Dick or something because it is or Blood Meridian now. That's the trend.

Jared: I kind of want to tell a guy who really liked Red Dead Redemption 2 that if you liked that, like maybe, you know, reading a western novel would be the kind of thing that you're into. But I don't know, it just doesn't even come up in their minds.

Jake: But you tell them, "Hey, you should read a western and they go, what is the best western? What is the hardest western? What is the most brutal western?" And they say, "I'm going to Read Blood Meridian."

And although I tend to prefer non-fiction over fiction I totally get it and can see myself at least partly in it. I also get and see now everywhere I look this tendency and need to feel productive even in the things that are supposed to be just for me. Like in the way the productivity person Cal Newport argues for why reading is important in this video:

Why bother reading so many books? Well, I am convinced that if you do intellectual work, so if one of the primary ways you make money is by creating value with your Brain alchemizing dollars out of the stuff of thoughts. Reading is critical to you. Why? Because reading is to your brain what exercise is to your body.

To work with books means you're grappling with complex ideas, trying to make connections between different types of theories or ways of seeing the world. It helps your ability to empathetically put yourself into other people's shoes and understand life through other people's eyes. All of this is critical; it's calisthenics for the gray matter up here. It is a huge competitive advantage. If you work in knowledge work, you need to work out your brain. Reading is one of the best workouts that we know about.

I mean, I find it to be the degree to which we obsess so much about physical health, and we get into minutia about different exercise routines or supplements, or exactly how you eat. And yet, we barely think at all about how to keep our brain operating at its full capacity, even though for most of us. We depend way more for our livelihood on our brain than we do these days on our body. So, I care about getting the most out of our brain. Reading is a fantastic way to do this. All right, five books a month, five ways to help you get there.[...]

And as motivating as ideas on how to read more can be, I feel they ultimately miss the point that reading can also just be a part of your life and doesn't need to be (thought of as) an end to other means.

So yeah, I'd like to read again. Most of my book consumption has been through audio books the last few years and a kind of large amount of the books I consumed was ultimately about being more productive. I think that reading more is about changing my approach to how I chose to spend my time and to spend it more in tune with my authentic (non-goblin) self.

5. Towards A Personal Media Landscape That I Like

Finally all of these thoughts have started to coagulate into a somewhat new approach towards media. I want to be more mindful and spend my time more with my nose in books. I want to spend less time scrolling social media (without abandoning it completely). I want to continue my expedition into music. And I want to own more of the media I like.

All in all, I think I want less algorithms in my life, less dependencies on platforms and more low-tech (like I am investing in a new eReader, because the one I have - the Kindle Scribe - is just so god- damn heavy). Less fast food thoughts and less swimming along the sewage pipe that is a life in late-stage-capitalism. I realize that being able to even attempt to rework my life in this way drips of privilege in some ways, but I think that being able to do something like this and (maybe) document my thoughts around this topic could still be valuable.

Do I wonder if what I attempt to do here is futile in the sense that society won't change and reorganizing my media landscape is mostly an excentric hobby? Yeah. But even it isn't something that could become the norm: Because owning (most) of your media is too expensive, because the grip of social media on us - even the neutral-good kind like Mastodon - is so strong, because listening to music understood as albums seems to be antiquated. I hope that thinking through alternatives and trying to build a life on these ideas and practices still could mean something.

Finally, why do I even care about the aspect of "can it scale" in this particular instance? I don't necessarily think about that when describing my programming or when I talk about theory in general? I think the reason is that observing the "normal" life but living "differently" can quickly lead to the "holier than though" attitude that I so despise. But anyways, this meandering blog post has become quite long and it is neither the best, nor my last word on any of these topics. But it's a starting point.

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