I wanted to expand on yesterday's post with a reflection on how I listen to music. With a hefty dose of nostalgia thrown in.

My first personal listening device was a Sony Walkman. And it was perfect. I got my hands on the cassette of Amy Grant's ‘The Collection’ and had my first notable experience with a pop song. But getting tapes wasn't easy. Any allowance I had was spent on candy and RC Cola that I biked into town to buy so I was mostly limited to whatever tapes my parents had. Thankfully they both liked music so there was a fair amount to choose from at home; but I wanted to figure out what I liked.

So I learned how to make mixtapes. This involved waiting for songs on the radio and hitting the play/record buttons at the same time and just accepting that you would forever listen to this song with the missing first couple seconds or a DJ's comments overlaying the intro. Daily countdowns were a great way to grab a specific song you wanted (Mix 99.9's top 9 at 9). It often sounded like garbage but this was my music, self-selected and personal.

In junior high I got a Discman and this began a whole new journey in my music experience: collecting cds. For a while this involved jumping on my friend's Columbia House subscription and ordering cds. I was so envious of anyone with a Columbia House subscription. Imagine getting new cds just mailed to your house every month. This enabled me to buy the album of some of the bands I was listening to on the radio. I started discovering new rock (as distinct from my parents' old rock). Bands like Everclear, Eve 6, and of course, Green Day were early purchases and filled my headphones. This also very much represented me listening to music that I didn't want my parents to know I was listening to so I remember hiding cd sleeves where they couldn't find them.

The first cd I ever purchased from an actual, physical music store was MxPx - Life in General. I was with my family at a mall and I left them to go into the store myself and came back with it. It was also a declaration: this is what I'm into and I'm okay if you don't like it (they didn't). From here there was no stopping, I began collecting cds with a new intensity. Saving up money however I could and going and picking out cds from HMV. My collection grew and evolved as I grew and evolved. I'd buy cds sometimes because they looked cool; it was a gamble and it cost me money and sometimes it didn't pay off. But sometimes it did. I also started picking up music magazines to try and discover new bands. My tastes were all over the place. In my late teens I even got into that old rock my parents were into because we listened to Q107 at work.

At some point in my teenage years two pieces of technology changed everything: the iPod and Napster. My hunting for music shifted from magazines and stores to the computer. Music blogs became my source for recommendations and then I would track those songs down and fill my iPod with them. There was nothing between me and the endless consumption of new music (other than copyright laws and the shutting down of piracy sites). But there was very little friction. I could hear about a band, download that band, and listen to that band. Then move on to the next band. And there was no shortage of new music to discover. During this time, new bands were popping up constantly and it honestly got hard keeping up with them all. You'd have a current obsession but easily forget what you listened to last week. This wasn't inherently a bad thing, but it fundamentally changed how we would experience music.

I want to note two things here: 1) my relationship with music began to change at the same time society's relationship to media began to change; and 2) I was well past childhood or adolescent development when these shifts took place. I think this matters.

I'd also like to acknowledge that I think the iPod was a really great example of technology moving us in the right direction. It solved a legitimate problem: how to carry around a larger collection of music. But with that move came new problems. When the metric become convenience, we started to embrace other conveniences as well. Like, what if it could do more than just play music? [As an aside, the other issue I have with the iPod was the way it walked us into the normalization of walled gardens in how we experience media. I wrote about that a bit here.]

In my late 20s I started collecting vinyl. It was a return to how I used to experience music. Something less instant and more tangible. I think that's what the vinyl resurgence was all about. We can argue that there's something purer about vinyl or it sounding better or whatever; but really it was mostly people like me remembering what they loved about listening to music before the internet took it from us. I still collect vinyl for this reason. The friction is part of the experience. As the meme goes, "the two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience."

All of this leads me to what I said yesterday about buying my kids dedicated music players and getting them off of Apple Music. I'm trying to find a way to give them the ingredients necessary to nurture a relationship with music during their formative years. It involves creating the right amount of friction to slow them down just enough to appreciate the music they're choosing to listen to right now.

I know our kids live in a different world than we grew up in. It would be ridiculous to insist that they experience everything the exact same way that we did. But I want to believe there's a healthy middle ground. One that doesn't just give in and hand our kids a smartphone because it's the easiest option. I believe friction is a good thing; and just maybe it’s better for kids to not instantly have access to whatever they want without a little bit of work and patience.

Lately I've been interested in single use devices that do what they're meant to do without adding in distractions and extras. This is something I've previously pursued in my digital tools but haven't always been as intentional with physical devices.

This pursuit has primarily been inspired by parenting kids who are at the age where they both want (and in some cases need) technology. The almost daily request of can I have a phone and everyone else in my class has one has put me in a position of needing to come up with a good answer for why I don't plan on giving them one anytime soon—if ever. It's also left me wondering if maybe giving them my old phone (stripped of most of its functions) was a step in the wrong direction.

Let me try and unpack my thinking:

I had repurposed my old iPhone in order to give my kids a way to a) listen to music/podcasts and b) take pictures. For the last couple years this has worked just fine. But over the last few months I began to notice a couple things that had me second guessing this.

1) They were scrolling. Despite having no access to anything to really scroll through, they were still just lying there, looking at the phone and flipping through pictures they had taken. They weren't doing anything creative with those images, just looking at them. And they had the same slumped over posture and vacant expression that we all do when sucked into a mindless feed.

2) They had been conditioned to streaming. Here's a question: do we think it's a good idea to give kids access to anything they want whenever they want it? I feel like if we were to apply that generally to most things the answer would be no. Yet, when it comes to entertainment this is now the new normal. And I guess from a childhood-development perspective I'm wondering what that will do to how they interact with the world. Also, what is this doing to their relationship with the things they enjoy? More on this in a future post I think.

Anyways, in response to this I've started a difficult backtracking in our home, putting some new boundaries on things as well as taking away what had previously been given. I took back the old phone and have sort of-mostly-not quite-but almost cut them off from Apple Music. Not an easy thing, but as Katherine Martinko says, "you can say no."

However, I also believe in saying yes at the same time. So I did some research and bought both kids a DAP (digital audio player). Like the iPods or mp3 players we used to have, it's designed to do one thing and one thing only: play music. They weren't initially happy with this switch. It's less convenient (we have to put music on it). It's not as intuitive (physical buttons rather than a touchscreen). And it doesn't do anything else. But, I notice it's now the first thing they grab when we're going somewhere in the car.

Small win? Sure, why not.

"We need to remind ourselves that there was once a time when genetic technology did not determine the beginning—and nuclear technology the end—of life. People had a different relationship with pain and with themselves. They had fashioned a language which shared and made sense of pain." (Soelle, Against the Wind)

What do we lose if we lose our pain? This is a question that Soelle reflects on and positions it specifically in the history of the pains of birth. She reflects on the way that the technical world views pain as "an avoidable hazard," something that can be overcome or denied. For Soelle, this is a betrayal of what makes us human.

"We are neither machines nor beings domesticated to run the treadmill of consumerism. We are capable of suffering because we are capable of love. Activities like loving, suffering, giving birth, and dying are already a form of resistance against the imperatives of the economy under which we live." (Soelle)

What do we lose if we lose our pain? Our capacity to love, to hope, to fight for a better world? Perhaps.

Back into reading Soelle's memoir after a month off. I took a family trip and that involved some travel anxieties leading up to it and then recovering from some illness after it. Regardless, this sort of reading took a bit of a pause.

This morning I was reading Soelle's reflection on her feminism and really enjoyed this part:

"Perhaps my image of a happy life is less individualistic than that of many young women. I think that we need a certain kind of dependence in order to live, but not total emotional and economic dependence, the inability to organize our lives ourselves. There is a dependence that grows inside freedom: I could live by myself, but I want to life with you, enter into mutuality. The concept of dependence is often devalued in the woman’s movement; in whatever case, it is seen as deadly, as destructive of human beings. I find this wrong; I believe that mutual dependence is part of being human. Concretely, it means that I am sexually, spiritually, and emotionally dependent on others. I need conversation, challenge, critique, affection, understanding, and help in managing everyday life. I want to share my experiences with someone; I wish to give and to receive comfort."

One of the values of our age is the supremacy of the individual. This is a path we have been on for a long while now and you can feel its consequences in every area of society. Something I am particularly interested in is the way technology† has propelled this value to new extremes. Each new era brings with it technical advancements that further prioritizes the autonomy of the individual and weakens our communal bonds.

Today, the digital has ripped apart the previous era's clean separation of both the private and public realms. Each has crossed into the other in ways that we have yet to fully grapple with. The private has become commodified and made public for mass consumption while the public realm has become a space primarily dedicated to the protection of private interest.

I think what I like about what Soelle is writing here is that it represents a value that cuts against this entire trajectory that we have all just accepted. It feels somewhat jarring to advocate for mutual dependence in a time when all those things she mentions—one's sexual, spiritual, and emotional life—have been wholly defined by individual desire. The radical statement, to suggest that human beings need one another, is the antithesis of the technological pursuit.

But it is a pursuit that seeks to make us less human and more machine.

† I mean technology here in a broad sort of sense as we think about the trajectory of human 'progress.' It is an application of thinking that prioritizes efficiency or innovation over all else. We can apply this to things like automobiles, the replacement of porches with backyards, and of course the digital sphere.

“Theological reflection without political consequences was tantamount to blasphemy… Every theological statement has to be at the same time a political one.” (Soelle, Against the Wind)

All theology is, by its very nature, contextual. By that I mean it emerges out of a particular time and place by real people responding to the challenges and questions that matter to them and their communities. This is what makes it political. It's theology that matters.

Soelle is working in a very particular time, the aftermath of WWII in Germany. She develops much of her theological awareness during a period when the church seemed at its weakest, having aligned itself with fascism—and all its brutality. If theological reflection at its core might be considered our attempts to 'follow the tracks' of whatever we might think of God at work in our world, Soelle joined the Liberation theologians in identifying God as on the side of the poor and oppressed. What makes this a political statement is that it has tangible implications for the rest of us. As Soelle reflected,

"What I suffer from, and what I need and seek forgiveness for, are all the disastrous things that we, as a society, inflict today on the poorest of the poor and on our mother, the earth."

Good theology—real theology—changes us. Not just how we think, or what we believe, but in how we live in the world and what we do in it. If it doesn't, Soelle would say it doesn't matter, and that's what makes it blasphemous. What good is a theology that has no consequences?