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.

I got thinking today about garbage trucks. More specifically, I got thinking about the workers on those garbage trucks. Even more specifically, I got thinking about how it seems there are less workers on garbage trucks these days than there used to be.

For most of my life, a garbage truck had two workers on it. Someone who drove and someone who would jump off and empty the bins into the truck. My town, like many others, has adopted the trucks with the big mechanical claw on the side of it that lifts the garbage can from the curb and dumps its contents into the truck. It now only takes one worker to both drive and operate the claw.

It reminds me of grocery stores. When I was a kid, every cash register had two workers: a cashier and someone to bag the groceries. I remember when they got rid of the bagger job, all of a sudden you were expected to bag your own (or the cashier might do it for you). Today, in many grocery stores, a single worker can oversee a dozen different self-checkouts.

My grandfather worked his whole life in a GM plant. The threat of automation to jobs is nothing new. I think what is important to keep in mind is that it's not often an abrupt replacement. It's usually many small, different changes—often presented as opportunity for efficiency or skill learning—each one making human work slightly more redundant. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt pondered what happens to a society of labourers that becomes "liberated" from the bonds of labour when labour is all this society knows. Of that, she wrote, "surely nothing could be worse."

"When social media users do encounter misinformation, they largely follow accounts with whom they are likely to agree and consume outlets that reflect their perspectives. As a result, digital misinformation generally preaches to the choir, potentially making attitudes or behaviors more extreme but not acting as vectors of mass influence or persuasion. If anything, the causal arrows may face in the opposite directions: beliefs may explain digital misinformation consumption more than the other way around." (Source)

Connected to yesterday's post on one-sided conversations. This is an interesting article exploring the overall failure in how we've handled misinformation. Basically we understand what misinformation is, how it spreads, and who is most susceptible; but attempts to fact check it have been futile. The article suggests that this is due to a failure to fully and properly understand the role of this sort of communication. Rather than thinking of this as a problem between true and false, we need to be understanding how communication more broadly impacts identity, trust, and polarization.

It's a good article that touches on several things I've been thinking about lately, including what the role of helpful communication needs to be moving forward. Check it out.

“The last thing we need is blind optimism about technology. History is rife with innovations that failed to being shared prosperity… Nothing says that tech progress will automatically benefit everyone... That depends on the choices we make as a society, and those choices have moral aspects we can’t sidestep.”

Bregman talks about the need for a cyclical relationship between tech/science and activism. He notes that science has saved more lives than all the most famous activists combined. Yet, activism is still needed to give tech a moral centre.

AI is a perfect example of this.

Are there real, life saving opportunities with AI? Of course. Everything from medical scans to climate change mitigation can be possible with well deployed AI. But we also cannot ignore the ethical arguments against AI. The energy and water use, the loss of jobs, and the cognitive decline associated with it are all legitimate concerns that need to be taken seriously. And, let's be honest, not every company investing in AI is making the world a better place. Most are seeing it as a way to increase profits.

So yes, advancement in technology is necessary; but without moral guidance we can do more harm than good.