CHANGSTAR: Audiophile Headphone Reviews and Early 90s Style BBS
Non-Audio Stuff => Random Thoughts => Topic started by: SeaBupter on August 08, 2015, 09:07:39 PM
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Your NOS tube order has finally arrived! You joyously unpack the precious new music bottles, only to drop them on the floor. They break, releasing the genie who has been imprisoned there since the 1940s.
As a reward, he grants you one very specialized wish: you may choose one technology that you feel should never have been invented, and it will vanish from the universe, erased from history as though it had never been.
What technology would you choose? The words, "Leaf Blower" would burst spontaneously from my lips.
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I nominate A.I. applications that track and monitor my actions without permission à la Siri or Cortana.
I already have no tolerance for the text prediction application(s) for text messaging so I turned that off as a soon as I witnessed it.
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Social media for sure. A few tech trends that need to die are selfies and people who hold up iPads at a concert.
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Automated speed enforcement cameras. Pure cash grab, nothing to do with safety.
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Social media for sure. A few tech trends that need to die are selfies and people who hold up iPads at a concert.
A bit suprised you didn'y say TRS jack
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It's right up there!
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I actually wish cellphone and email has never been invented.
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Automated speed enforcement cameras. Pure cash grab, nothing to do with safety.
In my city, they started putting out more cruiser speed traps because the cameras weren't generating enough income to pay for themselves.
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Digital audio workstations, Pro Tools, etc. Modern recording sucks, and modern records suck as a result.
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Dave, is it the tool that sucks, or is it that it brings recording within the reach of those who don't know what they are doing?
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They are not mutually exclusive.
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Personally, I have a grudge against the camera because of what it did to portraiture. But socially, the problematic invention was television--video broadly--insofar as it supplanted family and community. #NRx
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Personally, I have a grudge against the camera because of what it did to portraiture. But socially, the problematic invention was television--video broadly--insofar as it supplanted family and community. #NRx
Learn photography with film. No pixels to save you. You learn real skills the hard way.
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Social media in general and Facialbook in particular.
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SMS messaging. Not because I'm inherently opposed to the medium/technology, but because all of my older relatives treat it as though it had a different temporal register than social media messages and emails. As a result, family texts - especially with my in-laws - combine all of the problems inherent in written rhetoric with all of the impatience and expected immediacy of a phone call.
[2:59 PM] "How is your drive going?"
[3:02 PM] "Austin? How's your drive coming along?"
[3:12 PM] "R u home yet?"
[3:14 PM] "Austin?"
[3:16 PM] "Hellooooooooooooo"
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SMS messaging. Not because I'm inherently opposed to the medium/technology, but because all of my older relatives treat it as though it had a different temporal register than social media messages and emails. As a result, family texts - especially with my in-laws - combine all of the problems inherent in written rhetoric with all of the impatience and expected immediacy of a phone call.
[2:59 PM] "How is your drive going?"
[3:02 PM] "Austin? How's your drive coming along?"
[3:12 PM] "R u home yet?"
[3:14 PM] "Austin?"
[3:16 PM] "Hellooooooooooooo"
You can get the same result with SMS in half an hour than you can get with a call in half a minute though? Don't you like spending more social time? :gross:
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But socially, the problematic invention was television--video broadly--insofar as it supplanted family and community. #NRx
Hmm, how do you figure? Like what period in history specifically do you feel TV became a social evil? I recall TV time was very much a family and sometimes a community event (Super Bowl, Oscars, etc.). Couldn't you make the same argument about books promoting insularity? I mean nobody shares the same book at the same time.
I think TV gets a bad rap. Sure, there's a lot of BS content for morons, but nothing is more efficient at substantive information transfer than video.
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Depends what country you're in but here and in the UK there's also a lot of commercials to start with.
The content is as low as it gets... People who live off social security for instance, and that's in both countries. It's not that they can't get work but McDonalds is too low for them. I ask you how we will get our burgers along the freeway otherwise.
Community events would be football here, the real one called soccer. I, as well as a lot of people I know are in no way interested in it but still it's a part of daily newscast, not including the sports section.
So we get shovelded what we don't want in the throat by a spoon.
And the strikes we see on the daily news? They aren't common in a lot of countries you know, in some countries I admire they're even illegal.
End rant.
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I have no problem criticizing poor content, just not the actual device or medium itself which is inherently agnostic.
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Nothing woong with the medium but what if the prople controlling the medium introduce poor content? And the medium gets controlled by those people?
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Nothing worong with the medium but what if the prople controlling the medium introduce poor content?
Don't watch it. This is why you promote competition.
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Easy to say, but you're in a hotel zapping to find content.
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Easy to say, but you're in a hotel zapping to find content.
So would you rather not have the technology then?
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So would you rather not have the technology then?
Definitely yes!
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Actually, TV is a technology I find it very easy not to have.
There is one in the house somewhere...
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Same here, and why the hell would we need it?
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A world without David Attenborough, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rod Serling, Star Trek, BSG or real time global news coverage? No thanks. You can keep your dark age papyrus. ;)
You guys must have zero content in your govt. regulated worlds. :D
Reading can't replace this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlHHTmIkdis
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Hmm, how do you figure? Like what period in history specifically do you feel TV became a social evil?
Sometime after its mass adoption, especially after it became vulgar.
Video hasn't generally brought people together for good purposes: it's driven them apart. Families used to have dinner together, talking with each other. People used to get more involved with local civic associations and churches. Video isn't the only culprit, but can you think of a bigger tech culprit?
(I take it for granted that this discussion is premised on purposely succumbing to the false dilemma of all-or-nothing, so I consider that irrelevant as a counter-argument.)
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but can you think of a bigger tech culprit?
For breaking down the family unit? Yes. Texting, video games, and the Internet. More people will watch TV with at least one other person in the family than would do the other three. Personally I see an attack on television just about on par with an attack on literature or any other form of media expression. There's a lot of shitty books, magazines or journals. DVRs and cord cutting/subscription services also give you control of content improving quality, efficiency, and time management. Not to mention virtually eliminating useless marketing from commercials.
When I watch something good I notify friends and family and then we talk about it afterward. They do the same. :)
Put simply, I think my life experience would have been negatively impacted if television had never been invented. I think I'd be a dumber and even less interesting person than I am today. ;) Can't say that about social media or automated traffic cameras.
No Looney Tunes, Animaniacs or South Park?! :-0 How would we ever learn about the Japanese otherwise?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGepBtBCuTY
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So, it looks like the worst way to spend an afternoon is watching a TV soap opera that centers around a torrid love affair between a leaf blower and an automated speed enforcement camera. popcorn
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For breaking down the family unit? Yes. Texting, video games, and the Internet. More people will watch TV with at least one other person in the family than would do the other three.
Those came along after the battle was lost, and killed off the survivors.
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Yeah, TV totally drives people apart. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYBce9Gsz7g
Entire original skit is a classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH5Os0VX7qE
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Yeah, TV totally drives people apart. ;)
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Entire original skit is a classic.
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You two are really both right. Those skits work as both critique and as proof of concept: we have a nostalgic attachment to family time watching those shows (and myriad others) because the work of centering the life of the private sphere around mass market commodities had already been completed by the time we began our childhoods. I think that television had a large part in that, for sure. Brecht thought as much. Adorno and Horkheimer put a lot of the blame on popular music. Irving Howe and Frederic Wertham both blamed comic books. Saul Bellow blamed the declining cultural importance of the novel.
Kids in my generation got sad about the deaths of Optimus Prime and Littlefoot's Mom because a weekend theater trip or an evening movie night was co-terminus with family time and almost no one saw any problem with that. (If not Littlefoot's Mom and Optimus Prime, then what about "Jurassic Bark"...) That debate had already ended and it was perfectly fine to watch In Living Color with your brother and see who did the best impression of Fire Marshall Bill.
It seemed like there were limits then though. Cinema, drive-in theaters, the arcades, laser tag, the mall: away from home, our relationship to mass market commodities had a relationship to a shared commons or some form of minimally class-gated collectivity. In that way, it mirrored our experience at home. We experienced commodities with family; we experienced commodities with friends or at least with members of our community. We had to put a fucking quarter on the machine to call 'next'.
The problem with texting, video games, laptops, smartphones, etc etc - digitally-enabled mobile devices coupled with wireless access - is that they took the previous conquest of the private sphere and expanded it to the rest of the public sphere and public life. And it did it in a way that no longer required any interpersonal interaction whatsoever. Now, assholes can't stop at a stoplight without checking their Facebook. Shopping can be handled through Amazon, or iTunes, or Priceline. No one needs to have a conversation in line because they're staring at their screens. Groceries can come by Peapod or Amazon Pantry. We might not even have to see postal workers anymore soon if mail drones start to catch on.
Things like TiVo, Online Piracy, Video on Demand, and Streaming Services have even to a large extent ruptured our shared temporality that television previously carefully constructed around watching things at the same time on the same evening. Except for maybe sports broadcasts and superhero films.
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I have no problem criticizing poor content, just not the actual device or medium itself which is inherently agnostic.
But not all media technologies are actually neutral ('agnostic' as you put it); I doubt that technology as such can be said to be clearly neutral. Some media are one-to-many channels with a centralized message/program, which means lots of control (including quality control), some are many-to-many (with a democratizing but also a chaotic potential), some media are many-to-one (like your TV example). Some might have been but got reduced to less than they can be. Some clearly have the potential for wreaking havoc on structures many value.
For instance: Radio, which started as a wide-open, many-to-many medium, had great promise but got strapped into a limited range of mainstream pop, stations with country AND western music, and talk radio stations with increasingly rabidly divisive hosts. (although when I still had a car my age, I had a weakness for AM stations from Mexico, for their music ;-) So now instead of dialogue, multiplicity, and a wide range of tastes and flavors, everyone gets the same narrow band of classic rock and tepid sports coverage. Classical music coverage in California now is basically ONE frequency. Jazz is ONE station, most days. Where are the many flavors of electronic music? Folk? World? Asian pop? Not to mention political opinions that dare to occasionally diverge from the two stupid monoliths that pass for party organizations in the US?
TV was never set up to be many-to-many: its threshold to entry is higher, but its program quality has suffered - partly because so much time is devoted to advertising. In 1982, each hour had six minutes of ads; by 2001, it was twelve - and today, each hour of TV has to accommodate four minutes of local ads and at least twelve of syndicated ads. The headlines last week were full of the falling revenues for broadcast media, which is a consequence of an increasingly dispersed audience (online, on their smartphones, or on game consoles as much or more than watching TV each day). The more money the competing channels spend on trying to reach their audience, the less TV programmers have to spend on quality content - hence the rapid growth of reality TV.
I could go on - but it's a beautiful day and I'm going to go out with my SO instead of spending any more time at a screen. Opting for the exclusive narrow-band signal of marriage over the promiscuous Internet for once ;-)
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...
(http://pre15.deviantart.net/4c66/th/pre/i/2012/129/7/c/1984_by_alcook-d4z39dh.jpg)
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So, it looks like the worst way to spend an afternoon is watching a TV soap opera that centers around a torrid love affair between a leaf blower and an automated speed enforcement camera. popcorn
Somewhere in the depths of the internet, there's probably a rule 34 for this...
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You guys must have zero content in your govt. regulated worlds. :D
Reading can't replace this:
I confess: I did buy the complete (at the time) set of David Attenborough DVDs and do occasionally watch some
No Looney Tunes, Animaniacs or South Park?! :-0 How would we ever learn about the Japanese otherwise?
It's true that I do miss The Simpsons!
I was watching some TV at my host's place during my UK holiday last month. Notable was Eastenders for its sub-Hardy/Conrad dire and twisted themes in which all is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds, and nobody can escape their dreadful family/personal destiny. Coronation Street, at least, allowed its characters an occasional happy moment. Masterchef was good!
Don't know if I would watch more TV in UK, but I don't think so. I had almost given it up before I left. I don't find much on Indian TV on the rare occasions when I turn it on. I was never much of a movie watcher, and I dislike Iindian movies a lot (I hate the music!).
However, all this absence of TV in my life doesn't lead to lack of screens and electronics. I sit in front of the internet instead, and it feeds me news, information, entertainment and social life.
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My two cents (literally) when I watch TV together with the family (the kids anyway, the wife hates TV): cricket and reruns of Friends. Otherwise, I give TV a wide berth.
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No one has nominated S-D (audio) dacs, esp Sabre!?
Class-D (audio) amplifiers, anyone?
If that thread would have opened in HF, i bet vacuum tubes would have been among top ten posts.
''Genie, make yourself disappear from the pages of history, lol'' walk the plank2
A few years back my answer to the genie would have been ''Facebook''. But it seems to bring some positive traits to society lately. Still, world would be better place if those kind of social-media things never existed.
If the genie would let me think some time i would ask ''can you bring back monarchy?'', muhahhaa :)p8
But honestly, i wouldn't want to condemn any single technology. Thanks Ultra for bringing 1984 up, it's the people and politics that make some technologies sinful and annoying.
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Bring back monarchy? Some people never lost it. What would the trash newspapers of UK do without it?
(concentrate on film and other celebrities, I suppose).
There! That's a thing, albeit not a technology, that we could do without: celebrity!
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We have a de-facto monarch in each state in India ! >:(
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lr02OPwcYzY/TbJedHWveYI/AAAAAAAAAFM/4htiPSQ9epM/s1600/work_home_play_sleep_cartoon_this_modern_life_.jpg)
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gnrnJsEXTmw/UiYvzgyDZfI/AAAAAAAABog/XibvCYMJpf8/s1600/life_without_internet.jpg)
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MuZo2... Where did you get that picture of me? (This Modern Life)
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MuZo2... Where did you get that picture of me? (This Modern Life)
We're twins?
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Social media can go ahead and disappear from the face of the earth...
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Dave, is it the tool that sucks, or is it that it brings recording within the reach of those who don't know what they are doing?
I don't think you can just say that "digital = bad" but I think you can say that things like Pro Tools and EZdrummer have allowed people to get lazy, and music to get demonstrably worse. It's also lowered the minimum skill level to use the tools considerably. Now any jackass with a copy of Wavelab can be a "mastering engineer." That's not to say that the pros are necessarily any better these days.
Terrible sounding records are the new normal, and so somebody can record using a few hundred bucks worth of USB mics at home and get something basically the same as the latest Imagine Dragons or Arcade Fire piece of trash done by "the experts." These guys don't even bother using their brickwall limiters anymore. 0dBFS on every track? Audible hard clipping? Who gives a fuck, they won't hear it on their laptop speakers or Apple earbuds anyway, ship it!
Oh, and don't forget to whine and moan about how MP3s make things sound bad, and people should be using Tidal or listening to High-Rez. Give me a fucking break.
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Social media can go ahead and disappear from the face of the earth...
Media are social. The digital platforms are really scary right now.
On the internet trust is even more delicate and is now it is the subject of corporate value speculation.
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Actually i'll go ahead and say some lower bit rate mp3's with the right algorithm make modern digitally hashed masters sound better by filtering out that fatiguing crap off the top-end.
Digital audio is a complete mess and people think it's simple because they visualize '1's and '0's in their head so it must be easy and they take it for granted.
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We're twins?
I was born in UK. How about you? If you were too, then that could be a zero or two off the odds!
:)p13
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If the genie would let me think some time i would ask ''can you bring back monarchy?'', muhahhaa :)p8
Monarchy is why one can still find correct formal wear in London but not in New York, where all the dinner jackets have notch lapels.
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I was born in UK. How about you? If you were too, then that could be a zero or two off the odds!
:)p13
My mommy don't tell and my daddy don't know ...
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Monarchy is why one can still find correct formal wear in London but not in New York, where all the dinner jackets have notch lapels.
You are forgetting Amsterdam. Get a suit and indulge in the city's grey areas.