Cocktails and Records

I think I may have identified another 21st century ‘illness’ – password fatigue.

This became apparent to me last night when, straight after locking myself out of my online banking for failing to remember the 11th digit of my 14 digit password, I then attempted to buy some tickets for the National Theatre and discovered that I needed to set up yet another account with yet another ‘unique’ password. I felt like screaming. Why can’t I just buy the damn tickets?*

I think I have at least 50 accounts which require passwords – from Amazon and our work’s Flickr page to this blog and the Barbican. Of course, they’re not all completely different and they have varying degrees of complexity, but this doesn’t make things any easier. I still have to remember which password it actually is and which complicated recipe of numbers and £$%£^’s I cooked up at the time. And the less I use the account and password in question, the harder it gets. God knows what my password for ebay is, its been that long since I used it, but I know I’ve got one.

Being a paranoid and cynical type of person who believes that identity muggers really do lurk around every corner, of course I never write any of them down. So all the passwords are residing in my head and as Betty Everett once sung ‘it’s getting mighty crowded’.

* ok, I work in marketing and I know exactly why they don’t allow this, but that’s not the point.

I see that it’s almost the end of the decade.

I’ve been too busy lately to reflect terribly hard on this fact, but reading the current issue of The Word on the train this morning did get me thinking about what the naughties ‘means to me’.

So putting aside climate change, 9/11, people routinely degrading themselves on national television, ongoing threats to bio-diversity, the global collapse of the banking system, the disintegration of feminism, the re-emergence of religious extremism, the widening gap between rich and poor, the ongoing imminent collapse of civilisation etc. etc. one of the biggest impacts of the past decade for me has been the cementing of instant gratification culture and its evil twin, information over-load.

Once upon a time, I scoured second hand record shops, fairs and garage sales for records I knew I couldn’t get anywhere else, I traipsed into town to look for books I’d read about in the single paper I’d read that day (and if the shop didn’t have it they’d order it for me and I’d wait patiently), if I forgot to set the video for a TV show I thought I’d lost it forever and I didn’t ever think that I would see childhood favourites like You Can’t Do That On Television again*. Once upon a time I wrote letters.  Once upon a time I actually feared that I would either run out of music or run out of space in my house to put it in.

Faster internet speeds, email, DVDs and the like were beginning to make all these fears redundant around the year 2000, but information was still manageable. Over the past ten years though, almost everything has become available – and instantly available  if you want it.

It’s lunchtime as I write this, I’m sitting here at my desk and I’ve just read the headlines of three international newspapers, WBGO a radio station from New York is playing in the background and two Twitter accounts** are constantly updating me on ‘stuff’ from around the world. Last night I watched a Canadian sitcom on Youtube, looked at my mate in Vietnam’s latest photos on Flickr, ordered a DVD boxset from the States and listened to a record I’d tracked down on ebay after years of unsuccessfully searching for it charity shops. And there is so much more I could have done – waded through all that music on Spotify, read even more newspapers online, listened to some of those podcasts I’ve got queuing up on itunes…

I’m not complaining you know. It’s just an odd sensation to realise that in the course of ten years I’ve gone from craving more knowledge and more music to almost drowning in the stuff.

*Surely no one in their right mind would put this show out on a video/DVD boxset?
** I changed my mind alright. I blame work.

It’s not unusual for me to feel alienated by television. Typically it makes me feel like a boring, underachieving intellectual snob who is too sane for my own good. Now it just makes me feel like a Luddite.

BBC4’s series Electric Dreams features a family who are spending a month living in the style of  the years 1970 to 2000. The  catch for them is that they are living with nothing but the technology around at the time. The catch for me is that our household is still living with that technology.

Well, we may as well be. We do not own a microwave,  dishwasher, clothes dryer or deep freeze. We only have one TV – which we often watch together – and it’s not flat-screen. We still use our VCR regularly. We are wedded to our record player – the other half was reluctantly forced to start buying CDs two years ago and is yet to discover the delights of the mp3.  I’ve only recently conceded to digital cameras, never owned a digital watch and the last games console I bought was a Nintendo Game & Watch in 1986*.

We have, however, moved into the naughties with a PC and a DVD player. And we’ve just bought a cordless phone and a new set-top box for the telly. Mr C. has even suggested that a Teasmade might be nice…

Any other kindred anti-gadget folk out there?

* Donkey Kong Junior! Ace!

Once upon a time my friends and I used to write letters and postcards to each other. My school friends and I wrote when we went away to university, and university friends and I wrote to each other after we graduated and moved off around the country and then the world.

I remember the glee of finding a letter in the mailbox, hidden amongst the bills and junk mail, and smiling as I instantly recognised the distinctive handwriting of particular friends. Sometimes it was a postcard, with just a couple of lines on the back, which I would stick on the fridge until it fell off and slipped away underneath. Sometimes it was a big fat juicy letter containing photos and clippings lovingly cut out of papers and magazines. These packages I would put aside, and make myself a cup of coffee before settling down in a comfy chair to pour over their contents.

Gradually, we began to write more emails and some people began to write generic group letters, more reminiscent of the annual Christmas letters churned out by particular members of the family… ‘This year was a wonderful year for us; I got an amazing job, Annie successfully made it through rehab and little Steven saved the world’….  Still, seeing people’s names pop up in my inbox made me smile and I eagerly clicked on their email. It still meant something.

Now in 2008 hardly any of us write either letters or emails anymore. I don’t know why, but I suspect there are two main culprits behind this:

1. Other priorities: spouses, children, career crises, mortgage worries, general laziness etc. etc.
2. Facebook and the fact that I’m not on it.

Long time readers might know my feelings on Facebook, and I’m still reluctant to open up my personal life to this shallow form of communication.

However, I am beginning to increasingly feel like my Grandmother in her antipathy towards computers and email: something’s changing in society; we don’t really care very much for it but at the same time we feel like we might be missing out on something. Grandma’s lucky though, most of her friends feel the same way as her. Mine don’t. Am I in danger of losing all regular contact with my friends if I don’t give in to Facebook?

It was only the other week that I was writing about my music format crisis, but it seems there is a wider technological crisis going on that I hadn’t even thought about. This time it’s in my other love, cinema.

This article in the New York Times explores the impact of digital technology on our filmed heritage. In a nutshell, film stock keeps well and is cheap to store, and digital isn’t. It costs about US$12,514 a year to store a digital master compared to US$1,059 to keep a conventional film master.

The article suggests that the heady combination of cost and inevitable technology shifts (basically not being able to easily upgrade digital film back-ups) could mean that in the future it might be easier to access easily preserved pre-digital films than current ones.

Obviously there is an upside to this (we’ll always have Jimmy Stewart but not neccessarily Tom Hanks) but it means that huge swathes of our current culture could one day be ‘digitally extinct’. Pity really.

Every week it seems that there is something in the news reminding us about the crisis in the music industry - how the old business model isn’t working anymore, CDs are dead and downloads are the future.

Although I love my ipod, I don’t particularly like the MP3 format – the music is compressed to hell and call me an old fashioned consumerist, but I like physically owning the music. I like the packaging, I like the liner notes, I like proper running orders and I like actually putting things on the stereo.

So since I started hearing that the CD is dead I’ve been having my own personal crisis. What the hell format do I get music in? Is there any point in buying CDs if they are redundant technology? Is it like still buying video tapes, rather than DVD?

I’ve always bought vinyl, but mostly singles and 12”s and old vinyl from record fairs, charity shops and the like; I’ve bought all my new releases on CD since 1990. CDs have never really been loveable, but they are portable and as someone who has moved house and countries several times I definitely know the downside of lugging crates of records around.

However, this week in a random act of strangeness I bought some new, mint vinyl LPs – Nostalgia 77 and James Yorkston – both readily available on CD and download, probably for much cheaper than I paid. They sound and look fantastic obviously, as vinyl does.

Is vinyl, as Wired magazine says, the future? Is this a new beginning for me? And more importantly, can the floorboards in our upper floor flat take it?

I hate Facebook. It is like celebrating Christmas, having hair free armpits and saying that other people’s babies look cute – it  is something that I can’t really be arsed with, but constantly feel the social pressure to conform on. However unlike Christmas, armpits and babies, and even using Google, I have not given in and I am not on Facebook.

So because they couldn’t find me on there, someone I knew when I was seven has contacted my brother via Facebook to find out whatever happened to me. My brother is five years younger than me so this means that he was two when they met. I mean, really! As much as I can’t begrudge anyone being nice enough to want to catch up after 26 years, why are they harassing my brother and what sort of information are they expecting to get on the superficial Facebook level anyway?

I almost wish that I was a polygamist terrorist with a keen interest in 16th century madrigals so he had something interesting to tell her. 

Anyway, I am not alone in my anti-Facebook stance as an article in today’s Guardian by Tom Hodgkinson proves. Here he describes Facebook as a libertarian capitalist experiment that seeks to commodify relationships. He also does a fabulous deconstruction of the Facebook privacy policy. i.e. you don’t have any, all your details ‘are on sale to giant global brands’.  

As someone who works in marketing, I think that this is genius. And as someone who desperately needs a new job, it’s an appalling attack on things I hold dear like privacy, individuality and being seen as a citizen rather than a consumer.

However, as a cynic the worst thing is when people on Facebook have the audacity to complain about being marketed to, like they expect something (a social networking facility) for nothing. I think it is the combination of Facebook hoovering up and selling on market intelligence and people actually being naive enough to be outraged by this which is the truly interesting thing.