Cocktails and Records

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.