Semiocide, Perfect Days, and many musical Fresh Digs 🍅

Some meandering thoughts on what we lose when we go digital (and Don Draper touching grass)

Mar 26, 2024

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about analog media and what it means to only have a digital collection (or rather, digital access – digital rentals, subscriptions, and streams don’t an owned collection make). Many things have watered this seed growing in the back of my mind: my parents driving out my CD collection (to live in my attic rather than theirs), overhearing a convo on “how many record stores does one neighborhood need?” in the lobby of my daughter’s dance studio, coming across the “Take a Zine, Leave a Zine” project while walking around my neighborhood… There is a lot to gain with digital media (my career started in digital media planning!) when it comes to convenience and choice(ish1), but what is it that we lose?

Last week, I learned a new term that felt apt to describe what I’ve been ruminating on: “semiocide” – the destruction of signs; the killing of meaning. What meaning is being destroyed with the extinction of physical media formats? Some loosely organized thoughts:

Tactile experiences: in order to consume physical media, we must touch it: flipping through pages, feeling the difference between gloss and matte, the heft of a magazine or liner notes booklet, thumbing through a collection to pull out and choose what we’d like to read or listen to… These small acts are rituals, lost to scrolls and clicks. We are no longer touching what someone else has touched.

It's May Day, baby. : r/madmen — Mad Men S3 E2 “Love Among the Ruins”

Archiving and history: I think about the future and how people will come to understand the culture of era – will they be able to even access it? We’re relying on platforms out of our control to archive our content... when online media titles stops publishing (ahem, Vice), how long until they stop hosting? We must protect The Wayback Machine at all costs.
Human curation: I’ll leave it to Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld for the deep dive on how “algorithms flatten culture.” When it comes to things like magazines and albums, I like think about the people putting the work together – there is a reason pieces are included, in that order. Someone had a creative vision for its assembly. Shouldn’t we aim to honor that? I personally feel this most strongly when I listen to one of my favs, Rosalía. El Mal Querer and Motomami are truly two masterpieces, best enjoyed while listening to the songs in the order intended, from first to last. They are more than the sum of their parts.2
Acts of sharing, exchange and discovery (“just thinking of you” moments): Yes, it is easier than ever to send a URL to someone of a playlist, a YouTube clip, a news article, but the effort that goes into sharing a physical item – swapping a book, making a mixtape/CD for someone, cutting an article out of the paper and mailing it – is what makes the act especially meaningful. And there is a very human element to it… we often have to see and meet the other person for the handoff.

These moments of meaning are represented really nicely in the movie Perfect Days. The main character’s commuting ritual is soundtracked by his choice of cassette, a side character is moved when hearing new music for the first time (the mode of discovery adds an emotional layer beyond just the experience of listening to a new artist), the act of returning a tape is the vessel for an unexpected moment of physical touch.

There is a lot more that can be (and has been) said here about renewed interests in physical media (or more broadly, physical ephemera) and the connection to nostalgia, yearning, digital fatigue, yadda yadda (I also have a lot of thoughts on analog media as a signaler of status but I’ll save that for another time)… ultimately, in human nature, convenience is king and a driving force for many changes in behavior and consumption. But, I think, to live more meaningfully, we need to seek out some friction in our lives!!! whether it be in the media we consume or someplace else3.

I’ll leave you here with a couple extracts from this (still highly relevant) 2018 opinion piece in the NYT, The Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu:

With [convenience’s] promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us…
We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.

And now for the Fresh Digs: lately I’ve been enjoying…

(it is not lost on me that these are all digital media shares 😅)

Chappell Roan’s Tiny Desk Concert

This Oral History of Limewire

How apropos… my first foray into the world of digital music. Oral histories are truly one of my favorite formats of storytelling, I won’t ever not read one that comes my way.

At the height of LimeWire, Facebook and YouTube were brand new, and they hadn’t yet monopolized how we interact. Web 2.0 sought to turn your real-life friends into followable accounts and avatars, whereas LimeWire capitalized on near-random, anonymous connections between strangers. You couldn’t talk to whoever was hosting the file you wanted; you had to live by your wits and decide whom to trust. Primitive as that sounds, it made for a thrilling suspense you’ll never find in the walled gardens of today’s social media.