Invested Listening

John emailed me yesterday and wrote the following:

I just skip through songs. Don’t finish them, start listening to something, think of something else and jump to that. There is always something better out there to listen to. I think I’ve always thought this way which has led me to search new and different music, but it seems different now when music is at your finger tips. It used to be that I would buy an album, put it on, and seriously devote time to it. I still that when I actually go to the record store and buy things. When I plunk my hard earned money down, I am investing in that music. So I tend to take my time with it, some more than others, but still a not unsubstantial amount of time. But online, its like I don’t give it time. Even buying things on iTunes, it basically vanishes into this morass of the digital music I own. It doesn’t really stand out. Not like the CDs that are on top of my player. I wonder is this is perhaps symptomatic of music itself where people just don’t care enough about it anymore. People were devoted to certain artists and now they’re not. So they don’t go to concerts, don’t buy the CD, etc.

I tend to agree. Don’t you? This is, of course, not just true of music, right? When Bezos is calling books “long form reading” we’re no we’re in a spot where attention is becoming scarcer and scarcer and we’re less able to concentrate and focus on specific things. To really digest them. I wrote about that concept when I was talking about one of my favorite records of the year, Microcastle by Deerhunter, which technically was released last year but which I fell in love with this year. No coincidence that I bought it on CD and listened to it in the car on my way upstate on the weekends and that it took me awhile to put it on my iPod.

Things take time.

In fact, my sense is that the records that I buy on CD always tend to be my favorites because I give them the opportunity. John had emailed and said that the Hastings household was listening to a lot of ‘It’s Blitz’ recently. I had bought it awhile ago and given it two spins and it almost stuck but not in a substantial way but more in a superficial bubble gum way because of ‘Zero’.

But I got that email and I was driving up to New Hampshire so I stuck it in the CD player and listened to it three times in a row and it revealed itself to me. I thought up a great line about female vocalists which is that for me to like them I need to believe they can break my nose and Karen O fits the bill.

The point is of course that I was invested.

It’s not one to one. I’ve tried to invest myself in ‘Veckatimest’ and it’s just not for me. And I listen to Fleet Foxes on my iPod and that’s stuck with me. But there does seem to be a lesson that we’re losing the ability to focus.

Now there’s a second part to that question which is important and the second part is: Should we care? And frankly, I don’t have the answer to that. We mustn’t be sentimental. We must move boldly into the future where every piece of art is merely a digital flicker on the information superhighway and there’s a buzzing sound inside our collective heads as links and images flit across the transom of our consciousness and maybe that’s the future. Maybe we are all just pulsing nodes on the network and that’s just evolution and we must do it, so to speak.

Back to the Kindle. Everybody says, “You can be thinking of a book and then, presto chango, two seconds later that book is on your Kindle and you’re reading it. And you can graze, one chapter of this and one chapter of that.” And I’m sure Clay Shirky and Jarvis and a bunch of other talkings heads have already contemplated this phenomenon and it’s in line with the decline of the news industry and sipping your coffee (and of course in this fantasy it’s Sunday morning right and we’re listening to Click and Clack on NPR and isn’t it just divine?).

Here’s what Shiry says in an interview in CJR:

CS: You know, there’ve always been these complaints about attention span. And, again, this is one of the things that’s—people just worry about attention span and they change the media they worry about. I mean, when I was growing up, the attention span worry was, you know, entirely targeted at television shows and so forth. And, one of the things I think Steven Johnson does quite beautifully in Everything Bad is Good for You is to note the ways in which the unit of a television show moved from being inside the show—you have Fantasy Island orLove Boat, which has sort of two or three subplots—to being units of comprehension that passed across several shows. So, you get the Sopranos, where the entire thing has a narrative arc that spans years. So, it’s harder, I think, to make the case that attention span is unilaterally shortening.

What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing.

But there is something real to the decline and evaporation of our ability to pay attention and only that it’s real not that it’s bad or good. And I think maybe (who was it, please tell me) that wrote that it’s all a myth and nobody was ever able to pay attention and we’ve been perpetually distracted for a long long time and maybe the Internet is only a mirror reflecting back to us what we already are. (ed note: Stephen Johnson, I think)

And listen I like choices and I play games where I do things like force myself to listen to albums all the way through all the time for just this reason or I’ll say I’m allowed to listen to four songs in a row for an EP’s worth of music before I change the artist or I’ll say I have to finish this book I started (although I did abandon ‘The 42nd Parallel’ but only briefly).

So where are we with all of this? Nowhere special. But I think there’s some truth to the notion that invested listening has declined and that attention spans are shorter.

Here’s a question: Does this mean that we will start writing shorter songs?

Invested Listening

Leave a Reply