Are we living in a disposable culture?

muser

Well-known member
Digital culture = Disposable culture? Would be interested in what anyone thinks, I did write a fairly long pointless waffle on my theories but it was long and pointless. Also is popular music dead as an art form in comparison to say 50 years ago or even 20 years ago?
 
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swears

preppy-kei
Haven't we been living in a "disposable" culture since at least the 50s?
Since the advent of mass produced consumer goods, television, radio, etc?
I think "digital culture" (broadband, p2p filesharing, youtube, etc) has just made this more acute.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Digital culture = Disposable culture? Would be interested in what anyone thinks, I did write a fairly long pointless waffle on my theories but it was long and pointless.

Ahahaha. Give that man a Culture Studies AS!
 

zhao

there are no accidents
the erosion of meaning which allegedly happens with an overload of information is a subject that I am also interested in... Baudrillard also touched on it, yes? which work was it again... can't remember... too much information!
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Counter question- in terms of purely digital media- is disposability necessarily a bad thing?
Is disposable perhaps even the wrong term in the purely digital domain of constant flow? To be able to dispose of something implies that we once possessed it? sure it requires a certain re-calibration of our sense of the essentiality and discreteness of cultural objects perhaps...
 
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muser

Well-known member
Haven't we been living in a "disposable" culture since at least the 50s?
Since the advent of mass produced consumer goods, television, radio, etc?
I think "digital culture" (broadband, p2p filesharing, youtube, etc) has just made this more acute.

maybe, by disposable I was more meaning examples such as music increasingly being purley stored by people as digital data that may well be obsolete in 100 years time, and its not like music in western popular culture is recorded in score or passed down. CGI in films which will look shite in 20 years time. Electronic music (where I think the majority of creativity in western music lies) etc. etc. The music that will last presumably is the stuff that is the most popular now (what gets the most air play on the radio the most sales etc) as it has over the years, which is at the moment awful and getting worse imo.
 
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Dusty

Tone deaf
Of course CGI will look shite, just as black and white movies look dated now, they still retain a value, the viewer is aware of their place in history. Toy Story already looks decidedly dated, but its still a good story to watch, the artform is still there.

The same can be said for electronic music. Early Detroit techno was made on the most basic of equipment, and it shows, but thats part of its charm. I don't think the digital era has affected music as an artform, its just swamped us with a vast wealth of music to choose from - we need to become better at filtering, find what you love, what speaks to you and hold on to it.
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
I did write a fairly long pointless waffle on my theories but it was long and pointless.

I want the unabridged version! Pompous logorrhoea rules.

Almost nobody archives e-mails, MSM-conversations, SMSs/MMSs, old blog posts, old websites (except for the frontpage), etc., so I guess those elements of our current culture will be forgotten pretty soon. Maybe for the better. How many artefacts are there left from the «dot com»-era, by the way? Not many, from what I can see.
 

turtles

in the sea
Is disposable really the right term to be applying to digital media though? I mean, has there ever been a media format more easy to archive? Storage space is only becoming cheaper and larger; it's not unreasonable to conceive of a time when NO media is ever discarded. I think the obsolecense of certaind digital formats is not too big a deal either. Remembering a couple of codecs and protocols is not the trickiest of things.
 
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turtles

in the sea
I want the unabridged version! Pompous logorrhoea rules.

Almost nobody archives e-mails, MSM-conversations, SMSs/MMSs, old blog posts, old websites (except for the frontpage), etc., so I guess those elements of our current culture will be forgotten pretty soon. Maybe for the better. How many artefacts are there left from the «dot com»-era, by the way? Not many, from what I can see.
People don't do this, but google does, email servers do, internet providers do. We actually leave a pretty large trail of automatically archived data on the web.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
well with music specifically it is not disposibility which is new. but rather (relative) "permanance" that is a very recent and maybe breif phenomenon.

the new ephemerality in its own way perhaps recalls the way music existed for 10 thousand years before we started "canning" it in frozen, and some say, nutrition-depleted forms -- you hear it once and it's gone for ever, without possibility of replay.
 
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turtles

in the sea
Yeah I think the real issue is just how much data is flying straight at you and how easy it is to access it all, so that most of it just wizzes by you and even the stuff you do look at you don't spend time with because of the pressure of all the other stuff that your missing
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
well with music specifically it is not disposibility which is a new. but rather (relative) "permanence" which is a very recent and maybe brief phenomenon.

the new ephemerality in its own way perhaps recalls the way music existed for 10 thousand years before we started "canning" it in frozen, and some say, nutrition-depleted forms -- you hear it once and it's gone for ever, without possibility of replay.

but there is permanence (in terms of "fixing music into recordings"-> as the music-object) but now there is a new form of permanence- a dispersed spread of data stored by individuals on a networked basis. Just think- if you delete an mp3, there is a 99% chance that you will be able to get it back within a day from another copy elsewhere on the network. The very idea of "permanence" becomes irrelevant in a way- it is permanently accessible whether one possesses it or not...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Yeah I think the real issue is just how much data is flying straight at you and how easy it is to access it all, so that most of it just wizzes by you and even the stuff you do look at you don't spend time with because of the pressure of all the other stuff that your missing

and gone is the deep connection which comes from growing up with only 1 musical tradition... that sense of living and breathing one kind of music, of its meaning permeating every aspect of life -- daily experience, rites of passage, births and deaths...

has the information age made us all into dilettantes with A.D.D.? maybe higher heights can be reached if we were less exposed?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Indeed, the combination of a disposable (or at least, lets say "quality of merely peripheral importance") flow on an immediate level - with a global perspective where not only is it impossible to delete something but everything which was once lost returns in hyper-historicised, archived forms is obviously quite strange. We are at once more "in the moment" at an immediate sensory level, and yet on the macro-scale ever more outside of time, things don't get deleted or disposed of, they are lovingly archived...
 

bruno

est malade
the idea that everything is disposeable may be right but it bothers me that it is always presented as something negative. it devalues human efforts and is close to devaluing human experience of these things, a dangerous path, i think.
 

muser

Well-known member
Is disposable really the right term to be applying to digital media though? I mean, has there ever been a media format more easy to archive? Storage space is only becoming cheaper and larger; it's not unreasonable to conceive of a time when NO media is ever discarded. I think the obsolecense of certaind digital formats is not too big a deal either. Remembering a couple of codecs and protocols is not the trickiest of things.

But will digital media leave a significant cultural footprint tho? In the hear and now it is the opposit of disposable I agree, but in 100 years time technology will have progressed so fast huge amounts of data from now will be lost or forgotten about, there will be no artifacts for someone else to discover, even if things could be retrieved noone would know about it to retrieve it.
 
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turtles

in the sea
Just to be contrarian a bit here, I'd say that the easy access to information is also actually a real interesting and powerful thing. I know for a fact that my passion for music as well as politics and philosophy really only started to take off after I had easy access to broadband internet (or course there were also outside factors that influenced this growth in interest). If I hadn't had internet access over the last 8-9 years, I would be a very different person, a lot less informed and with waaaaay crapier tase in music ;)
 

turtles

in the sea
muser: but how will this be different from every other age before us? Information is always lost over time. Is it jus that more of it will have been stored at one point in time?

But also in regards to how to know that the information is there: this is why entities like google are so important, because they get to decide what is remembered and what isn't.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Certainly in terms of music (and this is in the music section rather than technology say...) there is more being archived than ever before. It all feels more disposable, but ironically less and less of it is actually being disposed...
 
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