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26 September 2019 18:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonOne of the (many, many) problems with the web is the loss of syncronicity: the loss of loss itself. If you have a half memory of a childhood song or video, you can find it immediately.
I had a music video which had haunted my subconscious for years, and I remember me and my dad sitting down online and trying to find it. It came out when I was six, and with his memory and mine we did find and download it (a *lengthy* procedure in those days!). The internet was new enough that it still felt like scavenging; but now it's trivial to find the most obscure errata, what Reynolds call "cultural carrion".
This is good, in a way; infinite free public access to the kind of materials you'd have needed a university membership and a library card for a specific niche archive to encounter. All the same, there's a loss too; a kind of...
...anyway, one impact this has on meatspace is that junk shops have become junkier. You lose the syncronicity of diving through piles of old records, for example, because anything good or valuable has been checked on amazon, and snapped up. The same is true no matter what you collect; like the idea of lucky vintage finds, being transformed into the vintage shop and online retailers; or dolls; or anything, really, that you can price-check online and take out of the real economy to put into the digital one. And because meatspace record shops are closing, you lose the experience of going to places and just having a good old rummage.
I had a music video which had haunted my subconscious for years, and I remember me and my dad sitting down online and trying to find it. It came out when I was six, and with his memory and mine we did find and download it (a *lengthy* procedure in those days!). The internet was new enough that it still felt like scavenging; but now it's trivial to find the most obscure errata, what Reynolds call "cultural carrion".
This is good, in a way; infinite free public access to the kind of materials you'd have needed a university membership and a library card for a specific niche archive to encounter. All the same, there's a loss too; a kind of...
...anyway, one impact this has on meatspace is that junk shops have become junkier. You lose the syncronicity of diving through piles of old records, for example, because anything good or valuable has been checked on amazon, and snapped up. The same is true no matter what you collect; like the idea of lucky vintage finds, being transformed into the vintage shop and online retailers; or dolls; or anything, really, that you can price-check online and take out of the real economy to put into the digital one. And because meatspace record shops are closing, you lose the experience of going to places and just having a good old rummage.
