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Analogue days and modern low-fi

1/11/2018

 
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I wish I'd kept my old record player – and the albums too!  They were beautiful objects in their own right and loaded with memories. And it seems that these days vinyl records are making a comeback. It's not just the secondhand record shops that are selling them. Artists are putting new releases onto vinyl.

I vividly remember the first album I bought with my own money: Tubular Bells. I don't know what it cost, but I remember having to save for it. I must have been about 11 or 12 and I remember the excitement of getting home, and putting it on my old mono recordplayer. The magical track is embedded deep in memory for me and I still enjoy the layered composition and appreciate its 'realness' (in that it isn't 'perfect' because Mike Oldfield was using an 8-track recording system that was state of the art at the time, but now superseded).

The word analogue, when you look it up in my hardback Collins Dictionary, means "a physical object or quantity that is used to measure or represent another quantity". But is has come to mean "the opposite of digital", as stated in the Oxford online dictionary.  Analogue devices (watches, cameras, VHS players and record players) occupy real space and have visibly moving parts: you put a record on a turntable and it spins around. These days even CDs and DVDs can be considered analogue, when compared to the digital players that can carry a whole record or movie collection in the space of a few square inches.

While digital devices are convenient in terms of storage (and these days you can even store data in 'the cloud'), they do not have the real-life qualities of analogue machines. A digital photograph might be great for manipulating but you will never have that 'happy accident' when an overexposure turns into something like art. Similarly, a digital recording does not have the scratchy crackle of a much-played vinyl record and it will never hold a memory in its grooves of all the times it was played and loved. I remember my Songs in the Key of Life album – scavenged when my sister left home – that always jumped on 'Love's in Need of Love Today'. Records often jumped on the first track because this is where you put the needle down (if you were impatient and didn't want to wait for the player to do it!). Gosh – just looking the record up has given me a flood of memories!! I really must buy the album again.


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In our increasingly digital world, a move back to analogue is not recidivism. It is a move towards an appreciation of realness. Also, when you play something on an analogue device, no one is keeping score and working out a playlist for you – no one is using your preferences to create a profile for marketing purposes. (The album on the right is another early one I bought, and very meaningful for me.  Though my original was thrown out when my childhood home was cleared, a lovely friend gave me a replacement. )

In the future there will be digital advertising on every available piece of space (think about Philip K. Dick's vision in Minority Report, the scene where Tom Cruise's character is walking through a shopping mall). You may have interactive adverts, personalised adverts, or be given rewards for participating in advertising campaigns. The only way to be free is to UNPLUG yourself. And if more people start doing that now, the drift towards this sort of advertising will slacken off. Advertisers are only interested in making the sale; if enough people unplug, they will have to use analogue methods and go back to posters, leaflets and flyers, which can be annoying but don't get inside your head like the digital adverts do.

You can still enjoy digital technology – but in an analogue, real-life way. Simply unplug from the Internet as often as you can. Limit how much TV you watch and get your news from a reliable source like The Guardian (NOT Facebook and definitely not Trump's tweets – ha ha). While writing this blog, there were no adverts interrupting my flow and I had music playing in the background via my iPod dock. It's possible to limit digital exposure. I'm calling it "going low-fi".


Do you have a private life?

24/10/2018

 
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Right now we live in a digital world. There is no way to avoid it. Even if we never go on social media, we all use the Internet. And I'm not knocking it – the Internet is a wonderful thing. It offers so much in the way of communication, knowledge-sharing and connection. But this digital world in which we swim on a daily basis (for most of us) is not private. There are many making a tidy business out of hoovering up our data.

You may well think – so what? Who cares about little old me? My few bits of data in the ocean of the Internet don't really matter. Well I guess that's true. But whatever happened to having a private life? Don't you think that you deserve it? It's getting harder to have. You use Spotify for your music; you chat to friends on Whats App; you plan events and outings on Facebook; you publish blogs (um... like this one) on the web; you make recordings of your life and publish photos on Instagram... and so on. And now (well, for some time really) Google want to give us the whole package with Google Home, a speaker that acts as an assistant to help you plan your day and hook up your TV, radio, music and anything you'd like to search for on the Internet (so neatly netting ALL your data in one scoop) Thanks Google! There is also Amazon Echo that does much the same thing. Recently I went in to a local hi-fi chain and tried to by a CD player and ALL of them came with the 'Google Home' app as a 'free extra'. No thank you.

But it is still possible to have a private life. You just unplug yourself. (And use cash in supermarkets.) You have the choice – at the moment, at least. When I went up to Hanmer for a retreat, I discovered my cabin didn't have wi-fi – shock, horror!! But actually... it was marvellous. All emails had to wait. No social media posts (for me to make or read)... just space... and time... and privacy. So one morning I woke before dawn and walked up Conical Hill through the forest. And I thought to myself  "No one in the world knows I am here – but I do". And that's all that matters. Being here, now, just me. Later I listened to some music on a CD player and watched a DVD. I won't tell you what, cos it's private!

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A walk in the forest fills me up and makes me feel better than any amount of web surfing. I ditch the digital 'noise' in my head for the sweet sound of rustling trees and birdsong. There is more wisdom to be found in a forest than in the whole of the Internet. And there is no one 'listening in' either.

Be free. Be you. Unplug as often as you can.

Namaste.

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