There are no conclusions here.

Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a while--I went out to see a concert for bands that I had never heard before. I feel like this recalls back to ye olden days before MP3s and even before CDs--when bands actually had to tour to get their fanbase established. It seems strange to me now that people would go through so much effort to find out when tours were, when today the music scene is just an internet race to see who Panicked at the Disco first.

Indie rock has become much more accessible, which I think is great--but now Indie has become a genre in and of itself--the music all begins to start the same, despite the fact that the term "indie" technically means that it is music produced on an independent label (that most likely would allow more creative rein). So many bands now spring up, knowing that they can eliminate the middleman and build a fanbase online without having to hire someone with the connections to book shows right away, I think it sort of dilutes the pool of talent.

Some would argue that this is the "mass of mediocrity" effect of the internet, but it actually takes a lot more now for a band to become popular and be lucrative. Like anything else on the internet, only things that are particularly noteworthy or interesting (not necessarily for lofty artistic reasons) catch the public eye.



I thought it was interesting that for each of the bands that played, the first search result on Google was their Myspace music page. I kind of forgot it existed

Technology-->hermits

So I noticed myself doing something technology-related today that I realized was very sad, because I'm sure I'm not the only person who does it.

I got a nice, chatty email from one of the leaders at an organization I used to volunteer for, inviting me out to coffee over Spring Break to catch up. I starred it so I could deal with it later, not because I didn't have time then, but because I just didn't feel like having to respond to an email thoughtfully. Most of my emails are strictly informational--things like Facebook notifications, academic and club listserv messages, advertisements--none of which I have to act upon, or even really think about. I can just passively read about what's going on, and it's not as if anyone would feel ignored or offended.

The advent of social networking allows us to see what's happening in the lives of our friends without actually having to talk to them. Email listservs and the CC function allow us to recieve information in a similar way. None of these are new technologies by any means, but I wanted to open it up to you all--does technology make you more or less social?

It depends on personality, of course, but it just really dawned on me today with my response to that email, because I realized that I tend to do that with personal emails, and they often get forgotten as my inbox fills with more and more stuff. It's counterintuitive, but when I go on Gmail, I'm not expecting to interact with people anymore via email. Chat has replaced that for me. I wonder if this trend will continue, and using email for personal notes will seem odd to everyone.

Or it could just be me, and my slow descent into allowing the internet to consume my life.
(I just got Corel Painter over the weekend so I'm trying to learn how to use it...)

Attention Span

As I'm coming out of a four-day stint of studying almost constantly for my midterms this week, I'm feeling a little drained. It's hard to pay attention to any one thing for more than a few minutes. I know it's just because I'm tired, but as I was trying to beat my staticky brain into thinking up a blog post, I wondered: isn't this what has been happening to Americans for years now?

Our attention spans are just shrinking. First it was because of the mind-numbing, formula-bound television that just didn't require us to think. Now, the internet feeds us snippets of information, whatever we want to know. Admittedly, it's a more cerebral activity than eating chips and watching terrible Full House reruns, but our tolerance for waiting for the right information is quickly decreasing.

I remember when I would ride the bus to high school and keep flipping through my iPod's shuffle function--I couldn't just listen to a song in its entirety because I would get bored, or I would think of another song in the middle of the one I was already listening to. Or, think of how the average student does his or her work--homework on WebAssign might be up in one tab of Mozilla, Facebook in another, maybe Gmail or Youtube in the third--we're not really paying attention to any one of those things, and so it takes much longer to accomplish anything.

Whatever is the most entertaining will grip us, at least for a few minutes. Most of what's on Facebook or Youtube really isn't that entertaining, so we've conditioned ourselves to tune out whatever doesn't grab our attention within the first few moments.

This pattern of only paying attention for a few minutes at a time is really damaging the way we work. Reading an entire blog post is stretching it sometimes. It's easier to just get the gist of things from an RSS feed, even if it's truncated. Did you even read this far?