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\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried that experiences are becoming disposable. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried that in our striving to make experiences simpler, easier, and faster, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re also somehow stripping their soul, their meaning. <\/p>\n
The subtext beneath this implies that we are supposed to use the time, money and attention that simpler, easier and faster frees up to consume even more experiences. But before we get a chance to really connect with any single given experience, before we can press beyond its surface, before it has a chance to naturally unfold and leave us changed, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re off to the next one, and the one after that, and so on, and so on.<\/p>\n
This raises an important question for designers: is it out job to merely accelerate experience consumption, or is it to deepen and enrich experience connection? <\/p>\n
While our own individual answers likely strike some balance between these two extremes, the trend I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m afraid appears to be very much toward acceleration at the expense of connection. <\/p>\n
Economically, this makes a lot of sense. Today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s experiences are off-the-shelf products, mass-produced, mass-marketed and mass-consumed. But an experience can only be monetized once, so superficial disposable experiences are much more economically attractive than deep lasting experiences because they can be monetized more frequently.<\/p>\n
The economics of the matter then encourages the design of experiences that are standardized, that have extremely short self-lives, and that are disposable. These are to the human soul what McDonald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s is to the human body. <\/p>\n
Enough with the abstraction, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s get concrete. <\/p>\n
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t listen to music the same way anymore. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know many people who do. When I was a kid all my music was on tape and I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a lot of money to throw around. So getting new music and listening to it took a lot of time and effort. This time and effort meant listening carefully to each track, listening to whole albums at once, and listening to the same albums over and over again. It was like developing a relationship.<\/p>\n
Today I have several gigs of music on my hard drive and I subscribe to Yahoo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s music service which puts several hundred more only click away. I keep some of it on my Zen on constant shuffle (not so sure about the shuffling since it seems to really be enjoying Goldfrapp these days). I have an incredible variety that crosses genres, decades, continents and even tastes, only a click away\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand it has all started to blend into one relatively undifferentiated mass of sound with which I have absolutely no emotional connection.<\/p>\n
If I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get a visceral jolt from a song, click and its on to the next one. Like a junkie I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m chasing that one great high, that one great hook. I can hardly listen to the same artist more than twice a day\u00e2\u20ac\u201cand why should I with thousands of artists all clamouring for my ear and approving mouse click. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m no sooner coming down from the sugar sweetness of Mint Royal than I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m twanging away with Niko Case or camping it up with the Sissor Sisters\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really make a difference. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all sooo easy. And the medium\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inherent ease keeps me hungry for ever more music, keeps me hooked to the service, and helps ensure that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get too attached to any one song, band or genre.<\/p>\n
What originally seemed like such a blessing, is turning into a bit of a curse. Obviously I can still listen the way I used to\u00e2\u20ac\u201cnothing is really preventing that. But the medium itself has evolved to tersely discourage close listening, to discourage connection. The medium wants you, it needs you to listen to more, more, more tracks by more artists, more superficially, more disposably. It needs you to consume not connect. <\/p>\n
The entire business model of disposability is predicated on rapid, massive, non-reflective, superficial consumption. Fine for tissues, but for music? For experiences?<\/p>\n
The effort involved in both production and consumption of music is evaporating. The individual song is fast becoming completely disposable, cheapening music into becoming mere background hippness for life as a Mitsubishi commercial (thanks for ruining T.Rex and the Wiseguys for me Mitsubishi). Its fast, its easy, its non-committal, its autonomic, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plenty more more more where it came from, so no need to pay too much attention to what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hearing now. <\/p>\n
Truth be told I can no longer stomach the Thievery Corporation because it is so disposable. Forget about the medium, the content itself doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want you to connect with it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mere auditory decoration, mere vapid paint by numbers West Elm lifestyle ‘hipness’ for your ears. There’s nothing to connect with. But I degress…<\/p>\n
Of course your personal music experience may be quite different from mine\u00e2\u20ac\u201cI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure it is at least a little different\u00e2\u20ac\u201cand you may not really see it as disposable. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine, because my point here hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been to wax ludditic and moan about how things aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t as good as they used to be (although I do wonder how Kate Bush would do if she was just starting out today). <\/p>\n
My point (in case it got lost in all these words, words, words, dear Polonius) was simply to illustrate the disposability of experience by contrasting my music listening experience of today with yesterday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, and ask the question of design how will we balance the tension between accelerating consumption and deepening connection without losing our souls or our jobs?<\/p>\n
PS
\nNext time I’ll get into television and how advances in distribution are driving the experience of watching tv shows in the exact opposite direction from listening to music, in terms of experience and connection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried that experiences are becoming disposable. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried that in our striving to make experiences simpler, easier, and faster, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re also somehow stripping their soul, their meaning. The subtext beneath this implies that we are supposed to use the time, money and attention that simpler, easier and faster frees up to consume […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-U","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}