"Top Economists Study What Happens When You Stop Using Facebook"

Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism reports on a paper examining the effects of not using Facebook. I'll assume the results apply to other social media as well.

Perhaps most interesting was the disconnect between the subjects’ experience with deactivating Facebook and their prediction about how other people would react. “About 80 percent of the Treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them,” reports the researchers. But this same group was likely to believe that others wouldn’t experience similar positive effects, as they would likely “miss out” more. The specter of FOMO, in other words, is hard to shake, even after you’ve learned through direct experience that in your own case this “fear” was largely hype.

This final result tells me that perhaps an early important step in freeing our culture from indentured servitude in social media’s attention mines is convincing people that abstention is an option in the first place.

Newport's blog entry is worth reading. I might read the report itself as well.

The Empty Page

Disjointed thoughts about writing on paper composed on the computer after having read Colin Walker's blog (which you should be reading too).

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It's fun to read Colin Walker's thoughts as he moves to writing everything by hand. There's real joy there. I know that feeling, even though I'm drafting this on the computer in Writer: The Internet Typewriter an editor I've loved for years. It's great for creation (and surprisingly good for revision), but like any electronic writing tool it can disappear words too easily.

I remember computers in the nineties. I'd write for hours until someone tripped on the power cord. The machine would go black and quiet. All was lost. Rebooting led to a blank screen and blinking cursor, confirming the unsaved draft was completely gone.

I lost seventeen pages that way once. Poof.

Technological breakdowns like that have been largely overcome, but the biggest dangers of writing on the computer remain: the delete and backspace keys and the writers who use them too much sometimes on pages and pages of work. It seems the same as crumpling paper and starting a new sheet but if feels different and has very different consequences.

Colin Walker is describing the power of analog writing and the need for things touched, felt, and held onto. I have a handwritten story from tenth grade (1983) that barring disaster can easily remain readable, tactile, and (dare I say it) delightful for centuries. Every time I dig it out, I smile both at the thought of myself back then and at the feeling of holding those pages.

The power of analog creation begins with the blank page on the desk and the pen in hand, the writer palpable in the process and not mediated by electricity, networks, or file formats. Palpable means able to be touched and such things have more heft, a feeling about them of value. Filling half a page by pen, I'm likely to keep going with my thinking and accept the imperfections. Filling the whole page, I begin to feel the act of writing revealing what I want to say as well as how I want to say it. Even if I crumple it and throw it in the bin, until the recycling is collected, there's still the artifact. It's right there within reach. I can see it. I know it's there.

Analog writing depends completely on the actions of the writer. Auto-correct kicks in when I feel a misspelling or misplaced comma. Formatting consists of underlines, circles, the occasional use of all-caps. Revisions are actual marks on the page, lines drawn from place to place, and scribbled in additions. Sometimes the writing flows around a drawing, post-it, or coffee stain. It's all up to me.

One reason I don't much like Microsoft Word is that it wants to do more of the work for me. I'm more creative when I'm alone with the words and, quite literally, left to my own devices.

Writing on paper connects me with the act of writing. It changes my thinking. On paper I'm a writer, not a publisher or editor. I write words, lots of them, and that takes me places.

Walker sounds like a writer and thinker here:

I now find a blank page inviting, a place of discovery where I don't know what I am going to find but will enjoy the hunt."

The blank analog page, once marked, can't be made blank again. That's its killer feature.

The Year In Records

I like records. A lot. Listening to records beats streaming. The analog sound isn't quantitatively superior to digital, but I listen better to a record than to a stream. Put an album on and I'm there, really there, for the duration.

I picked up thirty-seven albums this year, mostly used, but a few are brand new pressings of brand new albums. Here's the 2019 rundown:

I've listened to Genesis since seventh grade and have almost completed the collection with Wind & Wuthering, Trespass, ...And Then There Were Three, Swelled And Spent (a bootleg of the The Lamb), Three Sides Live (Import) and Phil Collins' solo album, Face Value which works better as a whole record instead of individual songs.

My favorite albums in middle school were Supertramp's Even In The Quietest Moments... and Crime Of The Century, perfect examples of eighties pop. You don't get much better than "Fools Overture." Just handling these albums feels like the best kind of time travel.

I bought Steely Dan's Gold to have a vinyl copy "FM (No Static At All)" and "Babylon Sisters" on an album better than the one on which it originally appeared.

In high school, I avoided Bruce Springsteen because he was too popular, but I got over that and this year bought Nebraska, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and the brand new Western Stars which, to my ear, is one of his best.

I didn't even know that Lou Reed's New York, one of the best rock and roll albums ever, came out on vinyl, but there it was in the bin. You bet I snagged it.

I grabbed some oldies too. Paul McCartney's Tug Of War (which isn't all that old), Glen Campbell's Greatest Hits (which my wife forbids playing in her presence), Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Randy Newman's eponymous first album (both brilliant though very differently so).

There aren't many better songwriters than Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, and The Decemberists. Illinois, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and The Hazards Of Love represent some of their best work.

I can't get enough of old jazz like Getz/Gilberto #2, Vince Guaraldi Trio's Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers_, and Cannonball Adderly's, Something' Else. I'm especially devoted to the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond, so I picked up the Quartet's _Time In, Brandenburg Gate: Revisited, Jazz Impressions Of The U.S.A., and Desmond's Bossa Antigua and First Place Again.

Jazz fusion such as Jean-Luc Ponty's Aurora, Andy Summers & Robert Fripp's I Advance Masked, and Al Di Meola's Casino reminds me of record shopping at Spectrum and Desert Shore on the Syracuse University Hill back before I could drive. That Centro bus ride home felt endless with new records in hand.

Brand new jazz this year included The Bad Plus' Activate Infinity and the absolutely spectacular Finding Gabriel by Brad Mehldau. Nonesuch released Mehldau's best solo piano performanceLive In Tokyo on vinyl and sent me a sampler album too. Sweet.

A pretty good year for records, but then, any analog year is pretty good. On to 2020!

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Without intending to buy any more records in 2019, on December 30, at Barnes & Noble I found The Decemberists' I'll Be Your Girl for fifty-percent off. I couldn't pass that up and so now it's thirty-eight albums for the year. That's one better than thirty-seven, in case you hadn't noticed.

Bootleg Records From Long Ago

I stopped at a used record shop for an old Genesis bootleg I had seen there last week. If it was still there, I'd count that as fate saying I just had to buy it. There it was and so I bought it. Of course I did.

I buy mostly used records. I buy some new albums, but used stuff is more interesting. Most shops are poorly organized, so I hunt for the good stuff. That's fine so long as I'm on my own. Anyone with me wonders, as the first half hour passes, when they'll be released and when I might look up and rejoin the world. Flipping through, I'm somewhere and some-when else.

Anyone who thrifts for clothes, old car parts, or what have you knows this feeling of drifting away, of solitude that is all too rare these days. I even switch my phone off while in the temples of vinyl. There were no mobile phones back in record days.

Records are things of the past. They're making a comeback of sorts but won't ever be mainstream again and so they harken back to another time. I won't say it was a better time we should go back to. That nonsense leads to racist red baseball hats. However, like cherry picked classic rock, I go back for some of that era's greatest hits.

I'm alone in the house with the bootleg record on the turntable. The recording is terrible (the audience member's microphone seems to have been incapable of recording bass), but the experience is as close as I can get to being back in tenth grade. Then there was no YouTube filled with every bootleg known to fandom. Instead, I dug through bins at Desert Shore and hoped for the best when I brought one home where, by myself or with my best friend, I'd put the record on (often with a fresh TDK or Maxell tape recording it) and listen carefully. I remember hearing this bootleg back then, imagining myself at the concert that had happened ten years before, back when I was only seven. It was a bit of magic. Now, rather than imagining the concert I never saw, I recall the red and black rug, the Technics turntable, the view out my bedroom windows, the scratched and pitted recording that is my memory and which is much less clear than the audio on this bootleg.

Flipping through records I recall my younger self trying work through the store methodically but drifting from jazz to rock, working through A, B, and C but then jumping to G and finding the bootleg I didn't know I had been looking for but which felt just right and so full of possibility. There I am, paying the bill, catching the bus from the SU Hill back home. Up in my room, I open the turntable, slip the record from its sleeve, and set the needle in the groove for a listen. It comes back to me across four decades, like an old song whose words are all still there, whose every melody is etched into me.

That terrible bootleg record sounds awfully good to me.