The Medium Is (Still) the Message
a.k.a. Even in electronic music, the internet and social media have us all at each other's throats. That's not a coincidence.
Have you read the “Arguing Ourselves to Death” essay?
Written by Jay Caspian Kang, it’s the first installment of Fault Lines, a new weekly column the Berkeley-based writer will be doing for The New Yorker. And while he promises that said column will primarily focus on politics and the media, his first edition started things off by zeroing in on much different topic: surfing.
Surfing? I imagine some First Floor readers are already thinking, “What in the hell does this have to do with electronic music?”
Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Just bear with me.
It’s true that Kang spends several paragraphs sharing all sorts of details about Bay Area surfing, and somehow even manages to slip in a mention of what’s often been described as “the most beautiful Taco Bell in the world.” But amidst all his talk of waves, weather and parking hassles lies something deeper, and more universal: the internet. It seems that the culture of surfing, like that of seemingly every other interest and activity on the planet, has been not just affected, but completely transformed by our increasingly online existence, and those changes haven’t always been for the better.
Moreover, many of those changes weren’t something that surfers—or anyone—actually asked for. In the piece, Kang quotes Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book by the late author Neil Postman that included the following passage:
What is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
Sound familiar? What’s funny is that Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, and Postman was writing about television. Nearly 40 years later, a different medium—the internet, and social media in particular—is driving the cultural discourse, yet Postman’s words still seem incredibly pertinent.
Kang applies this framework to surfing, but someone could just have easily used electronic music or DJ culture as a jumping-off point. Reading his words, I flashed back to so many topics that I’ve touched upon here in the newsletter over the years, and realized that the omnipresence of the internet profoundly shaped them all. In some cases (e.g. the increasingly influencer-esque nature of life as a professional DJ, the pressure artists feel to project success at all times, the seeming disposability of regional music trends, the shrinking demand for music news), that influence directly triggered the situation being discussed; other times (e.g. the endless debates over pop edits, vinyl and the relevance of the album format), it merely laid out the terms of debate. Whenever these conversations arise, people (myself included) naturally tend to focus on the subjects being talked about, but where and how those discussions unfold rarely receive much consideration. That, it seems, has been a colossal mistake.