Root Down

The shortcuts. The quality that we concede for accessibility is more far-reaching than gadgets and personal tech items. It's in our conversations. It's in our mannerisms, our diets, our plans, and commitments (or lack thereof), and it's in our personal images of ourselves. We have abbreviated so much in our culture and lifestyles that it seems very possible that we do not enjoy things as much as we used to. There exists, instead, an itch, an anxiety, a beating-down the door for more and more within the seemingly endless possibilities that our modern accessibility advantages offer.
And I’m not sure it's a good thing.
It affects our politics, our art, and our state. "Too much of a good thing" is not merely a possibility anymore, but it seems to clearly exist as a perpetual standard. In general, I call my feelings against the abbreviation brought on by new technology “Techmostalgia.” My romanticized longing for the technology of things that have only been recently made obsolete, but represent the loss of quality and presence of the activity to compression and simplification of 21st century scatter-media. It’s my sentimentalized longing for modern tech in a post-modern world.
Furthermore, techmostalgia is my longing for not just tech, but for art of prior eras, recent ones, e.g. the 1970s/80s, and the process, the intimacy, the special-ness of producing art: writing, film, music. Its sacredness, its worth, its value has been devalued by accessibility and increased frequency, a watering-down, a thinning of the stew in favor of "quantity over quality" or “more is better.”
The most glaring example of truncation in our tech culture is in music--Film-media is a very close runner-up, but people like Paul Thomas Anderson still shoot on film, sometimes 70mm, to glorious, wondrous results. Technology in the 21st century has created an intensified simplicity of convenience for the things that we used to take closely-meditated time to appreciate: music, film, gaming, communication, education, etc. In such short periods, the transformation of our technological culture as “aiding” is now “piloting,” as we are beyond the use of tech as a means to do something, but tech is now solely the thing that we do. I don’t like it, kids.
I look at the home stereo, particularly the record player setup, as the richest example of techmostalgia and my quandary. The active process of listening to music is central with a turntable stereo. You are present: you must be in a generally tight radius to experience it to get up, flip the record, or change the record for more tuneage, which encourages an active, focused experience.
Music listening is hardly the central activity in our modern society of smartphone mp3 storage and streaming systems like Spotify. The activity of music is secondary, as we listen to music while we walk to work, to school, on our automobile and mass-transit commutes; while we exercise; while we work; while we cook, eat, drink, and socialize. The act of music listening has become, with convenience and technological compression, secondary to the activity of something else that music has come to help us purely enjoy. The home stereo as a whole, by virtue of its technology, forces you to be present in a way that the 1500 tunes in your pocket does not--and that’s besides the quality itself, which is unmatched completely. You have to be there, in the room, engaged with the music. You are required to be more aware than is required with those uncomfortable sets of earbuds and touch screens. The given loss in post-modern technology is quality--that can go without saying. But the presence of the activity is a much deeper loss, because slowed-down, contemplative moments are more necessary than ever. Gadgets are wonderful, but to have access to their speed and brevity so often, an inundation of the constant, is making us less accepting of the things that are really beautiful and more accessible than our phones: literally everything else naturally around you.
The modern tech of 10, 20 years ago is representative of a damn fine balance between our inner lives and our exterior actions. It's activity with presence. And it’s golden. We currently reside in an oft-lost convergence of self in 2015, because we are in constant flux, a clamoring for pace and reaction to match action borne so compulsively through accessibility.
The older I get, the more I begin to feel disassociated with pop culture, which is something that i'd never thought I'd say; I've always been a pop-culture hound. But it strikes me, too, that we aren't enjoying these new gadgets as much as we project, which the word “need” identifies. We more "need" them as a reaction to the rapid, rigidly progressing landscape of pop culture and societal shifts.
The age group that I'm most in contact with these days is the 18-21 urban African-American/Hispanic crowd. The word "want" rarely (nearly ever) is uttered when the desire for new tech (or much else, for that matter) grabs them. The drop of the new Android/Apple device as desired is expressed as a necessity: "I need that." I seem often asking myself, at what point does the speed and regularity of our encounters devalue personal technology's function, allure, and ingenuity? When do we stop being impressed, awestruck, inspired, etc. by a thing and just merely expect it? What happens then? Has it already happened? Again, my experiences with younger Americans shows me that there is disingenuousness in the culture, a loss of satisfaction with the replacement of necessity. A need for “keeping up,” it seems, all around.
On the surface, and I admit, this seems like a case of generational disaffection, but really do think about this. A great possibility for my techmostalgia is likely the realization that I am entering the void of aging and in it a quarreling with the modern and a contemptuous vision for the future based on personal preference. But I’m positive that our culture’s transitional rapidity has created too many social and psychological gaps, leaving us in a state of moderate satisfaction. And that is a direction that I will do almost anything to avoid heading into 30.
Obviously, I am not pleased. But as long as I can still fuck around with my record player, embracing my techmostalgia for its inherent worth to me, and not the possible superficiality, and play my $45 special edition There Will Be Blood and $50 Criterion Carlos (DVDs have, what, three years of relevance left?), I guess I can manage, or better, reset and refresh from a culture running faster than I'd prefer.

Pat Marino appreciates pink translucent vinyl.