I’ve been thinking lately about how the eternal on-ness of global connection has given way to the loss of self to some degree. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that the incredible ease in which I can go online and find something I’m looking for is inherently bad — just that I often remember and kind of miss that it wasn’t always this easy to fall down a rabbit hole. And I’m not necessarily saying that this global connection is breeding some kind of conformity, because if anything, it’s done the exact opposite and opened several social avenues for people who might not have had this access in the past.
I’m just saying that if I’m passive about this global connection, that I just let it wash over me with minimal reaction or emotional resonance, then all it’s ever been is a white noise distraction and a folly.
Right now as I’m writing this on late Sunday afternoon, I’m listening to Radiohead’s Kid A, an album released twenty-six years ago this month, and I recall buying it on cassette at Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst, and listening to it on the way home. Driving through the back woods of central Massachusetts on a cold afternoon, the New England foliage just reaching its peak. I’m looking forward to getting home to work on A Division of Souls on my PC in my parents’ basement. We had the internet back then of course — it was dial-up and the local phone lines wouldn’t upgrade for another year or so — but I was more focused on writing my new novel instead of futzing around online. I saved that for the late nights on weekends when I had time to kill and nobody to accidentally disconnect me.
I say this because I find it morbidly fascinating that I can listen to Kid A and am immediately connecting with the music on a deeper and closer level, as I hadn’t had as much distraction, nor was I fully plugged in and mainlining sounds from hither and yon. I’d given myself more time and patience to resonate with the music I surrounded myself with. And then I’ll put on, say, A Moon Shaped Pool from 2016, and it’s much harder for me to connect. I know what it is, and it’s not that I’ve lost interest in the band. It’s because in those ensuing ten years, I’ve ingested so much music, most of it passively or merely in passing, that that resonance isn’t nearly as strong.
Is it because my memory is almost full? Or is it because I’ve rewired my brain so much over the years that the connections aren’t as easy to revisit? I’ve been going through my library and ‘retiring’ a good portion of it — saving the secondary backup but deleting it from the main source drive — in order to rectify this. I think of it as selling my old physical copies at record stores back in the day, getting rid of the excess to lighten the load a bit and maybe get something back from it.
Why do I want to reinvest in this ‘resonance’, as I keep calling it? Well, it’s because that’s the primal reason for me loving music in the first place. A song that sings to me. A style or a genre that inspires or influences me in one way or another. It’s still there, I know it is, it’s just become so much harder to reach because of this passive intake and its ensuing clutter.
