I’m finally almost caught up with all of the news I missed while he was gone. One piece that struck me, from Entertainment [last] Weekly, was Stephen King’s article about reading a book on his new Kindle electronic reader (1/25/08). He reminds of of a saying that “books do furnish a room,” and further finds “a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.” Leave it to an author to succinctly capture that “something” about physical media.
This started me thinking about other media. Movies, for example, also can furnish a room as well as say something about its inhabitant. For me, scanning someone’s DVD collection is the equivalent of looking through their medicine cabinet. There is something about finding common movies that another likes well enough to own that seems to speed up the social connection; perhaps because of an imagined common experience or vocabulary. I’m not sure if today, books are capable of creating this type of connection (or for that matter, a Facebook application).
Music is curiously a somewhat different matter. I remember being judged by my CD collection as an undergraduate, and in years past I have spoken with a few people who like the feel of holding a physical CD and the statement that it might make sitting on their shelf. However, while my iTunes shared music has started a few conversations and I have been a long-time user of a music networking site, statistics seem to say that CDs are increasingly for geeks who care about sound quality.
What is it about music that makes some more willing to abandon the physical medium. Is it because the ideas are not as permanent or important as those found in a book? I suspect it might have something to do with how music has become background noise for some (the white earbud syndrome), or perhaps because it doesn’t play as prominent a role in our social vocabulary as movies or books. Maybe it’s because CD spines are so small, you have to really lean in close for a look.