Notes
The New Media Shelf
Rands wrote something recently about the relevance of physical books in the age of the Kindle that got me thinking.
I love and can totally relate to what Rands is talking about, not just with books but especially with albums. I have an incredibly meticulous ranking system for the CDs on my shelves, and I play with this system once every few months, taking my CDs out and sorting them by some new taxonomy. It’s a soothing experience, it reminds me of music that I love but have forgotten, and, yes, it’s slightly neurotic. I have a slightly less complex (read “actually intelligible to someone other than me”) system for my books — absolute favourites all go on one shelf, fiction over this side, non-fiction over that side; sort by author’s last name, then sort chronologically for each author.
The thing is, I have to wonder how this works outside of books and CDs. Some of my favourite things in the world are episodes of podcasts and other digital media (videos online, etc). I listen to my favourite podcast episodes about as often as my favourite albums, and podcasts are just another form of consumable media like books and albums. However, I don’t think you can obsess over podcasts (or any digital media) as much as a physical item like a book or an album.
It’s true. Sure, you can tag Born To Run with “bestalbumintheworld” or “theestreetbandarethebestbackingbandever”, but is that anywhere near as satisfying as putting that album on your little shelf (wedged between Something About Airplanes and Neon Bible) so that everyone that comes over can see it? I don’t think it is.
Does this kind of inequality make New Media “worth” “less” than tradtional media? In the Digital Age (the air-quotes are implied), how can I show that I like a bunch of 1s and 0s as much as a book?
A final thought: in High Fidelity, Rob took the time to sort his albums autobiographically (as in, in the order he bought them). In iTunes, you can do that in, like, four mouse clicks. Are those two experiences even remotely the same?
