Music... Makes the People Come Together

Some time ago a discovered this British band online. I liked the one song they had at the time, so I followed up on their website, downloaded some free music from their myspace page, became a fan on Facebook. Some videos appeared on YouTube. I put them on my wall. Finally their debut album was released but only in the UK, so it was unavailable on iTunes. Undeterred, I went on Amazon and had a physical CD shipped to me. On Saturday, less then a week after my purchase, the little plastic box, with the album's title "Happyness" across the sleek black and white photo of the band was in my mailbox in Bushwick. The same evening it was in my computer, iPod, phone...

None of these seems out of the ordinary, quite the opposite. However I remember the very first time I was wowed by the internet. It wasn't too long ago and it was also related to music. I still lived in Serbia at the time. As the country was politically and economically quite isolated, most new music could only be bought on pirated CDs. In 1997, one of my favorite singers at the time released a new album and one evening I was sitting with a group of friends at a friend's house trying to figure out lyrics to a song through the thick Icelandic accent. While we were debating the choices and analyzing the meaning of possible metaphors, my friend was fiddling with his computer, his phone and modem buzzed and clicked trying to connect to the feeble beginnings of Serbian internet, which most of us at the time had no access to, and limited understanding of. Soon he printed out the complete lyrics to the song and I was amazed at the idea of all this information available to everyone.

Talking about the evolution of media, what is specific about the latest developments is not merely the extent of change but the pace of it. The introduction of, say, the telephone certainly brought about a revolution in the way people can communicate but it took decades before every household had one. Even television slowly worked its way into every home. In a matter of years however my life became unimaginable without technology that seems to have come completely unforeseen.

Making History

In our ever-accelerating world, next big things do not last too long. Events become History sooner and movies need to be made to commemorate historical events before new history happens and we forget everything else. Hence:

Media Unlimited

Media or the amalgamated "THE Media" are (or is) everywhere around us, filling our senses and our thoughts, shaping how we feel and reason and act more than we are aware or would care to admit. This is increasingly true for every new generation that is being born as the media torrent permeates additional pores of our existence.

Writen in the pre-YouTube or even more importantly pre-Wikipedia and pre-Facebook era, Todd Gitlin's "Media Unlimited" occasionally already feels dated when dealing with the contemporary. In a strange way, however, even this fact speaks of our society. My need to click "Refresh" and get more up-to-date statistics or more relevant celebrity references just reinforces the awareness of how quickly we have become accustomed (if not addicted) to our over-connected world.

On the other hand I enjoyed the historical perspective provided through the works of great social analysts of the the development of our current state. Although I am usually inclined to be critical of media influence this book leaves me with a feeling of inevitability and, with it, indifference. I can still be critical of a certain aspect, snippet, channel, consequence of our media experience but when it comes to media's overwhelming entirety, judgement escapes me.

It seems like media have become another natural element. Like the availability of air that has led to the evolution of lungs that we breathe with, the media do shape us further. Either nothing about human civilization is natural or it is all natural progression and this book leads me to believe that perhaps as a species we are no longer evolving physically but through our technology and with it our media society we are becoming something new. Maybe it is too early, or perhaps beside the point, to judge what that is. Maybe it's what Media want me to think...

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