The end of sentimetality?
by asi
I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about life in/with the cloud. That near future where every piece of content (music, video, books etc) will be accessible in real-time, at all locations, on all platforms. Or something like that.
Now there’s been some interesting writings about our changing notions of ownership. Increasingly, some predict, people will question the need to pay for and pack their living room with piles of CDs / Vinyls or their hard drive with 300 gigs of music when you can (soon) stream every song in recorded history.
Ownership, in this scenario, will become an antiquated concept, no longer applicable to current conditions. Some people believe that the concept of ownership is going to disappear completely. For the digital natives, there wouldn’t be any difference between owning music and streaming it wherever and whenever you want. The notion of “not having that album” will be totally alien to them; they have everything, always.
I think that this scenario is missing something crucial in human psychology. If you think about ownership only through pure economic prism (there are tons of studies that show how ownership lead to increased perceptions of value) you are prone to misrepresenting the complex nature of value, or more specifically, sentimental value.
Talk to any music fan about their collection and what you are unlikely to hear is “I’ve got £17,400 worth of CDs here”. The value of the music we own and consume is far more complex than it’s economic value. It’s neither a case of pure intrinsic or final value nor is it a case of instrumental value. The relations we have with the music we own are at the center of a triangle whose points are defined by emotion, memory and the self. People invest a lot more than money in the music, (or films and books) they own.
Because sentimental value is personal rather than universal the notion that “not having that album” will be in the near future an alien concept because we have everything, always, seems pretty weak to me.
But two crucial questions remain:
1. How is the shift from physical to digital changing our relationships with objects and content?
2. How is the notion of super-abundance (i.e. the cloud) changing that triangle of emotion, memory and the self?
Will Thalia (my 2 years old) still collect music? Physical, digital, owned or not, will her generation still develop similar attachments (sentimental values) that we have with our stuff?
My teenage kids possess no music at all in physical form (ie CD). that idea is def. dead.
at home they are big users of spotify and they have invested a lot of time in building library, and constructing and sharing playlists. they have a lot of intellectual investment in this, which TBH is not dissimilar to the pride that i had in the carefully alphabetised shelf of LPs that I possessed at their age.
they do possess a lot of mp3 files which are used in their mp3 players. There are two reasons why possessing your own mp3 files are still important-
- to provide music on the move (obviously). the alternative: (eg) premium spotify + data charges + suitable phone is beyond their means.
- sharing. if they go to a friends house it is easy to plug their mp3 player into local docking station/speakers and play it. It’s far easier than any alternative.
I think an interesting challenge is going to be controlling the content we all create on the cloud. Who owns my spotify playlists? Can I transfer them to napster if I want to ?
Thanks botogol for your insightful comment. that’s exactly what I’m interested in.
How is the emotional investment is changing with the shift from physical to digital? Is there anything different at all when teenagers experience music minus two senses (i.e. touch and see of the physical CD or vinyl?
What’s worse is this idea of “ownership” is starting to have other blurry edges in my life, beyond my music & iPhone. For example, I feel like I don’t need to “own” a man because I can do the equivalent of “streaming” one. It’s scary!!