Think of a song that resonates deep down in your being. Now imagine sitting down with someone who was there when the song was recorded and can tell you how that series of sounds was committed to tape, and who can also explain why that particular combination of rhythms, timbres and pitches has lodged in your memory, making your pulse race and your heart swell every time you hear it.
Remarkably, Levitin does all this and more, interrogating the basic nature of hearing and of music making (this is likely the only book whose jacket sports blurbs from both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder), without losing an affectionate appreciation for the songs he’s reducing to neural impulses. Levitin is the ideal guide to this material: he enjoyed a successful career as a rock musician and studio producer before turning to cognitive neuroscience, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a top researcher into how our brains interpret music.
Though the book starts off a little dryly (the first chapter is a crash course in music theory), Levitin’s snappy prose and relaxed style quickly win one over and will leave readers thinking about the contents of their iPods in an entirely new way.
“Do you own technology or does technology own you?”
I’m really looking forward to reading the new book (The Next Story) by my friend Tim Challies. Below is a trailer produced by his publisher for the book. It is available for pre-order through Amazon.com and Westminster.
Look for an interview with Tim here at The Ascent to Truth in the next month or so.
Via John Dyer: The Table Project is one of many new socially oriented web platforms being released for churches… Take a look at the promo video and then let’s discuss. (watch)
I say – doomed. Noble, but doomed. That’s not to say that nobody will sign up, but within a relatively short period they’ll lose interest. Some will continue to use it but most will acknowledge the fact that nobody wants another social network they feel obligated to check in with every day, especially when they’d be checking in with the same people they’re already checking in with every day on Facebook.
It would be like talking to the same person on two phones, one on each ear. “Let’s talk about life in general in the left one, but churchy, intimate stuff on the right one, ok?” It’s like a “secular” song recut with Christian lyrics – we all know which song it is and we insert the original words over your substitutes and, eventually, we acknowledge that the original is better than your recut and we go back to listening to it. It’s like asking the person you meet you for coffee every week to meet with you twice every week because there’s a new Christian coffee shop in town.
In the same way, we all know that The Table Project is Facebook with a different face. We can also see that it might be better than Facebook in a some ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an existing song with Christianized lyrics (a good/bad example of that here).
Conclusions
I’d like to be wrong on this one because it does look like a noble idea. So I, like John Dyer, wish them the best, but I’ll wager two things:
(1) Nobody who is already on Facebook will abandon Facebook for this so it will consume more of their time, not less.
More time online means less time offline, which means a decrease in face-to-face interaction. The creators of The Table admit as much in a blog post on their site (read): “To be clear, we are not trying to compete with or replace Facebook. We act as a compliment to global networks such as Facebook.” In other words, “We want people to keep social networking elsewhere but also on our site.” How is that compatible with the goal of increasing local human connection?
(2) Very few people who are not currently engaged in social media will suddenly become engaged just because there is a Christian alternative.
The whole idea of The Table is to cause a transference of behavior from an existing network to another network. It needs to leverage people’s behavior on Facebook and to exploit their familiarity with it in order to engage them in the same behavior in a “safer” space. The problem is that if you’re not already assimilated into social media culture, The Table is every bit as foreign and foreboding as Facebook.
What do you think? Are my conclusions plausible or ridiculous?
I recently, finally, got an iPhone. After the first few days I am experiencing the same things I did when I got my first MacBook. I knew it was going to be good, but I didn’t know it was going to be THIS good.
What an amazing device. My experience with Apple products can be summed up in the following phrase: BELIEVE THE HYPE. I came to Apple products as a skeptic, and I am now a believer.
I know, I know… I sound like I should be wearing this t-shirt:
Not quite… I’m not religiously devoted to Apple products, but their quality and innovation do inspire admiration. So unless you are a gamer, you need a Mac.
On March 25-26 2011 I’ll be in Seattle at BibleTech 2011, a conference about – you guessed it – “Bible” and “Technology” (You are so s-m-r-t). I’ll be live-blogging for the 8Bit Network.
This two-day conference is designed for publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study.
BibleTech 2011 is an opportunity to meet others who share your interests and hear from industry leaders. If your passion is the Bible and technology, this conference is for you!
I’ll also be writing a special feature for Christian Week after the event and (of course) I’m hoping to check out Mars Hill Church while I’m there.
From TED, inventor Pranav Mistry talks about the thrilling potential of SixthSense technology. Watch this incredible demonstration of the integration of information into everyday objects.
Pranav Mistry: “I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. And it will help us, actually, not be machines sitting in front of other machines.”
Getting information from the internet, someone said, is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. The flow of information is overwhelming and it’s more than anyone can possibly consume. Appropriate use of the internet then involves trying to get what you need from the torrent of information without getting completely soaked.
The mass of information can be equal blessing and curse. If you haven’t experienced this yet, you probably will since, as novelist William Gibson once said, “There’s a big cinder block stuck on the technology accelerator pedal, and we’re only gonna go faster and faster, never stopping.”
There are others who believe, like humorist Andy Rooney that, “Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.” I do not share this opinion.
I am, admittedly, a voracious user of the internet, and I work hard at getting the drink I need from the hydrant without being knocked over by the force of the pressure. I don’t always succeed…
I am a gatherer, a collector, of items both digital and physical. As the number of information sources increases, so does my desire to monitor them. I am constantly attempting to consume more than I can contain or process.
Futurist and philosopher John Naisbitt, in his book MindSet, proposes a solution to this scenario: when you begin to monitor something new, you must drop something else. To continue to monitor an ever-increasing pool of information is to create, in Naisbitt’s words, “a graveyard of information”– stuff we collect but never use.
My own information graveyard is pretty big. I have tried to apply Naisbitt’s principle to both my physical and digital life, ruthlessly discarding or selling off things I keep but never use. But in the digital realm there is less incentive to do this since storage costs almost nothing and takes up no more physical space when it’s 250 gigabytes of information than when it’s one.
The questions I keep asking myself are: What am I afraid I’m going to miss? What am I going to miss? What am I really going to miss?
That Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan is a hero of mine should be no secret to those of you who have known me for some time. For me, reading McLuhan is second in effect and benefit only to reading scripture itself. I could prove this by showing you my tattered, dog-eared, underlined, highlighted, scribbled in and held-together-with-tape copy of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”.
The Medium Is The Message
The aphorism “The medium is the message” basically means that the content of a medium is not its message – or at least not the totality of it. Obsession with content masks the real facilitator of change – the medium itself. In McLuhan’s words: “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
The true message of a medium is its effect on humanity and human interaction. Some media expand and enrich our potential for human flourishing; others diminish it. The judgment of whether a medium is good or bad has less to do with the content of the medium than the effect of the medium itself.
TV
Applying the aphorism to one particular medium, McLuhan said the “message” of television is that it “turned the family circle into a semi-circle.” What does he mean?
First, the family circle. Prior to the advent of television there are no mediators of communication – no screens between us. There was plenty of two-way, face-to-face communication:
(We could extend backwards the analysis of the family circle prior to industrialization. In our agrarian phase, the family circle was both larger and more time intensive as multi-generational families lived and worked together. With the advent of the technologies that comprised industrialization, we were only able to engage the family circle after mom and/or dad got home from their 10, 12 or 18 hours at the factory.)
Next, what TV turned the “family circle” into. It greatly reduced face-to-face human contact and established a daily regimen of one way communication from screen to human. Families might still have been sitting in a room together, but communication between them was greatly reduced if not eliminated altogether:
In the era of social media the family circle is re-established in some ways and further diminished in others. Now, everyone has a screen in front of them, whether it’s a cellphone, iPad/Pod, or a display monitor. These screens now largely mediate the conversations between us and our families. In addition, we now have infinite potential connections outside of the circle – all of them also mediated by screens:
McLuhan was wary of making moral pronouncements about any medium. His goals were simply to determine the causes of their coming into being and to expose their effects on humanity. And so that is where I will leave the development of this idea.. for now.
Marshal McLuhan: “That baseball’s popularity will ebb and football’s will grow as TV continues to do its work on us. TV and football are tactile. Baseball is visual.”
From the Gallup site a chart which shows that since the coming of TV in the late 1940s the popularity of baseball in America has fallen and football has risen.
Gallup first asked this open-ended “favorite sport” question in 1937, and has updated it on a regular basis since 1990. In the very early years, baseball was king, with football second by a considerable margin. But by 1972, football had overtaken baseball, and it has been the top sport ever since, surpassing 40% mentions in each of the last three years.
Purchase his book here: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
