the good old days are long gone?
It's been years since I listened to American Country Countdown, which is weird when I consider it was pretty much a staple of my childhood; we listened to WMZQ on Sunday mornings and Casey Kasem counted down the top 40 country songs of the week, with artist interviews and what-have-you. As it happened, this past Saturday morning I was up early--bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (or groggy and pouring tea down my throat, whatever works)--and on my way to get my hair done, when I happened to have the local country station on my car radio, and it turns out that in Chicago, Saturday morning is when you hear American Country Countdown (and instead of 8 am to noon, it's apparently 6 am to 10.) It was being hosted by Kix Brooks, as in Brooks & Dunn, and it was so very strange to hear the countdown done by someone other than Casey Kasem.
But the main thing I was going to run on at the keyboard about was a song they featured by Miranda Lambert, "Automatic." It's Yet Another Country Song About The Good Old Days (see also Rascal Flatts's "Mayberry," and dozens of others I'm currently blanking on.) And while a lot of those songs are problematic for the things they totally erase about the so-called Good Old Days, this one in particular caught my attention because I think it has an artificial conflation between "time spent on a thing" and "value of a thing." [look up some lyrics and throw them in here]
It's true that I am totally a child of the digital age; my parents both worked for IBM before most people had even heard of a computer, and I grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets, both toys (my dad bought us a Nintendo as soon as I was the minimum recommended age of 8) and practical (my mom has every kitchen widget known to God or man.) My family embraces technology with great enthusiasm. Like my parents, I work in IT, and the number of widgets, gadgets, toys, and oddities I own that require electrical power is admittedly pretty ludicrous. And I fully acknowledge that in some ways, technology adds to my general distraction and sense of being overwhelmed by all the stuff there is to do - when I was a kid, I could sit down and read a book straight through without looking up, or play FF8 for twelve hours on a Saturday with only minimal breaks for things like food and biological needs. Now, I'm much less likely to spend that massive uninterrupted block of time (though, in fairness, now I have much less time to spend on such things and I totally still do lose massive chunks of it--just ask my husband about me and FF14 and he will laugh about how he's a video game widower.) So I have some nostalgia for "simpler days" too.
The thing is, I don't think that "things took longer" axiomatically equals "things were of higher value and/or quality." Yes, modern American consumer culture is heavily focused on disposable and/or planned obsolescence, which is in part driven by our ability to make things quickly and cheaply so they don't "have" to last as long as they used to have to last because the price was such that you couldn't replace it easily. But let's take cooking for example. I don't have as many nifty toys as my mom does, but I have a stand mixer and a hand mixer and a food processor and a blender (and newly an immersion blender because I love soup, fight me.) I own a mezzaluna and I can make (and have made) pesto the old-fashioned way, by hand. But I also work a job that, with commute included, eats 12 hours of my day. (Morning preparations etc. not included.) Even accounting for the fact that I don't sleep enough, that still only leaves me 5 hours out of the day for literally everything else. I could spend one of those five hours making pesto by hand, or I could spend three minutes of those five hours zooming it through the Cuisinart, and spend the other fifty-seven minutes talking to my husband or reading a book or playing a game or literally anything else.
There are things it is worth taking the time to do or make by hand. I've been working on a gift for my grandmother for the better part of a year now and when it's done I will have poured literal hundreds of hours into it. I might hate it a lot right now, but I know she will love it, and will value it simply because I made it for her--because I took that time. And that's important, and has value. I'm not saying everything should be machine-made and automated, because some things can't and shouldn't be.
But I don't think it's the fact that we have automated certain things that is the problem we should be looking at. I think it's what we've done with the additional time automation has granted us. Theoretically it was supposed to make us better at leisure, more able to live our lives instead of burying ourselves in work. We seem to have done the precise opposite--piled in more work to fill the hours than we used to, and thrown away our sense of community. (For what it's worth, although I can't speak for either Miranda Lambert or Rascal Flatts, I suspect that the lost community is what they're really mourning, more so than the "value" of hand-worked things that took more time.) I am all for increasing a sense of community; admittedly I'm bad at putting this into practice when it comes to the physical place where I live, insofar as I know my neighbors' names but not very much about several of them, but I've been tyring to pare down my online communities and keep up with the ones I choose to maintain more. I still have too many things to do and not nearly enough hours to devote to any of them, but I'm working on it.
This has been your irregularly scheduled episode of navel-gazing with Rina, part whatever in an ongoing series.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1110350.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
But the main thing I was going to run on at the keyboard about was a song they featured by Miranda Lambert, "Automatic." It's Yet Another Country Song About The Good Old Days (see also Rascal Flatts's "Mayberry," and dozens of others I'm currently blanking on.) And while a lot of those songs are problematic for the things they totally erase about the so-called Good Old Days, this one in particular caught my attention because I think it has an artificial conflation between "time spent on a thing" and "value of a thing." [look up some lyrics and throw them in here]
It's true that I am totally a child of the digital age; my parents both worked for IBM before most people had even heard of a computer, and I grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets, both toys (my dad bought us a Nintendo as soon as I was the minimum recommended age of 8) and practical (my mom has every kitchen widget known to God or man.) My family embraces technology with great enthusiasm. Like my parents, I work in IT, and the number of widgets, gadgets, toys, and oddities I own that require electrical power is admittedly pretty ludicrous. And I fully acknowledge that in some ways, technology adds to my general distraction and sense of being overwhelmed by all the stuff there is to do - when I was a kid, I could sit down and read a book straight through without looking up, or play FF8 for twelve hours on a Saturday with only minimal breaks for things like food and biological needs. Now, I'm much less likely to spend that massive uninterrupted block of time (though, in fairness, now I have much less time to spend on such things and I totally still do lose massive chunks of it--just ask my husband about me and FF14 and he will laugh about how he's a video game widower.) So I have some nostalgia for "simpler days" too.
The thing is, I don't think that "things took longer" axiomatically equals "things were of higher value and/or quality." Yes, modern American consumer culture is heavily focused on disposable and/or planned obsolescence, which is in part driven by our ability to make things quickly and cheaply so they don't "have" to last as long as they used to have to last because the price was such that you couldn't replace it easily. But let's take cooking for example. I don't have as many nifty toys as my mom does, but I have a stand mixer and a hand mixer and a food processor and a blender (and newly an immersion blender because I love soup, fight me.) I own a mezzaluna and I can make (and have made) pesto the old-fashioned way, by hand. But I also work a job that, with commute included, eats 12 hours of my day. (Morning preparations etc. not included.) Even accounting for the fact that I don't sleep enough, that still only leaves me 5 hours out of the day for literally everything else. I could spend one of those five hours making pesto by hand, or I could spend three minutes of those five hours zooming it through the Cuisinart, and spend the other fifty-seven minutes talking to my husband or reading a book or playing a game or literally anything else.
There are things it is worth taking the time to do or make by hand. I've been working on a gift for my grandmother for the better part of a year now and when it's done I will have poured literal hundreds of hours into it. I might hate it a lot right now, but I know she will love it, and will value it simply because I made it for her--because I took that time. And that's important, and has value. I'm not saying everything should be machine-made and automated, because some things can't and shouldn't be.
But I don't think it's the fact that we have automated certain things that is the problem we should be looking at. I think it's what we've done with the additional time automation has granted us. Theoretically it was supposed to make us better at leisure, more able to live our lives instead of burying ourselves in work. We seem to have done the precise opposite--piled in more work to fill the hours than we used to, and thrown away our sense of community. (For what it's worth, although I can't speak for either Miranda Lambert or Rascal Flatts, I suspect that the lost community is what they're really mourning, more so than the "value" of hand-worked things that took more time.) I am all for increasing a sense of community; admittedly I'm bad at putting this into practice when it comes to the physical place where I live, insofar as I know my neighbors' names but not very much about several of them, but I've been tyring to pare down my online communities and keep up with the ones I choose to maintain more. I still have too many things to do and not nearly enough hours to devote to any of them, but I'm working on it.
This has been your irregularly scheduled episode of navel-gazing with Rina, part whatever in an ongoing series.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1110350.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.