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[steelcage_match]

Poll Charme discret?I guess you could make this about vinyl vs. compact discs, or mp3s -- warm hisses and pops vs. digital clean, but occassionally cold sounding recordings. It could also be a fight between discrete and continuous quantities. I'm personally a fan of analog recordings in digital format

Comments

[copperbadge]

I'm kind of glad this is mostly quantified as a music question, because in some things I'm very pro-analog while in others I'm digital all the way. For music, while I like my mp3 player, I'm fond of the way vinyl sounds and I don't really own very many CDs. I like compasses over GPS, maps over satellite images (googlemaps notwithstanding), and paper over plastic....but for writing and communication I generally prefer digital, ditto photography.

[steelcage_match]

Yeah, I feel that division too. I like the sound of analog recordings, but the ease of digital format. I love my fountain pen, but I write with my laptop. i love the idea of taking Cunard everywhere and trains. But I fly.

Do you think it is because we are navel gazywriter types? We have romantic yearnings for the elegance of the past?

Oh I have actually done orienteering with a compass and map. I could never afford a GPS when I was hiking a lot. But the little GPS guides for cars are pretty cool. (Google maps is fabulous. and google earth! Have you ever played with google earth?)

[copperbadge]

To be honest, I think it has less to do with the way writers in specific are, and more to do with the fact that writers, like artists, have a developed sense of aesthetics that we tie firmly into our personality. We want everything in the world to be beautiful as well as functional, and that fusion of art and function is more often seen in a historical setting.

I love Google Maps, but when I used them to get round Chicago when I first moved here I discovered some highly disturbing inaccuracies. There's a whole street missing from the area near Fox & Obel, and at least two Red Line El stops are in the wrong place (one of them is in THE LAKE.)

[steelcage_match]

Yeah google maps can totally be a bitch. It has caused to miss at least one dinner reservation.

No, but I mean are we so sensitive to aesthetics? It is pretty curious. Perhaps it is that we are sensitive to start and then art is natural? OMG beauty and function. We want to whole world designed by Bang & Olufson! :D

[copperbadge]

I don't know -- I suppose it depends on whether you believe that artists are born with an innate aesthetic sensitivity, or working on art and being creative results in a more finely-tuned sense of the beautiful.

[steelcage_match]

nature/nurture whatever.