I thought about that a lot, since I grew up in love about computers and believed they would be the solution for everything; even books.
But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than the "pure" content.
I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing, flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a pleasure in itself.
On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries). There's a detrimental mismatch.
[1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..
I was trying to explain this to someone ~10 years younger than me the other day. I was telling them about how, when I was in high school (late 90s) I had a portable minidisc player/recorder. In so many ways, listening to music on that device was better than listening to it on Spotfiy + smartphone, even despite the obvious advantages.
Something about holding music in your hands, feeling a drive seek the next track, pressing physical buttons to control playback -- it all feels terrific, and I didn't realize until this conversation that there's a whole generation who hasn't experienced that.
BTW those minidisc players still go for $200-400 on ebay!
MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in 1992 ... could you imagine.
There's something I recently felt deep and weird about. The society is a double rotating system. We live, we want to solve problems, the solutions become a new ground replacing the past, not solving it.
When I look at old tech (big hifi tuner, vu meters, etc), I still deeply love it. The electro mechanical beauty is still there. Same for video games, or old software (I love win3.1 and 95 to bits, if I could patch the flawed core without changing the UX of that period I'd do it...). Without the commercial need to appeal money that fueled future versions like XP or Vista.
I saw things like the pico8 project, which gives a somehow modern hardware but with 8bit mindset: low res, 256 colors. People made damn beautiful games out of it. Really cool animations, gameplay, design. No need for a PS4 pro. My new pleasure is tweaking old platforms to give them "modern" day usage. Like retrofitting BT in a car radio. Or modding an old HP calc (longer battery, usb).
> MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in 1992 ... could you imagine.
Sony messed it up when they bought a movie and music studio, and started to hobble their own devices. The MD was awesome, worked for 40 hours on one battery, could to digital recording and replaying.
The content side of things made them weird, but I can't really blame them not to foresee the use of a 140MB optical disk when the average consumer used floppy disks. It might be two different parts of their brains.
Bill Gates largely made his fortune by creating an operating system that OEM's would want to ship with their computer. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Windows 3.1 and 95 were absolutely made for and to attract money.
Yeah it wasn't altruism, I meant commercial interests forces good but old to be replaced by new for the sake of new; you have to have something to pitch to the customers.
I find that the unlimited and instant choice I get with Spotify make me enjoy the music less. There are many songs that I constantly pass over on Spotify but am absolutely delighted to hear on the FM radio.
Happy to hear that I'm not the only FM-ist. I also love "FM quality" ... twice I bought an album after loving it on radio, and was disappointed because the clear mix changed the feel of the songs.
Lastly, remember how it felt to listen to a tape. You didn't want to skip, so you just let the music play and go with the flow.
All of this is the paradox of choice and free will. We think we want ability to do exactly all we want when we want but it turns out it's not so clear cut.
Yeah you can say that technology is great for finding the artifacts in a complex world with lots of variations. But it's not as good for experiencing these artifacts unless they are obviously only possible in the digital space itself (gifs, animation, interaction etc.)
But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than the "pure" content.
I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing, flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a pleasure in itself.
On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries). There's a detrimental mismatch.
[1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..