On Wasting Time
I recently bought an iPod from 2004 on eBay. There is the element of nostalgia baked in as admittedly, this was the first iPod I remember seeing. My brother owned the same model of fourth-generation iPod back in the day. I distinctly remember not understanding how Apple’s earbud headphones were designed to fit directly into the cartilage socket of your outer ear and instead interpreting their assembly as incredibly cumbersome and uncomfortable to use. Flash forward to 2024 where I struggle with a similar issue with Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 after fairly conservative periods of time. Their noise cancelling technology hadn’t done me many favors either, where the science of silence and the tight fit of the devices make my head feel vacuum-sealed like a bag of diced, fleshy fruit being readied for frozen preservation. It makes me consider if pineapple can feel vertigo, like the sensation of looking down out the window of a four-seat plane.
There’s an inherent question, I feel, that comes to mind when you see someone interface with media or art in a way that has, at the time, been since deemed inefficient. Vinyl has somewhat gotten over this hump by earning distinction as an expensive collector’s item among the frenzied release cycles of the Swifts and Rodrigos of our day. Overall, physical media as a whole has yet to materialize such a status.
It wouldn’t be incorrect or inappropriate to decry physical media as inconvenient or inefficient. By our modern metrics of efficiency, yes, anything not falling within our latest OS is by definition not optimized for the current moment. There’s another discussion here of how our last couple decades of media consumption have been dictated by tech companies and how a refusal of “efficiency” and “optimization” is a refusal of the latest product and an opt into planned obsolescence, but I’ll table that discussion and talk more about what brought me to revisit the iPod.
Physical Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a factor in my purchase of a second hand iPod. The $40 price tag and free shipping is a factor in my purchase of a second hand iPod. Impulse is a factor in my purchase. Many things factored into this purchase, but I’ll focus on the broader scope of things that moved me towards my purchase.
Physical media has taken on somewhat of a romantic status among my generation of late-arriving millennials. Maybe it’s just the nostalgic and the technophiles that hold this kind of interest in cathode ray tube televisions, sixty-four bit video game consoles and fourth-generation iPods. Maybe I’ve spent too much time in those circles consuming content about the sanctity of physical items and the relationships we hold with them - the beauty of bound books, the artistry of album sleeves, the journey of DVD menus. There’s a certain fixation throughout these kinds of narratives surrounding physical media about the tangible relationship one fosters with their items. The media you interact with has a story to it beyond whatever intangible experience the content of the media delivers. My original copy of the Bradygames Kingdom Hearts strategy guide has prominent bite marks and binding damage from my childhood dog’s time teething. There’s an encapsulation of childhood there that I honestly couldn’t script and don’t particularly want to indulge right now, but you can understand the relationship I have with that book and the romance it incites for a time long gone.
If you ask me, I can say with honesty and certainty that that copy of the Kingdom Hearts strategy guide is the book I have read the most in my life. Cover to cover, all the way through, every word consumed: excitement at the exposition contextualized to me through narrative copy, confusion at the missing pieces the writers at Bradygames simply couldn’t have known to include or deduce from their own gameplay, everything. I think there’s a difference in media consumption when you laboriously go through a whole work versus checking a box.
Media as Transaction
I don’t think it would be an outrageous claim to say that media consumption as a whole has changed in the past couple OS updates of reality. I don’t want to talk about attention spans or fake news or the shoot-first-ask-questions-later frame of communication right now, so I won’t. I will speak on my own behalf for my own habits. Over the past couple years, I’ve made it a point to expand my horizons of media consumption and discover new things to like. I started on Spotify. At first, this was born of an insecurity at the fear of being out of touch, so things came to me on the basis of being new. This did in fact expand my knowledge of what modern music is about and where it’s going, but it did eventually land me in a habit of not giving the complete time of day to music I meant to consume.
There was a certain practice I would take part in where I would find something generally interesting, click into the first ten or so seconds and decide from there if I wanted to come back to it later. Maybe it was my insecurity or my confidence in my process that drove me to ignore the fact that I was no better than anybody passively scrolling any number of feeds, perking up when they find something their reptilian brain deemed worth their attention. I thought through my practice of “finding more stuff” I was defeating my own diagnosis for what plagued the modern media landscape. “No one’s digging in, everyone’s a slave to the algorithm, the health of a media diet is not dictated by amount consumed.” The last of those there being from a video essay about sludge content by Lily Alexandre called “Everything is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era”, one of my favorites in the genre. Check it out on YouTube sometime if you get a chance, even though it doesn’t have a ton to do with what I’m talking about here.
My habit of skimming the surface of culture, believing that my future self would investigate later only turned out to work some of the time. In late 2022 into early 2023, I was busy completing my graduate degree in communication and media research at Rutgers University. It was in late 2022 that I had decided to take on the project of listening to new music in an attempt to catch myself up with what modern music was. By the end of 2023, I had a playlist of one hundred songs that came out in 2023 that I greatly enjoyed, identified with, and came back to. This result may have come from my extended periods of time during my days as a full-time graduate student commuting, waiting for my teaching assistant class to start, grading assignments in the library, though it may have just been from a renewed sense of self I cultivated post-pandemic. In any case, I stand by my 2023 year-end list and still come back to it today.
By the time 2024 ended and my second attempt at the same project concluded, I looked at the result as much more disappointing. I had not had the same result of narrative fulfillment as I had in 2023. I don’t believe this was any fault of 2024 being an “off” year for music, as since I had read, 2024 was being hailed by critics as the best year of the decade so far for the medium. It very well could have been 2024 not shaking out to be what I expected it to be, or maybe I just got busier being back in the working world. In any case, I look at my 2024 playlist and don’t consider it a failure. I say this in that meeting someone for the first time and not knowing them very well isn’t much of a failure, is it?
I clearly had focused on quantity more than quality in my exploration of music in 2024. While I certainly had found some things I connected with, it was not to the degree or on the scale that my 2023 had been. It’s no moral or ethical failing that my 2024 did not materialize to the scale of my 2023. However, my process, as much as I tried, was not the same.
Precious Time
Part of what I have since identified in my media consumption is a preoccupation with time. For instance, I had set out to beat my Letterboxd watched movies record from 2023 in 2024. Most of my year was strong, yet through all of September to November, I had one film logged, and it was one I didn’t truly watch. I could have watched a movie. I could have gone to the theatre, watched one on TV, streamed one, I could have. I didn’t, though. I can chalk this up to something I can identify now as a nagging fear of wasting time.
I could watch a movie, but I could also be doing something else. You can see where I’m going with this. Within myself I fostered a fear of wasting time watching something that I wouldn’t like. Balanced by an anxiety towards missing out on something I would like better, I ended up consuming nothing at all. This ended up in tiresome rewatches of YouTube videos I had seen too many times and countless games of Marvel Snap on Steam. If you don’t know Marvel Snap, it’s a game you can play on your phone about two minutes at a time. It’s a card game with a maximum of seven turn exchanges. It’s a game that definitely fostered my joylessly indulging in nothing in particular. The YouTube videos were fun and the two-minute games were satiating, but was there anything I could speak for in the collective hundreds of hours I spent doing this? No, I don’t think so. What was I so afraid of losing in consuming new media that might not be perfect?
Now, there’s an obvious causality for this ritual. Consuming substantive media takes work. It’s not always fun. If you’re like me, when reading a book, your mind is sure to wander. Listening to new music somehow makes you want to immediately swap over to a song you already know the words to. New experiences are scary and, often, the joy of something new becoming a favorite to you is a sensation you usually don’t think about. You can remember something familiar to you being familiar, but how common is it for that feeling of immediacy of familiarity to outshine the smaller, less frequent sensations of discovery?
This week I set out, like many other people on a resolution track, on my goal for the first time. Part of a resolution I had made with myself alongside the purchase of this iPod was to do the work. I’m not going to lie and say that, at least for me, critically and holistically consuming media is work. I try my best to get myself out there to find out, but more often than not, I wasn’t staying there.
I remember back to a stretch I had in my high school years where I had a lot of extra time to spend in the school library. This, combined with my recently granted access to Spotify in its earlier years, led me to a project where I listened to an album a day. An album a day is about forty minutes out of your day, right? I look back on those days where I can honestly say I sat and listened to an album a day - Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Kanye West’s Late Registration - and I do appreciate those days. But really, I consider, what is different about those structures of time of academic block scheduling versus the corporate work day? Not that much, to be frank.
It’s part of a resolution of mine to take part in that practice again. I know that naturally, I’m not going to make every album I listen to a classic in my mind, though at very least, I can confidently say that I’m getting out there and staying there. Forty minutes and a full artistic experience. Again, what was I so afraid of losing? Was my time so precious?
Stop and Smell the Flowers
I’m coming back to the iPod to be used as an artifact for ritual. I don’t romanticize the days of digital file management. I recognize how completely inefficient and obsolete the mechanisms through which we chose to interface with music throughout the iPod’s heyday are in today’s ecosystem of streaming and subscription. And I think that reality, in conjunction with my resolution to do the work of consuming media, is why I am choosing to take on that inefficiency and that obsolescence. Perhaps it’s a fear that I am trying to beat to the punch. A fear that, in a world of streaming and subscriptions, what might happen should tech companies choose to leverage their power in their markets and dangle the keys to our media over our heads. What might happen should Spotify or Netflix trade in their step ladder for the Chrysler building.
I am a proponent of owning physical media, if not for the reason that physical media is romantic and imperfect, if for the reason that it is yours. The means and modes of physical media may in fact be, in today’s media landscape, obfuscated through outdated consumer technology in an effort to sell you more things. However, there is, or should always be, another way.
The fourth-generation iPod functions with a long-abandoned USB cable design, so I must have one. The fourth-generation iPod reads mp3 files transmittable through CD roms, so I must have them. There is an inherent argument against the inefficiencies of outdated technology and the ease of access their successors champion. Why would you choose to use outdated technology for the same result? We used to call these people “hipsters”.
Maybe it’s my anxieties about the future of tech companies moving towards exclusively proprietary subscription-based services. Maybe it’s my nostalgia for the practices of physical media. Maybe it’s a confluence of both that drives me to the fourth-generation iPod. There’s no form that can trump streaming in discussions of convenience and efficiency.
I’m going to nab another little nugget from a YouTube video essay about physical media and its natural barriers, “The Importance of Inconvenience” by MecklesFrog: “Does one need to smell the flowers more quickly, more efficiently?” There are plenty of arguments one could make against physical media. There are arguments against its cost, its interface, its longevity. You can keep up with the times and stay efficient or convenient more easily. And yes, you can. I don’t mean to take anything away from anyone who interacts with technology in this way as it would be hypocritical of me to try. I still have streaming subscriptions and I still elect to interact with most of my media in the most modern, efficient, up-to-date, streamlined way possible. The writing of this piece and the practice I’m trying to put in place with this iPod is principally an exercise in, what I might describe as, spring cleaning. I’m trying my best, wish me luck.
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I’ll close this out with a more clinical, housekeeping thought. Physical media. I would encourage anyone to do what they can to own what they love. I think there’s an inclination to think about media as nebulous and the experiences they evoke to be naturally unquantifiable or not something to claim. Beyond my fears at seeing media companies erasing media texts from their streaming services, the primary method of media consumption today, I do believe there is a value in owning what you take ownership of. I don’t think it would be a jump to claim that we as media consumers take ownership of things that are meaningful to us, even if they don’t strictly belong to us. Does your favorite movie, song, book, belong to you? In a way, I’d say so.
