The Sound of Fragmentation
What does speedy media mean for community?
Billboard has been keeping a TikTok Top 50 chart since September of last year (“SkeeYee” by Sexyy Red was the first leader), recognizing the new phenomenon of musical artists gaining traction with singles on the shortform video app before pivoting their newfound listenership to streaming, then hopefully on to broadcast radio and record sales. It’s another layer in the music distribution cake, a far faster and more fragmented means of listening compared to how popular music used to find our ears.
By way of a disclaimer, I’m not a music historian, nor am I an expert on the music industry. I’m more concerned with the experience of consuming music, so the following bastardization of popular music’s story is going to be slapdash; the good stuff comes later.
It all started with word of mouth, literally. Before instruments, there were voices. To hear a song, you had to either be close enough to the singer or sing it your damn self. Whenever instruments came along, the basic interaction stayed the same; there was only the addition of a small piece of manual technology. Music was social, visceral.
Sheet music came along one way or another with the advent of literacy. Music got formalized, abstracted from its beginnings. Still, to hear music, you had to be in the presence of those who could play the notes on the page, or learn to decipher them yourself. Music became a commodity, but it was still the people you were paying to hear, paying to share a soundscape with.
Along came the end of the 19th century and boom, pow, here are the radio and records. Disembodied voices now drift through the air, and just like that, you can buy songs that you don’t have to sing, to be played in your own space without another person needing to share it with you. You could collect music, just the sounds, for the first time in history. That’s where the money came into it, of course; it’s a hell of a lot easier to make a profit off a vinyl reproduction of a few minutes of a person’s time than to sell their in-person time over and over again.
Innovations followed, the tapes and the discs, all of which lowered the price point and broadened the scope of making music your own. You could remix now, you could parse full packets of sound into bites, but you still needed the gear to do it. It was more accessible to listen and create, but it was still a labor of love in the physical world.
Then came the MP3 and the playlist. True innovations, no lie there, but the cracks were beginning to show. Don’t like the whole album? Just buy the one song! The calculus of the music industry shifted slowly all of a sudden, and streaming doubled down on the evisceration. Now, you don’t need to own the song, much less its analog form, you just need to set up a recurring payment and in turn you’ll get all the audio freedom your heart could desire. Again, an innovation, but surely not an equitable one. No one can claim that there ever was such a thing as a particularly ethical moment in the popular music industry, but scrapped for pieces? A bit harsh.
Again, I am no expert, and the pitfalls of streaming, the death of physical media, and all the other economic concerns of industrial music have been treated more intelligently elsewhere. I’m interested in something different.
The sentiment that time is speeding up has been with us for as long as you care to look for it. Things are created, become popular, and fall from favor faster than ever before, or so it seems in every time, but I think we’ve come to the general consensus that it is more or less true at the moment. “Staying current” is a common motivation for cultural literacy and always has been, but it seems more and more difficult to remain up to date in any sort of useful manner. This is partly due to the proliferation of media (Information Age or Misinformation Age, it’s a lot either way), but I would argue that there’s more to blame than sheer volume.
In case you got hung up on my admittedly ahistorical saga of musical evolution, let me sum up the thread that runs through it. The development of music can be traced from localized, embodied sounds towards technological mediation and its associated spatiotemporal abstraction. Innovations in scaled distribution both smoothed the overall range of sounds in popular music and opened new avenues for development, culminating in the current environment of hot singles and playlists. I contend that these fragmentations of form reflexively coincide with the evolutions of personal and public space, the idea of community, and ultimately, consensus reality.
Throughout the bulk of human history, spatial limitations, or the lack thereof, have dictated cultural evolution. Many of us were taught that Asia Minor and the Levant can be considered the “crossroads” between East and West, a place where geography funneled goods, culture, and empire to and fro. Conversely, consider many of the inhabitants of New Guinea, whose rugged jungle environment long shielded them from the rest of the world, resulting in the development of truly distinctive cultures and languages. These macroscale cultural evolutions are dictated by many microscale factors, both of which are impacted by the spatial configuration of environment. The ease with which spatial obstacles to connection may be overcome is a hallmark of technological development.
As I said earlier, there was a time when, if you wanted to hear a song, or watch actors perform, or hear the news of the world, you had to go to the place where the singers and actors and travelers congregated. This was particularly true before literacy was commonplace, but the need stuck around even after printing and publishing exploded in the 14th and 15th centuries. In times and places where printed materials were rare and expensive, group readings were common, public and private. To receive meaning, you had to engage closely with your community, not just spatially but emotionally, civically, and temporally.
Media technology changed this, of course. If you are reading this, you are likely not near me, either in space or time. The meaning of my words reaches your mind through a series of technological mediators, wholly independent of our spatial relation to one another. This didn’t just happen overnight; technological mediation of media did not always mean radically individual consumption of meaning. Throughout the bulk of the 20th century, the use of technological media still constituted a spatiotemporally regulated social interaction. While the scope of the distribution grew and meanings were divorced from the physicality of their creators, listening to the radio and watching films were still social practices. Families and neighbors gathered around radio sets at appointed times for regular programs, and the movie house was the place to be downtown. The radical benefits of these developments cannot be ignored. With the newly tapped immensity of distribution, poor, rural, and marginalized persons were allowed to enjoy art that their socioeconomic station or geographical isolation had hitherto prohibited them from consuming. But the benefits would ultimately not outweigh the costs.
Halfway through the last century, it became clear that the pitfalls of broadscale dissemination of media were unique in human history. With mass media came mass manipulation, propaganda unlike anything the world had seen. Corporatization reified social injustices that mass media seemed poised to fix, the almighty dollar overwhelming artistic and social merit. At this critical juncture, it was television that flipped the switch and accelerated the fragmentation of media in space, and the numbers bear it out.
In the late 1940s, only about 8,000 American households had a television. That number reached over 45 million just twenty years later. This shift was accompanied by an immense shift in residential patterns: during this same time period, the suburbs grew from holding just under 20% of nation’s population to over 30%, accounting for 83% of population growth between 1950 and 1970. Automotive use scaled with this trend as well, and accompanying pollution statistics, but let’s stick to media.
Whereas reading had long since become a private endeavor, watching and listening became so almost overnight comparatively speaking. The ability to remain vibrantly connected to the world through technological abstraction was brand spanking new, and people took to it quickly, but the spatial needs of the system did not disappear. For a brief time between the television and cheap home video, theaters were still a major meeting place for communities. Record stores were essential for delivering hot new radio hits to the hands of consumers. (An interesting digression here about album covers: there was a time when no art was needed on album covers because you would ask the salesperson for a particular record and they would retrieve it, but that changed when record companies realized that customers would purchase more records if they were able to browse on their own, leading to album art as a major advertising and artistic element of popular music. More here.) The advent of truly personal media changed all of this, with technological innovations exploding throughout the end of the 20th century and up to the current day.
The ability to create, purchase, and consume music, text, and video without interacting with another person at all is unprecedented in human history. Once, this was the sole realm of personal journals, but now, we can create and distribute any form of media without synchronous interaction in a shared space with another human being. This fact is a key assumption of modern life, so integral to our daily lives of computers and smartphones that we barely think of it at all, but it must be considered, must become unsettled in our minds. Value judgements aside, this is a wildly interesting concept, simply by virtue of its historic novelty. Never, across the long ages of human social evolution has mankind been able to entirely isolate themselves spatiotemporally and still access the riches of human art, culture, and meaning. That is the power of technological media. Now, back to the value judgements.
If you do not have to interact with others to reap the fruits of their creativity, you are missing the full picture of that creative work. The gulf between art and artist as enforced by technology cannot be recreated in the aggregate, try as we may to do so. We can listen to interviews, read write-ups, and correlate them with the original media itself, but we will never understand it as if we were there when it was created. Look to the survivance and resurgence of theatre and live music as proof of this; we want to be close to our meaning-makers, but the configuration of public space we now live in has made this decidedly more difficult. Cohesive understanding is only possible by navigating successive layers of abstraction, and the formulation of personal opinion with media is now a compulsory aggregation of fragmented sources, much like the spatial lives we now lead. Work is here, home is there, this shop over there, all separated by an isolated automotive commute of just under a half hour, so why not just order that book online and rent that movie on the smart TV.
The processes of media and community fragmentation have become so closely entangled as to become reflexively iterative of one another, and attempts to find a single root cause are red herrings. This orientation of space and meaning simply exists now, and we must understand how its parts revolve around one another if we are to envision a way beyond it.
I originally entitled this article “Sounds of Accelerationism.” I feel that hurry is integral to the fragmentation of both space and media, but hurry is so subjective that it seems much less useful as a lens than fragmentation per se. However, it cannot be ignored. The fragmented nature of our spatial lives begs for fragmented meanings, and shorter punches of meaning fit the bill for shorter visits, phases, and moments. Why listen to an album if your commute only lasts for half of its runtime? Choose a playlist instead. Why patronize a theater when you could rent a film in the comfort of your own home? Your pantry is cheaper than the concession stand and the theater is all the way across town. Why join a community discussion in a public place when you could comment on a Twitter thread? Why subject yourself to real-time, in-person feedback when you could just choose what you give attention to minute by minute? You’re wittier across 280 characters and limited context anyhow.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that the reliance upon fragmentary forms of media to convey meaning from one person to another across fragmented community spaces is a key limiting factor to humanity’s future survival. I do not buy wholesale into the idea that average people of the past were better informed than average people of today, but I can see where the argument comes from. Misinformation is only powerful when information per se is either rare, or proliferates. We do not trust our neighbors because we spend so much time processing information about what they could be that we do not actually learn what they are, and are disincentivized from learning from them by our spatially disconnected social schema. This reinforces our desire for separation, and we sequester ourselves into our domiciles and cliques, in-person and online, curating our media feeds to suit our desires, and the process grinds on.
What is the solution? Is there a solution? I think that language seeking a single solution, just like that seeking a single scapegoat, is not only bound to fail but fated to make things worse. Subscribing to a newsletter or triangulating your media is not going to fix this. Moving to a denser neighborhood is not going to fix this, nor is voting the “right” way, at least not on their own. We must bring back into balance personal flourishing with public unity, spatiotemporally and artistically, and to do that, we need to do a lot of things all at once. Our solutions must become so holistic in scope that they give rise to a whole new set of possibilities. The first step for me, my personal call to action every day, is this: create and consume with company.
Equitable growth and sustainability require interdependence, which requires personal vulnerability. It is easy to sink into your independent routine, but we must sacrifice independence for survival. Share ideas and ask for feedback face to face. Loan out your books, share your records, ask to borrow discs and tapes, write letters, cook meals together. In short, do the things you would usually do on your own with someone else, anyone else. It’s a hippy dippy sort of foundation, but dammit if it isn’t true to our nature as a species. We were not meant to create and interpret meaning alone.
Community requires deceleration, and convenience has become a performance supplement whose risks have been ignored for too long. Humans of old were slow pursuit predators, jogging along at a marathon pace and running the sprinters to ground over time. We have become sprinters ourselves, running off in a thousand short bursts each day, and it turns out that the marathoners among us are more often than not parasites of the worst kind, the financial and political classes that profit from the common man for as long as he flutters away his energy on the kaleidoscopic racetrack of on-demand everything.
You’ll have to forgive me for lacing an ostensibly straightforward piece of music criticism with sweeping remarks of social commentary, but the connection bears exploration. Holism is unifying, and slow is subversive. More than ever before, coming together to create and consume is a radical act. I encourage you to step out of line today.
