Digital vs. Analog
What's playing in my car's CD changer:
I wish I could always pull up the name of the CD(s) playing in the cars of friends and family around the country.
I was thinking...this whole digital vs. analog debate, CDs vs LPs. There is analog me, which is me as a continuous wave or signal. Then there's digital me. If you see me once a day, you're sampling me at the rate of 365 times a year. Or maybe you hear from me once a month because you live somewhere out of town. So you're sampling me 12 times a year. The more you see another person or come into contact with them, the closer you are to knowing their analog selves. The only person who can experience the analog of a person is that person himself. But a digital sample of a sufficient sampling rate is probably sufficient to really know most people. CDs are reasonable representations of music for most people, and you probably don't need to be with someone every second to feel like you know them fairly well. What is the right sampling rate for another person? It varies depending on how much you value their analog selves. You want to
own some albums as CDs, but others you're content to download as MP3s, and for a select few nothing but the LP will do.
Some people have such massive personalities that you meet them once and they haunt your memory forever. They are like waves of massive amplitude, they leave burns on the walls of your head. You may have heard the LP once, and you don't own it, and you'll spend the rest of your life flipping through the bins of old record stores looking for it.
Can you truly desire something you've never even experienced? What is it Sean Penn says in Thin Red Line?
"If I should never find you in this life, let me feel the lack."
- U2 -- All That You Can't Leave Behind
- David Gray -- White Ladder
- Coldplay -- Parachutes
- Sigur Ros -- Agaetis Byrjun
- Dido -- No Angel
- Beth Orton -- Central Reservation
I wish I could always pull up the name of the CD(s) playing in the cars of friends and family around the country.
I was thinking...this whole digital vs. analog debate, CDs vs LPs. There is analog me, which is me as a continuous wave or signal. Then there's digital me. If you see me once a day, you're sampling me at the rate of 365 times a year. Or maybe you hear from me once a month because you live somewhere out of town. So you're sampling me 12 times a year. The more you see another person or come into contact with them, the closer you are to knowing their analog selves. The only person who can experience the analog of a person is that person himself. But a digital sample of a sufficient sampling rate is probably sufficient to really know most people. CDs are reasonable representations of music for most people, and you probably don't need to be with someone every second to feel like you know them fairly well. What is the right sampling rate for another person? It varies depending on how much you value their analog selves. You want to
own some albums as CDs, but others you're content to download as MP3s, and for a select few nothing but the LP will do.
Some people have such massive personalities that you meet them once and they haunt your memory forever. They are like waves of massive amplitude, they leave burns on the walls of your head. You may have heard the LP once, and you don't own it, and you'll spend the rest of your life flipping through the bins of old record stores looking for it.
Can you truly desire something you've never even experienced? What is it Sean Penn says in Thin Red Line?
"If I should never find you in this life, let me feel the lack."