All that cannot be left behind: Tony Leung in Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046

I once had a schoolteacher, who announced, a little too chirpily, that all we could really look forward to in life was ‘a few well-cooked meals and the occasional bit of memorable sex’. It might have been a daring thing to say to a room of sixteen-year-old boys, but he had a point. There is, however, a few more of these simple pleasures that I would suggest for inclusion. Most of these are best done slowly and for a long time, nearly all demand high quality raw materials, they are best experienced in isolation, and at their best they involve a small number of people in relative proximity. These things demand focus and dedication, and few mix well together, nor is it good if one is disturbed in the doing of them. Crucially, all of them are sensuous experiences, hinging on the nuances of touch, colour, taste, smell and vibrations of the air. 

I’m thinking here of the pleasures of thumbing through a good magazine, taking an overnight train between two countries, sneaking a matinee film on a rainy day or listening to Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill’s Welcome Here Again on a Sunday morning at medium volume, accompanied only by the sizzle of sausages and a boiling kettle. These are clearly my own peculiar biases, and there are many other possible additions to the category, but it is significant that many of these activities have well known, and often official, counter-cultural movements dedicated to slowing them down. Dublin, for example, now has a Slow Food festival; any magazine publisher with his head screwed on is focusing on the tactile and aesthetic aspects of his product; and every few weeks I read another article in a weekend magazine on the benefits of Slow Travel. But cinema and music are going in the opposite direction: both are being swept up in cultures of speed, and this is sad because it threatens qualities of both.

It is true that technology has brought about this development – more specifically the internet and digitisation, but we shouldn’t blame the technology, nor should we reject it totally. It is our attitude to technology that is at fault, our unilateral and unquestioning adoption and application of every technological development to every aspect of life. The ways in which we produce and consume were long shaped by limitations beyond our control, but now the control is in our own hands: for the first time, we need to develop an intelligent culture of making and listening to music on our own terms.

Recently I wrote in these pages about how developments in technology have democratised the production of music, and that this – while in principle a positive thing – has in practice the consequence of discouraging professional dedication to craft, such that the quality of music produced will suffer as a result. The same could have been written of cinema, where the abundance of cheap digital cameras now means that almost anyone can shoot a film, yet only few of these may actually be worth watching. The scenario is also true with the consumption of both film and music. The decline of physical media and the spread of adoption of digital formats over analogue ones removes inbuilt restrictions that slow down the process: by the time you’ve gone to the trouble of carrying the record home, taking it out of its sleeve and carefully placing the needle, you might as well listen to it; and if you’ve gone to the trouble of buying or renting the DVD, you’re probably going to play it from beginning to end, on a good screen, without distractions and with the sound up high. The opposite is true of current digital media, which are cheap, unlimited, and therefore disposable.

A while ago I arrived at a house party to find three people in the corner of a room, each playing different pieces of music at each other through tinny laptop speakers. Everything was played from pixelated YouTube videos, and no song was let run for longer than thirty seconds, because at the first sign of disinterest, the song was changed. It was a typical example of how the internet’s ease of access and abundance of content is cultivating a distracted and surface listening culture. Think also of the millions watching downloaded films on their laptops, rather than shelling out for a cinema ticket. Because we can, we go for the easiest, fastest, cheapest option – not that which promises the richest experience.

There is an inevitable feedback loop that affects live music, too. As we forget how to listen, we will expect music to satisfy us in less time with lesser subtlety. The very importance of live performance will be questioned: why should we leave the comfort of our homes and pay money to hear something that is imperfect, and over which we have no immediate control? Will we be introducing ‘next track’ buttons to the seats of our concert halls? These are the terms on which live music now competes with the recorded medium.

But we can’t blame the technology, nor should we attach ourselves to old media and values out of misguided nostalgia. Existing physical media have their problems too: they limit duration; they are all made of oil, which is itself running out; they are costly to produce and distribute, and they deteriorate over time. Live music can be expensive to the point of making it impossible, it may be acoustically inferior to a recording, and you have to endure the company of strangers for a long period of time. We can, however, ask ourselves what it is about these old media and about live performance that we don’t want to leave behind – and what, specifically, is it about a new technology that excites us. Why do many of us hang onto shelves of CDs when they could easily fit an entire collection onto an iPod? Is it because we want something to touch? because we need the context that the packaging brings? because they function as mementos of other people and moments in our lives? or is it because we crave the discipline that the medium’s very inefficiency gives to our listening habits? The answers to these questions, rather than coincidence and expediency, must drive how we adopt technology for the production and consumption of music. In other words, we need to become idealists again.

We also need an idea of how much we are prepared to compromise: we may decide that we want instant global access to all music, but are we ready to sacrifice it’s sensuousness, intimacy and beauty? The November/December issue of Adbusters magazine is all about this conflict between the natural world and the virtual world: it has a separate cover for each theme, and the articles go in opposite directions, meeting in the middle. The ‘Virtual World’ cover is of a woman and a man embracing, but each is wrapped in a thin plastic film – so they are touching, but never touching fully. 

An article by Kevin Kelly, technophile and founder of WIRED magazine, is published on the opening pages. Some time ago, he predicted that the internet would develop from a network of separate machines into one single machine with billions of portals, a machine that would, by the year 2040, have the same processing power as the human population of the planet. This super-machine would see everything and be in everything, and it would be a part of every action – and if our subconscious consecration of the internet wasn’t obvious, Kelly even referred to this super-machine as ‘The One’. Much of what he predicts is promising: such a unified and capable system could bring positive change, like promoting global economic equality, enabling more effective democracy, and reducing waste – changes that would be said to improve the quality of our lives. But the ultimate implications of this idea are more complicated. As Kelly himself admits, the total saturation of this machine will also require total transparency, and with that the concept of privacy must go. And when everything is visible, and nothing is secret, will we begin to lose our identities as individuals? At what point do we become subservient to the machine that was once intended as an improvement to our lives? At what point do we ask if the technology’s trajectory is serving humanity, or serving itself?

The beginnings of this trend are emerging in sites like Facebook, to which I finally succumbed about a month ago. I gave in because I was sold on the many useful things Facebook does: it’s an excellent way to bring people of similar interests together, irrespective of location; it’s a very cheap and direct way to promote concerts, it’s the best way to flag interesting things elsewhere on the internet, and the 140-character limit in messages (which it shares with Twitter) is a breakthrough in functional communication. But there are other things I’ve found less appealing: the total homogenisation of design makes for clear reading, but it dulls the personalities it presents; the public display of private messages must be eroding the intimacy of our relationships; and the unanswered question of where all those pictures go, and what they might be used for, is unsettling, too. It is a microcosm of our whole approach to new technology: something that was capable of doing a few things very well, but was compromised when it was expected to take the place of everything.

The pictures used in this article are taken from the films of the Hong Kong Director Wong Kar-Wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle. These are films of intense warmth, with deep colours, meticulous detail and muted stories. They are also very slow-moving films, seeming to return us to the era in which they are set. They epitomise all that cannot be left behind. 

Music, too, is one of those things with the ability to apply brakes to a fast-moving world, and to act as a necessary counter-balance; it is one of those simple pleasures that thrive on being slow, being considered, and being sensuous. Those of my generation, born in the 1980s, were the first to be called digital natives, and it is relevant that we are roughly as old as the internet as we know it. My generation, more than any other, is the one to have straddled both the virtual and natural worlds – and so it is this generation that must take the lead on an intelligent culture of music that fuses both. The alternative is to herald an age that sees the end of difference, the end of feeling, the end of focus, and the end of beautiful things.