Rethinking Our Digital Garden Of Eden
By: Scott Bradlee
Tags: Mindfulness, Music Education, Social Media, Digital Life, Society

The internet has given us everything on demand. Are we any better off?

When I was 12 years old, I put a cassette tape into a Sony Walkman, pressed “play,” and listened to the piece of music that changed my life forever: George Gershwin’s 1924 genre-crossing tone poem, “Rhapsody In Blue.” Of course, this was a much less profound revelation at the time; my 12 year old thoughts on this piece were more along the lines of, “Wow, this piece isn’t boring like the stuff I learned in the piano lessons my parents made me take.” At any rate, hearing it provided enough of a kernel of curiosity to inspire me to dust off my family’s old out-of-tune spinet piano and get to work on making sense of the interesting sounds I heard for the first time — a sound that I would learn was called “jazz.”

Learning to play jazz — in particular, the kind of brash and jubilant 1920s jazz popularized by Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and other early New Orleans innovators — was not a straightforward task for a kid living in a small town in the mid ’90s. Finding a teacher to teach me the intricacies of such a niche style of music within a 30 mile radius was out of the question, so I embarked on a kind of self-study, with no real plan other than to pursue the pieces and genres of music that interested me and attempt to figure out their mysterious inner workings. I was on a quest for knowledge — wherever it might lead.

My local public library became my university. Every weekend, I spent hours scooping up every biography and reference book on jazz I could find, scouring the pages for any quotations or analysis that could help me to better bridge the gap between the exciting sounds I heard and my less-than-inspiring own attempts at reproducing those sounds. Coming across a bit of musical notation was a cause for celebration — if celebration was to be defined as monopolizing the library copy machine for the next 15 minutes or so. In addition to books, I borrowed cassette tapes and CDs: James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbecke. Jazz was a three dimensional, living art, so reading books and theory could only take one so far; the real “source materials” were the recordings. Indeed, we are quite fortunate that the advent of jazz in America tracked somewhat closely with the advent of the modern record industry, but the relative paucity of these recordings meant that each one was precious. The archaic recording methods of the time also meant that studying them in full required a bit of detective work and cross-reference with other sources: Was that note at 1:31 intentional, or was it an overtone picked up by a recording aberration? What was the pianist playing in the bridge, where it was drowned out by the rest of the band?

During the week, I practiced all the various excerpts I came across, often recording myself with my parents’ tape recorder, as a sort of measuring stick for how my piano skills might sound to an outside listener. The tapes didn’t lie, and they were often harsh and unrelenting in their judgment. Gradually, instead of expecting perfection, I accepted that this would be a lifelong process and began to work towards incremental improvements instead, which helped to ease the sting that I felt when listening back to the tapes and hearing all my obvious shortcomings.

I was fully immersed in studying this music. At night, I fell asleep listening to 88.3 WBGO, often fighting sleep to hear the end of a Duke Ellington or Count Basie track. On one occasion, I heard a pianist and a trio perform “Tea For Two” — only I didn’t know who or what it was at the time, since I had tuned in halfway through. It featured the most brilliant piano playing I had ever heard, and I immediately ran across the room to grab my trusted tape recorder, so that I could capture at least the last minute or so of this inspiring, mysterious track. Although I listened to it almost daily for quite some time, it took me another 3 years for me to learn the name of the pianist: Art Tatum. Such was life before the invention of the Shazam! app.

By the time I was in high school, my family purchased a dial-up modem and made the jump into the Internet Era — although, to be fair, it was still the Weird Internet era, and not particularly helpful with my musical goals. Combing through random Geocities pages in the hopes of finding information on old jazz recordings from the 1930s sounds positively quaint today, and at the time, it was hardly worth the frustrating page load times, frequent browser crashes, and interruption by other family members needing to use the phone. By this time, I had a built a pretty reliable system for learning the things I wanted to learn via books, CDs, and hours upon hours spent at the piano, so the internet hardly factored into my studies at all; it was just a fun, weird place to explore.

The promise was there, however. Even then, we could catch glimpses of just how this technology might one day usher in a utopian paradise of knowledge. Encyclopedias and newspapers went digital. Forums emerged for every type of niche interest. MP3s of popular musical acts were uploaded and shared— if mostly thanks to piracy. The internet was no longer just for tech geeks, either; between 1995 and 2000, the number of internet users grew from 16 million to 361 million. As our mailbox overflowed with CD-ROMS promising dozens of free hours of America Online, we imagined what life would be like when everyone had an internet connection.

Things have changed quite a bit in the 26 years since I bought that George Gershwin cassette tape and got to work. Nowadays, nearly every one of the recordings that I spent hours searching for in the media wing of the library are available for instant streaming on Spotify. There are hundreds of hours of video lessons on all the stride piano techniques that no piano teacher in my hometown could show me, now available on demand 24/7 on YouTube. If 13 year old me in 1994 lamented the lack of friends that shared my interest in jazz back then, my 13 year counterpart in 2020 would already have dozens of online friends, all over the world, that shared the same interest. The internet itself is no longer a fun, weird place with kitschy guestbooks and page counters; instead, it’s all encompassing. All the information we need to learn how to do practically anything is right at our fingertips, at all times. The utopian vision of a massive tree of the world’s knowledge — free and open even to those outside of academia — has been achieved.

Despite all this progress, I’m not entirely convinced that we have a better environment for learning now, as opposed to then. Somehow, I can’t help but feel that those of us that experienced the frustration and joy of learning a skill or subject in the pre-internet age were right in the sweet spot of being able to access lots of high quality information without all of the distraction. This seems to be echoed by many my age and older — but is it accurate? Or is it just nostalgia for a time that might have only seemed to be a lot more straightforward?

It’s not hard to figure out what it takes to become highly knowledgeable in anything, in the abstract sense: one simply needs to immerse themselves in study of that discipline, participate in some sort of focused, consistent training regiment that incorporates unbiased feedback as a means of improvement…and then continue to do that, over and over again, over a long period of time. Of course, this is a very simplistic and linear view of a frustratingly non-linear process — check out Robert Greene’s excellent book, “Mastery,” for a true in-depth look — but nonetheless, we instinctively know that learning anything worth knowing clearly demands a good amount of time and attention. These are raw commodities that we all possess, to use as we see fit.

How valuable is our time and attention? So valuable that today’s social media platforms have successfully harnessed them to build highly influential, billion dollar corporations . As The Social Dilemma — which may prove to be the most important documentary of the decade, let alone this year — illustrates, the entire business model of these platforms depends on the ability to keep users engaged and scrolling, for as long as possible. For most of us, the devices that house these powerful bits of social engineering are always within arm’s reach, which makes us all the more vulnerable to their glowing, seductive pull. The minute we accept a user agreement, we consent to exchange our data — conveniently extracted from our precious time and attention — for access to this online world.

As a result, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of having a superhuman amount of information available at our fingertips, but presented in a way that almost guarantees that we won’t be able to make the best use of it. We can learn from tutorial videos on YouTube, but we may not be able to resist the urge to allow YouTube’s algorithm to lead us down new, unrelated but highly compelling rabbit holes for hours at a time. We can draw inspiration from the social media feeds of others that share our craft, but also risk shifting our focus from the pursuit of excellence to the pursuit of vanity in an increasingly curated, self-conscious online world. We can listen to any album, watch any movie, and access thousands of newspapers, but may find ourselves overwhelmed by too many options and opinions to pursue meaningful study of any of them.

Although the internet has vastly accelerated the democratization of knowledge, it has also introduced new problems regarding quality of information. Part of the guidance that a teacher provides is epistemological; a good teacher will impart on their students an understanding of how to filter, absorb, and implement information more effectively, so that they won’t waste time studying things that have already been shown not to help them with their goals. In my own case, not having a teacher certainly led to a lot of time wasted in practicing things incorrectly, but at least I felt assured that I had source materials that I could trust; a dozen or so tried and true books written by historians and musicologists, often with extensive interviews and collected wisdom from the greats themselves, and a whole lot of historic recordings. I had no reason to doubt the veracity of anything I read — save for a few of Jelly Roll Morton’s farfetched tales (which generally appeared heavily annotated by historians, anyway).

Today, social media has brought us into a kind of postmodern age when it comes to obtaining knowledge. Although reference materials on every subject are widely and readily accessible, there is not as much consensus on which ones are most valuable as there once was. In matters that might hold even scant political significance, it seems to be infinitely more difficult to ascertain objective facts on anything, which makes understanding the world around us a more complex and difficult endeavor than ever before. Because of the ease with which social media allows likeminded people to congregate, an allegiance to tribalism can often supersede rational thought. Previously discredited theories have resurfaced with new levels of cultlike enthusiasm, and institutions formerly regarded as authoritative have lost credibility in the eyes of many — in part due to conspiratorial thinking, but also in part due to their own missteps in navigating this new, highly charged online world. If the Dark Ages suffered from a lack of information, today’s Internet Age is trending towards having far too much, with contradictory interpretations swirling around different filter bubbles, leaving it up to the individual to sift through and vet sources themselves — a nearly impossible task.

Yet somehow — despite all the chaos — we learn of young people creating revolutionary new inventions to solve long-standing problems every day. Nonprofits like The Khan Academy have brought advanced education to remote corners of the globe through their free video courses on a wide variety of subjects. The research and development of life-saving drugs and treatments has grown exponentially more efficient. The skill level of young artists, musicians, and athletes has gotten progressively higher over time, despite the increased amount of digital distractions they face. Even social media itself hasn’t been all fluff; to the contrary, social media has facilitated powerful collaborations between innovators, exposed dangerous corruption and injustice, and launched and sustained the careers of lots of noteworthy talent that might have otherwise gone unnoticed or ignored by media gatekeepers. For me personally, social media has been every bit as life changing as hearing “Rhapsody In Blue”; it gave me the tools to connect with millions of likeminded music lovers and launch a world touring concert act — all done without a record deal. It’s easy to say, “things were better back then” out of nostalgia, but focusing only on what has been lost fails to give us the full picture.

The more I examine it, the more it seems to me that, like so many issues surrounding technological progress, the advantages of our technological progress largely outweigh the drawbacks — but these drawbacks should not be ignored or rationalized away. With these technological tools at our disposal, we have the potential to create a much, much better environment for learning than ever before. However, this is entirely dependent on our ability to navigate the unique pitfalls of the Digital Age — on both the societal and the individual level.

Societally, we must find a way to thread the needle between fighting dangerous misinformation and protecting the free speech that has been responsible for centuries of scientific and social progress. With fantastical conspiracies and divisive narratives algorithmically amplified much more than nuanced, fact-based discussion — and deepfakes possibly emerging as a kind of “2.0 generation” of Photoshop fakery — the modern social media landscape is one that is easily exploited by those that aim to polarize or outright deceive their audience. Additionally, years of allowing social media giants to operate solely in the “grey zone” between publisher and platform have given them carte blanche to shape the world around us, with little accountability or oversight — and, in Facebook’s case, no real competition. No matter one’s political affiliation, we should be able to agree that is time to prioritize and address these issues. Conversely, we must also resist the urge to over regulate through outright censorship of unpopular or controversial ideas and theories. Social media mobs on Twitter or Facebook can not be allowed to exert power over objective journalism or academic peer review without our entire body of knowledge suffering as a result. In particular, scientific institutions must remain free from bias and political pressure and work to build public trust in their methodology and research.

On the individual level, we must understand the psychological costs of social media use and guard our precious time and attention from being stolen right from under our nose. We must take it upon ourselves to apply a greater level of scrutiny in determining what sources and stories meet rigorous journalistic and research standards. We must demand evidence to back up narratives, and defend free inquiry as a means of uncovering truth. We must resist the temptations to celebrate vanity over hard work, to disregard tradition outright instead of seeking to improve upon it, and to lazily accept quick fixes in place of real pressure-tested long term solutions. And — like that tape recorder that highlights our every mistake in stark contrast — we must always have an accurate, unbiased way to judge our own progress.

Perhaps most importantly, extra care must also be taken to better shield our youth from the toxic effects of social media on developing minds. The early concerns about children stumbling upon graphic material and crude language on the internet have now been virtually superceded by the damaging effects of cyberbullying, constant distraction, and social media-linked depression. Privacy laws may need to be updated to better protect minors and their data, and parents will need to recognize the addictive nature of social media and place reasonable limits on device use for their children. We must ensure that they are given not just the access to knowledge they need to succeed, but also the stability and presence of mind to put this knowledge to use in a way that is safe for them and their peers. We must teach them that the pursuit of excellence is less about the technological tools that we are given and more about the character that we build along the way.

Recently, I had a conversation with a talented musician friend and collaborator, Jesse Elder, who told me of his own plan to take back his time and attention for himself and his family— one that he put into action swiftly and resolutely. In his blog, he talks about how deleting his social media accounts has improved his life in a number of ways — ways that he could not have imagined prior to unplugging. He describes the withdrawal symptoms stemming from fewer hits of Instagram dopamine, and the way his mind has slowly regained its ability to focus. Most strikingly, he sums up life on the other side as feeling like a “return to the ‘good old days.’” Even without any further explanation, I could visualize that feeling as a sort of dreamy, faraway time and place; a kind of oasis in a desert of data. It was the same feeling of satisfaction I had in discovering a new piece of music, or reading a passage that suddenly pulled a musical concept that I long had struggled to understand into focus. It was hearing Art Tatum play “Tea For Two” for the first time, and successfully catching half of it on a trusted tape recorder.

I’m not yet ready to take that plunge and quit social media, and perhaps I never will be. It seems to me that even as we may opt of social media user agreements, we’ve already opted in to a world that has been forever altered by them, and the best tool to push back against any excesses is understanding how they work and how they affect us, in turn. However, our nostalgia for the “good old days” serves as a potent reminder that we shouldn’t become fully dependent on the online world for understanding the real world. Every now and again, we would all do better to unplug, take a walk, and engage others in face-to-face conversation, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that we ultimately control how we use our valuable time and attention. Even more crucially, we must impart these reminders on the generations behind us, who — technologically savvy and connected as they may be — may never experience the joy of finding the information they spent hours looking for in the pages of a dusty library book.

-SB

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