Touchscreen, Touchscreen, On The Wall…

Laura Miller had an interesting piece in the New York Times last year about the difficulties some people face keeping their book collections lean. It contained this observation:

When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.

We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.

What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.

What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?

This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?

Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.

It’s the jukebox.

So here’s what I want: a massive wall-mounted multitouch iTunes jukebox interface. It’s a big multitouch monitor that lives on your wall, displays images of your choice while you’re not using it, and would enable a coverflow interface to browse your music library. And would serve all the other touchscreen applications that we’ve been excited about for some time.

As Nathan points out:

Bolt a high end virtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.

Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.

It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.

Audiobooks, or how I learned to love housework

You’re going to read about audiobooks quite a bit in this blog. (E-books, too, but you’re already reading this on a screen so you don’t need to hear how great they are; you just need someone to figure out how to sell them to you.) There are a few reasons we like audiobooks. The first is a matter of circumstance: through my job I have access to a huge supply of them. Three of us work at the same place, so when we want to share something we love, here come the discs.

Reason #2 is the one that counts for Datachondria.

Reading isn’t primarily a visual activity. It’s actually quite physical. Think about it. What can you do with your hands when you’re reading? How fast can you walk when you’re reading? Can you run? In what kind of weather can you read outdoors? At what time of day? Can you read with gloves on? Mittens? Can you watch your kid playing at the park while reading? Can you walk your dog? Fold laundry?

Reading requires a huge number of physical conditions to be met in order to be done effectively. But I’ve found that comprehending language only requires that no other language be input at the same time. I can carry on a conversation while eating as long as I can hear my companions distinctly. If there are several conversations going on at the table at once I can really only participate in one at a time, though if I concentrate only on listening I might be able to keep up with up to three threads of light discussion, but this has no bearing at all on the enjoyment I take from my meal.

Audiobooks let me employ that part of my brain that processes language while the rest of me is doing something else. I can’t write an email while listening to an audiobook, not in the sense that I can be said to be doing both at exactly the same moment, but I can usually format a spreadsheet, do some light banking, eat a salad, dust the living room, etc. The only thing I can’t do while listening to an audiobook is read, speak, or listen to speech.

The first thing I noticed after listening to a few audiobooks is that I spend a hell of a lot of time at home doing none of the things that would prevent me from listening to an audiobook. This revelation came a few weeks after my wife began photographing weddings on the weekends, leaving me to figure out what to do with myself at home. The first few Saturdays didn’t go so well. I watched a few DVDs I didn’t really want to watch again. I read a couple chapters of a book or two I wasn’t really into. I spent an incredible amount of time on the internet doing absolutely nothing of value. There was laundry that could have been done, groceries I could have gotten, letters to mail, empties to return, random errands to run, and there really wasn’t a good reason for me to be in the middle of washing dishes when she came home at midnight except that only by about 11:30 did the shame of accomplishing absolutely nothing with my day turn unbearable. Why did I put off housework? Probably for the same reasons that everyone does: because it’s boring. Even if I don’t want to watch Apocalypse Now: Redux for the 16th time, I’d rather tell myself I spent 4 hours of my day doing that than having handed over my weekend to chores.

Then one Friday afternoon a copy of Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music arrived in my mailbox at work and I took it home with me for the weekend. Earlier in the week wifey had specifically asked me to do the laundry (or I offered and she called my bluff; either way I’d be elbow-deep in undies) so I knew I had two things I wanted to do with my Saturday: “read” this audiobook and get through at least 3 or 4 loads of laundry, including folding and ironing. 5 discs/ 6 hours, and about as many loads later I knew I’d been witness to a breakthrough. I can indulge my intellectual curiosity (or appetite for narrative, though my at-home audiobook diet is 3:1 non-fiction to fiction) while getting things done around the house. In these early days I was still limited by proximity to the stereo, as iTunes hadn’t yet released version 8 with all its audiobook-friendly enhancements (more on that in a future post), and I hadn’t yet acquired a pair of wireless headphones. But wheeling the hamper into the living room, folding on the coffee table, and setting up the ironing board behind the couch all worked just fine for a while.

These days I always have one audiobook on the go at home and one or two in queue just in case I find myself with an extra heavy load of dishes ahead of me. I’ve learned that reading is addictive in all its forms. When we moved and I didn’t have my gear set up to listen to audiobooks wirelessly in our new home I became unproductive and irritable: I was in withdrawal. A few days into it I got a good fix when left alone to paint the room where my computer had been temporarily stationed — fortunately with the speakers hooked up. I still had to pause when I went to the kitchen for a beer (this was serious painting, after all) which made me pine for the adapter to get my wireless headphones back in the game. But at least the shakes were gone.

This week we bought a dishwasher and I had a thought, not expressed until now: will I still get to listen to audiobooks for the two hours per week I used to spend washing dishes? I haven’t discussed this with Wifey yet. Maybe her delicates need hand-washing? Could I learn to bake? Perhaps the dog could use a brushing? I could vacuum — but that’s loud. This place could use a good sweeping! And dusting. Maybe some paint touch-ups…