Panglossmedia.com
July 31st, 2006 | Tags: osv. | 4 Comments
I stumbled upon this article at pitchforkmedia.com today; it features a shockingly naïve assessment of the implications of technology:
In fact, all tech is “neat.” Maybe we can see some ill effects on the horizon– would federal endorsement of the destruction of embryos for stem cell research open the door to greater exploitation of humanity down the road? Can iPods damage your hearing?– but we only throw in the storm clouds for effect, to give the story some yang and make it more engaging. In the end, science is good, and progress is inevitable– so there’s no way that the technology we’re covering could be anything but good.
Man, that’s so ’94 — 1794, that is. Even if we were to accept a view of science and technology as merely oiling the wheel of limitless progress, the writer could have picked better examples. A quick examination of recent history reveals that only two things are “inevitable” vis-a-vis human “progress:” the accumulation of increasingly creative and novel ways to exploit humanity (especially the most vulnerable humans) will proceed unchecked and the relentless pursuit by pop recording engineers of the elusive “zero dynamic range” will continue until everyone is deaf, iPods or not.
UPDATE: Here are the images of the two songs I refer to in the comments:
July 31st, 2006 at 07:31:45 PM (#)
Actually, for a brief period in the early 90s, popular music abandoned the “zero dynamic range” concept briefly in favor of the more “alternative” soft-loud-soft-loud. There was a really popular song about deoderant that started it all. However, the proponents of the soft-loud-soft-loud dynamic have all either blown their heads off or ODed on smack, so now we’re back to “zero dynamic range”.
July 31st, 2006 at 10:29:34 PM (#)
You have failed to provide some vital information, Will — Jean-Jacques Rousseau happens to write for pitchforkmedia.com.
July 31st, 2006 at 10:42:14 PM (#)
Matt, I only have iTunes downloads for two Nirvana songs (one from Nevermind and one from Bleach; neither is about deodorant — feel free to guess what they are!), and I’m not sure if they’ve been normalized as part of the iTunes encoding process. But I see that both have peak values of -1 db and RMS values of -15 db — the RMS values are on par with Guns ’n Roses’ 1987 album Appetite for Destruction, which is generally regarded as a very hot CD that foreshadows (but is not necessarily part of) the current trend to squash dynamics out of CDs.
Greg, you’ve given me an awesome idea: what would happen if pitchforkmedia.com reviewed Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du Village as a contemporary work?
August 4th, 2006 at 04:04:22 PM (#)
What would happen — pitchforkmedia takes their standard approach of flipping a coin as to whether or not they like the album, writing an article about their “position,” and then looking up as many words as possible in the thesaurus in order to sound cultured. And, apparently, talking about eugenics as the hip new science, this season’s Social Darwinism.