I like to think of sleep as the ability to fast forward or accelerate through time. The reason being that you generally are not aware of time passing when you sleep and when you first wake up you need to use a clock or some other method of measuring time to determine how long you were asleep. The amount of time that passes isn't something we can reliably gauge, how restful or restless our sleep was seems inconsistent with the amount of time that passes and is more consistent with the quality of sleep and whether it was disturbed in the process.
The problem with thinking of sleep as the ability to move forward through time at pace is that it becomes a crutch or an escape route in effect when life becomes boring, repetitive, or when you just don't want to actually live through events. This is something I have been aware of ever since I was a teenager. My relationship with sleep is complicated, I have gone through periods of insomnia where I have slept as little as an hour a night, and periods of hypersomnia where I have slept 18 hours at a time, in both cases still feeling exhausted when I am awake. I have gone through periods where I am physically exhausted and mentally wired, and periods where the reverse is true, physically restless and mentally exhausted.
Periods of depression too often increase the desire to sleep your life away, although for me personally it is usually the case that when I want to sleep I can't and when I don't want to then I sleep in excess but that is neither here nor there for now. The point of this post is that whilst this complicated relationship with sleep was once something other people in my life found hard to understand, the pandemic, lockdown, quarantine, and the severe disruption to peoples' lives and their routines has thrown people into a mindset that is complex and for many people they are now experiencing this same complication relationship with sleep emerging. There is the desire to stick to your normal routine but without the impetus to do so and no consequence of failing to do so, the end result is an erratic sleep pattern that emerges.
I have wondered why this happens and I have been contemplating the idea that what we know and understand about sleep might be flawed. There is the often quoted wisdom that you should sleep 8 hours a night, and that your waking day should be 16 hours. This idea however is based more around the need to be awake to accommodate a working day, not a physiological need. When you look at wild animals and their sleep patterns the idea of impetus emerges more and more, those animals wake and sleep when they do because they have to in order to survive. When you take away that need to be awake to survive and provide the food and water and anything else that they would normally wake in order to pursue, what happens?
As far as humanity is concerned, this experiment has actually been carried out before, one of the first examples came in the 1960s when two cavers Antoine Senni and Josie Laures both spent several months living inside caves in the French Alps in isolation with no point of reference from their environment to determine the passage of time. They maintained contact with researchers throughout the experience but were not given any reference to the time on the surface. What the experiment concluded was that absent from the Earth's natural day and night cycle, individuals body clock reverts to a sleep cycle that is elongated. Further research that built on these conclusions went on to show that it appears that the natural sleep and wake cycle when environment is excluded as a factor is closer to a 48 hour cycle.
If you take a 48 hour "day" as the basis of a new paradigm then using the same 1:3 ratio we use for 24 hour days, then you should really sleep for 16 hours at a time and be awake for 32 hours. This idea is something I want to explore in coming days given this is perhaps one of the few opportunities I will get to put this in practice.
Music Monday #30: Body Talk by Robyn
Okay, right off the bat this post is going to be confusing to some so in an attempt to make sense of it let's cover a few things first.
Robyn is a Swedish born pop singer who is very well known in the EDM scene but has also been mainstream with EDM inspired hits. In 2010 she, technically, released 4 albums. I say technically with hesitation because this is where it gets complicated. The four albums are:
Body Talk Part 1
Body Talk Part 2
Body Talk Part 3
Body Talk
You would think that 1, 2, and 3, would simply be combined and reissued to make the 4th one in that list but no. Each part has different tracks and the final edition takes tracks from each of the first 3. If you want to own the lot, like I did, you need to buy all 4. Now when I spoke about reissued albums before I mentioned that I generally don't have an issue with them unless there is content that can only be got by buying that reissue and in this case that's what you have to do.
I love Robyn, I love her music and I loved this album, but for the purposes of this list I have to pick 1 release and I've chosen to go with the fourth, and in particular the standard edition of the album which is 15 tracks.
So, confusing explanations aside, the actual content of the fourth album itself I love from start to finish, every single track, and I can lsiten to the whole album without skipping. That puts this album near the top of my music library right from the start. There are however a few tracks on this album in particular that I love. The first is 'Dancing On My Own' which is one of the tracks most people who know her will recognise as soon as it starts. Dancing On My Own resonates with me because of the feeling of exclusion that it captures, to observe from a distance the people you want to be with doing their thing without you, leaving you to dance on your own. Rather pointed, I know but the lyrics "I'm just gonna dance all night, I'm all messed up, I'm so outta line, Stilettos and broken bottles, I'm spinning around in circles" these just feed the feeling of letting go and getting lost in your own world trying to ignore what's right in front of you.
I can't mention this track without mentioning a cover that was released by Calum Scott, who in 2015 rose to fame when both he and his sister auditioned separately one after the other for Britain's Got Talent. His sister was unsuccessful and having watched her get shot down by the judges he came out to perform a cover of Dancing On My Own. Now the cynic in me has to point out that I rarely believe reality TV shows are 'real' I always assume that there's an element of scripting and production that plays a part in creating a narrative. Whether that runs as deep as the reaction this moment had being intended or whether the producers thought scheduling them one after another in itself would create a story without expecting just what would emerge, I don't know. Regardless, the performance Calum gave was emotional and led to a standing ovation and Simon Cowell using his golden buzzer to give Calum an automatic place in the final. Calum went on to finish 6th in the competition but despite not winning he still got to release his cover of the song which is one of the few times where I think a cover is just as good as the original, possibly better but I hesitate to say that just a bit.
Back to Robyn, 'Love Kills', 'Call Your Girlfriend', and 'U Should Know Better' also feature on this edition of the album, all fitting the narrative of love sickness, and the pursuit of something more meaningful. An honourable mention here goes to 'Cry When You Get Older' which featured on Body Talk Part 1, which also focuses on dealing with heartache and trying to move on with your life. Another two honourable mentions go to tracks from her self titled album, they are 'Be Mine!' and 'With Every Heartbeat' which deal with this theme quite strongly, the latter of which became a massive dance hit when it was remixed by Voodoo & Serano and for a time became ubiquitous in the UK played in every club you went to, played on the radio.
I've mentioned before that I generally prefer recording artists, that I listen to music to get an experience and to stimulate my senses, it is something that is generally something of an intimate experience and that's part of the reason why sharing music is a way for me to bond with people because the exchange of what you like and what you love is an exchange of emotion more than anything. I also said that I generally don't care for concerts, and performances, and that I don't really do those because they don't appeal to me. There are only a handful of established singers that I have seen live and a fair few indie singers and bands that never made it but in their case I think they were performing artists that did not translate into recording. There are only a few singers I would not only want to see live but would fully expect to have the same experience seeing them perform as I have when I listen to them.
In 2007 I got to see Robyn perform live with Röyksopp in London, an experience that I still look back on with so many memories attached to it, Robyn delivered a stellar performance that lived up to my expectations. The performance was to a small audience and it felt intimate, I was treated to the experience by someone who knew how much I loved Robyn and knew I wouldn't be disappointed by her performance. I'm grateful for having that opportunity and being so close to her on the night, I know that with most concerts you're never that close to the performance. This is the only Robyn album that will feature on this list, if for no other reason than the fact that I've technically covered 5 albums with the honourable mentions included so she would dominate this list if I had included them all separately.
Robyn is a Swedish born pop singer who is very well known in the EDM scene but has also been mainstream with EDM inspired hits. In 2010 she, technically, released 4 albums. I say technically with hesitation because this is where it gets complicated. The four albums are:
Body Talk Part 1
Body Talk Part 2
Body Talk Part 3
Body Talk
You would think that 1, 2, and 3, would simply be combined and reissued to make the 4th one in that list but no. Each part has different tracks and the final edition takes tracks from each of the first 3. If you want to own the lot, like I did, you need to buy all 4. Now when I spoke about reissued albums before I mentioned that I generally don't have an issue with them unless there is content that can only be got by buying that reissue and in this case that's what you have to do.
I love Robyn, I love her music and I loved this album, but for the purposes of this list I have to pick 1 release and I've chosen to go with the fourth, and in particular the standard edition of the album which is 15 tracks.
So, confusing explanations aside, the actual content of the fourth album itself I love from start to finish, every single track, and I can lsiten to the whole album without skipping. That puts this album near the top of my music library right from the start. There are however a few tracks on this album in particular that I love. The first is 'Dancing On My Own' which is one of the tracks most people who know her will recognise as soon as it starts. Dancing On My Own resonates with me because of the feeling of exclusion that it captures, to observe from a distance the people you want to be with doing their thing without you, leaving you to dance on your own. Rather pointed, I know but the lyrics "I'm just gonna dance all night, I'm all messed up, I'm so outta line, Stilettos and broken bottles, I'm spinning around in circles" these just feed the feeling of letting go and getting lost in your own world trying to ignore what's right in front of you.
I can't mention this track without mentioning a cover that was released by Calum Scott, who in 2015 rose to fame when both he and his sister auditioned separately one after the other for Britain's Got Talent. His sister was unsuccessful and having watched her get shot down by the judges he came out to perform a cover of Dancing On My Own. Now the cynic in me has to point out that I rarely believe reality TV shows are 'real' I always assume that there's an element of scripting and production that plays a part in creating a narrative. Whether that runs as deep as the reaction this moment had being intended or whether the producers thought scheduling them one after another in itself would create a story without expecting just what would emerge, I don't know. Regardless, the performance Calum gave was emotional and led to a standing ovation and Simon Cowell using his golden buzzer to give Calum an automatic place in the final. Calum went on to finish 6th in the competition but despite not winning he still got to release his cover of the song which is one of the few times where I think a cover is just as good as the original, possibly better but I hesitate to say that just a bit.
Back to Robyn, 'Love Kills', 'Call Your Girlfriend', and 'U Should Know Better' also feature on this edition of the album, all fitting the narrative of love sickness, and the pursuit of something more meaningful. An honourable mention here goes to 'Cry When You Get Older' which featured on Body Talk Part 1, which also focuses on dealing with heartache and trying to move on with your life. Another two honourable mentions go to tracks from her self titled album, they are 'Be Mine!' and 'With Every Heartbeat' which deal with this theme quite strongly, the latter of which became a massive dance hit when it was remixed by Voodoo & Serano and for a time became ubiquitous in the UK played in every club you went to, played on the radio.
I've mentioned before that I generally prefer recording artists, that I listen to music to get an experience and to stimulate my senses, it is something that is generally something of an intimate experience and that's part of the reason why sharing music is a way for me to bond with people because the exchange of what you like and what you love is an exchange of emotion more than anything. I also said that I generally don't care for concerts, and performances, and that I don't really do those because they don't appeal to me. There are only a handful of established singers that I have seen live and a fair few indie singers and bands that never made it but in their case I think they were performing artists that did not translate into recording. There are only a few singers I would not only want to see live but would fully expect to have the same experience seeing them perform as I have when I listen to them.
In 2007 I got to see Robyn perform live with Röyksopp in London, an experience that I still look back on with so many memories attached to it, Robyn delivered a stellar performance that lived up to my expectations. The performance was to a small audience and it felt intimate, I was treated to the experience by someone who knew how much I loved Robyn and knew I wouldn't be disappointed by her performance. I'm grateful for having that opportunity and being so close to her on the night, I know that with most concerts you're never that close to the performance. This is the only Robyn album that will feature on this list, if for no other reason than the fact that I've technically covered 5 albums with the honourable mentions included so she would dominate this list if I had included them all separately.
Origin
When we think of originality we tend to think of it in reference to creative works. We tend to think about movies, music, games, literature, or in terms of ingenuity such as invention and production. We think of originality in these instances as the measure of how novel or new the output is compared to that which already exists. The more you produce over time the harder it becomes to compare every new output with that which already exists to determine if it is actually an original idea or if it is copying something else that came before it, either intentionally or unintentionally as the case may be.
We don't give much thought to the concept of original thought when it isn't connected to creative output, in other words we don't stop and think about whether our thoughts or feelings on a given subject are unique to us or whether other people have had the same thoughts and feelings before us. This omission of origin however extends beyond understanding our connection to other people and their thought processes, it also obscures the reality of just how much other people influence our own lives and the way we think. When you omit the origin of thought you ignore where it came from, and thereby prevent yourself from realising when those thoughts are not your own.
Months ago when I wrote about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] I wrote about the concept of finding the root of your beliefs, tracing the things you believe back to their root, by asking successively why you believe each conclusion and what it was based upon. Whilst that proved effective it did lead to the realisation that the branches of knowledge and the branches of beliefs that we hold true don't always sprout from our own trunk, they are often the branches of other people that have become entangled within our own. Going beyond the idea of finding the root of your beliefs, judging whether those thoughts and feelings originated within you is akin to asking who planted those beliefs to begin with, or where they came from, this is where the analogy breaks down because in practice you would imagine these are one and the same, that it would not be possible for you to assume a belief that is connected to your trunk was not part of your tree, but when you start to strip away the soil and expose the roots of the tree you start to see the truth, that it's possible for multiple trees to grow so close together that what you thought all along was a single tree is actually many.
To give an example let's take your taste in music. Think of the artists whose music you have listened to for the longest time, those that have been in your media library longer than any other. Where did those tracks come from? Are they purchases you made yourself, or were they shared with you by other people? Most people start listening to music at a very young age, long before they themselves have an income, it's inescapable that the music tastes of the people around us are going to influence our own tastes because most of their music serves as the starting point for our own musical journey. In other words before we can decide what we consume for ourselves, we consume what is provided for us. This concept extends beyond music, into our taste in food, our sense of fashion, our political beliefs, and our religious beliefs amongst many other things. You may have noticed as that list progressed, your aversion to the idea of the extant and extent of those influences grew, you were quite comfortable with the former being inherited but less comfortable with the latter.
The reality is, this idea of inherited thought and belief extends far beyond our family and how we are raised, it extends into our schooling, our social circles, and our life experiences as a whole. We exist as the product of society, no matter how much we may try to separate ourselves from it, the concept of society is in essence a constant feedback loop which everyone is connected to and which everyone provides input to as well as receiving output from. The question then becomes one of whether it is healthy for the mentality that disliking the direction in which society is heading is enough to justify disengaging from society, the posited answer therefore being that as with any recursive algorithm if you don't like the prevailing direction all you need do is rebalance the input so that it becomes flooded by input that produces the output you do want.
To put it another way, when you see the state of the world and you judge that this state is the product of generations of thinking, and entrenched beliefs, then it is an inescapable reality that undoing that process will require generations of opposition, and a flood of opposing energy to even achieve a neutral state before you begin to make progress. This idea is disheartening for a society that has become accustomed to instance gratification and instant results, the effort required to achieve real change needs to be sustained and the product is not going to be achieved quickly, like paying down your debts that were accumulated over many years, it will take time before you gain any degree of traction.
The best place to start however is to take stock, to reduce your debt the first thing you need to know is just how much of it you have, and how much you can afford to pay towards it. To take stock of your beliefs and instigate real change requires looking at yourself and what you believe on every level and asking why you believe it, do you still want to carry that belief, and is it time to let it go? You have to opportunity to let go of who you were, and what you knew, and to define your own beliefs from scratch, just don't expect instant results or you'll convince yourself the old way served you best and you'll return to it seeking constance and reassurance even though you know it doesn't deliver what it promises.
We don't give much thought to the concept of original thought when it isn't connected to creative output, in other words we don't stop and think about whether our thoughts or feelings on a given subject are unique to us or whether other people have had the same thoughts and feelings before us. This omission of origin however extends beyond understanding our connection to other people and their thought processes, it also obscures the reality of just how much other people influence our own lives and the way we think. When you omit the origin of thought you ignore where it came from, and thereby prevent yourself from realising when those thoughts are not your own.
Months ago when I wrote about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] I wrote about the concept of finding the root of your beliefs, tracing the things you believe back to their root, by asking successively why you believe each conclusion and what it was based upon. Whilst that proved effective it did lead to the realisation that the branches of knowledge and the branches of beliefs that we hold true don't always sprout from our own trunk, they are often the branches of other people that have become entangled within our own. Going beyond the idea of finding the root of your beliefs, judging whether those thoughts and feelings originated within you is akin to asking who planted those beliefs to begin with, or where they came from, this is where the analogy breaks down because in practice you would imagine these are one and the same, that it would not be possible for you to assume a belief that is connected to your trunk was not part of your tree, but when you start to strip away the soil and expose the roots of the tree you start to see the truth, that it's possible for multiple trees to grow so close together that what you thought all along was a single tree is actually many.
To give an example let's take your taste in music. Think of the artists whose music you have listened to for the longest time, those that have been in your media library longer than any other. Where did those tracks come from? Are they purchases you made yourself, or were they shared with you by other people? Most people start listening to music at a very young age, long before they themselves have an income, it's inescapable that the music tastes of the people around us are going to influence our own tastes because most of their music serves as the starting point for our own musical journey. In other words before we can decide what we consume for ourselves, we consume what is provided for us. This concept extends beyond music, into our taste in food, our sense of fashion, our political beliefs, and our religious beliefs amongst many other things. You may have noticed as that list progressed, your aversion to the idea of the extant and extent of those influences grew, you were quite comfortable with the former being inherited but less comfortable with the latter.
The reality is, this idea of inherited thought and belief extends far beyond our family and how we are raised, it extends into our schooling, our social circles, and our life experiences as a whole. We exist as the product of society, no matter how much we may try to separate ourselves from it, the concept of society is in essence a constant feedback loop which everyone is connected to and which everyone provides input to as well as receiving output from. The question then becomes one of whether it is healthy for the mentality that disliking the direction in which society is heading is enough to justify disengaging from society, the posited answer therefore being that as with any recursive algorithm if you don't like the prevailing direction all you need do is rebalance the input so that it becomes flooded by input that produces the output you do want.
To put it another way, when you see the state of the world and you judge that this state is the product of generations of thinking, and entrenched beliefs, then it is an inescapable reality that undoing that process will require generations of opposition, and a flood of opposing energy to even achieve a neutral state before you begin to make progress. This idea is disheartening for a society that has become accustomed to instance gratification and instant results, the effort required to achieve real change needs to be sustained and the product is not going to be achieved quickly, like paying down your debts that were accumulated over many years, it will take time before you gain any degree of traction.
The best place to start however is to take stock, to reduce your debt the first thing you need to know is just how much of it you have, and how much you can afford to pay towards it. To take stock of your beliefs and instigate real change requires looking at yourself and what you believe on every level and asking why you believe it, do you still want to carry that belief, and is it time to let it go? You have to opportunity to let go of who you were, and what you knew, and to define your own beliefs from scratch, just don't expect instant results or you'll convince yourself the old way served you best and you'll return to it seeking constance and reassurance even though you know it doesn't deliver what it promises.
Social Energy
I had a thought today that has been festering and I can't find a definitive answer to the question it raised. I wondered by what age you could say you have met the majority of people you will ever meet in your life. Some research into this concept proved inconclusive which is somewhat understandable since we tend not to keep a record of every person we meet. I did reflect however on the people in my life right now and how old I was when I met them. The easiest people to assign a date to are members of my family since they knew me from birth. After them things got a little complicated because of the difficulty we have in pinning down dates, something which goes much further than this concept.
I have lived in 4 different houses with my family, 2 flats whilst at Uni, and Halls of Residence, and I have also been homeless although I never slept on the street I relied on other people for accommodation during that time. These movements allow me to break up my lifespan into time periods associated with physical places, and subsequently associating the place we met allows me to give a rough time frame of when I would have met that person. After some approximation and some counting I managed to come up with a few rough figures that represent the people I met - the huge caveat here is that these are just the people I remember and there will likely be many unaccounted for. Nevertheless I broke the figures down by decade and the result was that up to the age of 10 years old I met around 59% of the people I have known, age 11 to 20 accounts for a further 18%, and age 20 to date aged 32 accounts for approximately 23% of the people I have met.
This did confirm something I suspected but not to the extent I was expecting, namely that I was expecting most connections you establish to be in your youth and that the older you got the lower that figure would become, which is somewhat true since 59% is definitely a majority, however the fact my third decade and a bit account for more than the second decade shows an increase in social connections. That is surprising to me because I didn't realise how many people I have actually met within the last decade or so of my life, this is perhaps because the connections I have made in that time haven't been as deep and that in part can be explained by the fact that those connections came about through circumstance rather than lived experiences as was the case with those I met when I was much younger.
Still this idea fascinates me, there is the notion that we become less sociable with age and that we tend to disconnect more, valuing the relationships that have the most meaning and longest standing over those that are superficial but the more I pick apart and analyse the relationships I have formed with other people the more I realise there isn't a rule or a condition I can set that determines how or why those connections grow in depth. As I said, my theory was that as a child since you live your life and grow up with people around you, the shared experience you would think would bind you and create something of unity but when I look at the people I met during that time, I am not in contact with most of them, with many of them being people I have not spoken to in over 20 years now. The theory that shared experience binds you to other people it seems for me at least is hokum.
One thing I find interesting about social media and those in particular who live their life with visibility through it, is the fact that it can be very useful for establishing timelines. The only social media site I use today is twitter but even with it, the profile I use is only a few years old as I delete and start over from time to time, it's a miracle that this one has lasted so long. There are people I know who joined Facebook in 2006 and have never deleted anything from it, their desire was to keep everything intact. Before I left Facebook I took a detox for a period where I did not use the site at all and what I realised was that friend count was superficial, the vast majority were people that weren't really "friends" and so I gave people the means to keep in touch if they wanted and left it at that. Who I still speak to today are people that have reciprocated the effort to remain in one another's lives. It is interesting to think however that for those who do live their lives on social media, Facebook for instance knows where and when you met people and how long you have known them for, and for a time when I did use the site it asked how you knew each person, you could see who was related to each other for instance.
I come from a very large family, MyHeritage offers a free genealogy service that caps out at 250 people before you have to pay to expand your family tree, I met that cap only going back 2 generations on both sides of my family tree, there are still a lot more people that could be added in those generations alone before you even begin to factor in descendants and adding in marriages and non-blood relatives. The point here is that there are a lot of people to maintain a connection with and an association, to a point where it would be exhausting and unrealistic for anyone to be expected to keep up. Before the Internet I recall a time when my parents would visit relatives to catch up on everything that had happened, I came to know who the figureheads of the family were, people who knew everything about everyone and maintained connections with them all, the people who if you lost touch with someone you went to them to reconnect.
This brings me to a final concept, something I refer to as social energy, that is, the amount of energy you have to expend on maintaining social connections. Despite the fact that I met 59% of people I know before I turned 10, I wasn't a particularly sociable child. I knew people who were a lot more outgoing than I was, people who were much more active, and there was an impression I got as a child that this was important and that I needed to keep up and that failing to keep up meant I was doing something wrong or failing. My teenage years when I became more reclusive were a time when I watched other people but only engaged in response and reaction never through a proactive pursuit of social interaction. That experience left me with the reinforced idea that failing to be sociable meant you were failing as a person - which isn't true for what it's worth but that's the conclusion I drew. The years at College and University when I came out of my shell and connected more really began to drain that energy I had reserved for social interaction and I quickly came to the realisation that other people make your life so complicated and that people are exhausting. They don't have to do anything to be exhausting, the sum total of maintaining those relationships mounts up.
Going through this outward, then inward, then outward personality shift taught me that it was better to focus your energy on relationships that had a positive impact on your life and to reduce your exposure to toxic relationships and those that had a negative impact on your life. That's the politically correct and adept way of wording it, the blunt force and crude alternative is to say you should devote energy to relationships that are of benefit and cut those that are of detriment but this creates an impression of a shallow mindset where you judge people based on what you can gain from them which isn't the intention but there is truth to that idea. People do this, whether they want to make that admission on a conscious level or whether they are adverse to acknowledging that truth. I frame it in this way only because I am conscious of how difficult it is to communicate nuance in text based communication. Therein lies the problem with the idea of social energy as a whole, at its crudest it can be imagined as a cell phone with a battery that is forever winding down, at some point it will die if you don't stop using it for a while and let it recharge. The trouble with that analogy is that at least when it comes to meaningful relationships, disconnecting from them for extended periods of time generally results in damage to those relationships, so how do you let that cell phone charge when you have to constantly use it?
How do you maintain social isolation without ending up alone?
I have lived in 4 different houses with my family, 2 flats whilst at Uni, and Halls of Residence, and I have also been homeless although I never slept on the street I relied on other people for accommodation during that time. These movements allow me to break up my lifespan into time periods associated with physical places, and subsequently associating the place we met allows me to give a rough time frame of when I would have met that person. After some approximation and some counting I managed to come up with a few rough figures that represent the people I met - the huge caveat here is that these are just the people I remember and there will likely be many unaccounted for. Nevertheless I broke the figures down by decade and the result was that up to the age of 10 years old I met around 59% of the people I have known, age 11 to 20 accounts for a further 18%, and age 20 to date aged 32 accounts for approximately 23% of the people I have met.
This did confirm something I suspected but not to the extent I was expecting, namely that I was expecting most connections you establish to be in your youth and that the older you got the lower that figure would become, which is somewhat true since 59% is definitely a majority, however the fact my third decade and a bit account for more than the second decade shows an increase in social connections. That is surprising to me because I didn't realise how many people I have actually met within the last decade or so of my life, this is perhaps because the connections I have made in that time haven't been as deep and that in part can be explained by the fact that those connections came about through circumstance rather than lived experiences as was the case with those I met when I was much younger.
Still this idea fascinates me, there is the notion that we become less sociable with age and that we tend to disconnect more, valuing the relationships that have the most meaning and longest standing over those that are superficial but the more I pick apart and analyse the relationships I have formed with other people the more I realise there isn't a rule or a condition I can set that determines how or why those connections grow in depth. As I said, my theory was that as a child since you live your life and grow up with people around you, the shared experience you would think would bind you and create something of unity but when I look at the people I met during that time, I am not in contact with most of them, with many of them being people I have not spoken to in over 20 years now. The theory that shared experience binds you to other people it seems for me at least is hokum.
One thing I find interesting about social media and those in particular who live their life with visibility through it, is the fact that it can be very useful for establishing timelines. The only social media site I use today is twitter but even with it, the profile I use is only a few years old as I delete and start over from time to time, it's a miracle that this one has lasted so long. There are people I know who joined Facebook in 2006 and have never deleted anything from it, their desire was to keep everything intact. Before I left Facebook I took a detox for a period where I did not use the site at all and what I realised was that friend count was superficial, the vast majority were people that weren't really "friends" and so I gave people the means to keep in touch if they wanted and left it at that. Who I still speak to today are people that have reciprocated the effort to remain in one another's lives. It is interesting to think however that for those who do live their lives on social media, Facebook for instance knows where and when you met people and how long you have known them for, and for a time when I did use the site it asked how you knew each person, you could see who was related to each other for instance.
I come from a very large family, MyHeritage offers a free genealogy service that caps out at 250 people before you have to pay to expand your family tree, I met that cap only going back 2 generations on both sides of my family tree, there are still a lot more people that could be added in those generations alone before you even begin to factor in descendants and adding in marriages and non-blood relatives. The point here is that there are a lot of people to maintain a connection with and an association, to a point where it would be exhausting and unrealistic for anyone to be expected to keep up. Before the Internet I recall a time when my parents would visit relatives to catch up on everything that had happened, I came to know who the figureheads of the family were, people who knew everything about everyone and maintained connections with them all, the people who if you lost touch with someone you went to them to reconnect.
This brings me to a final concept, something I refer to as social energy, that is, the amount of energy you have to expend on maintaining social connections. Despite the fact that I met 59% of people I know before I turned 10, I wasn't a particularly sociable child. I knew people who were a lot more outgoing than I was, people who were much more active, and there was an impression I got as a child that this was important and that I needed to keep up and that failing to keep up meant I was doing something wrong or failing. My teenage years when I became more reclusive were a time when I watched other people but only engaged in response and reaction never through a proactive pursuit of social interaction. That experience left me with the reinforced idea that failing to be sociable meant you were failing as a person - which isn't true for what it's worth but that's the conclusion I drew. The years at College and University when I came out of my shell and connected more really began to drain that energy I had reserved for social interaction and I quickly came to the realisation that other people make your life so complicated and that people are exhausting. They don't have to do anything to be exhausting, the sum total of maintaining those relationships mounts up.
Going through this outward, then inward, then outward personality shift taught me that it was better to focus your energy on relationships that had a positive impact on your life and to reduce your exposure to toxic relationships and those that had a negative impact on your life. That's the politically correct and adept way of wording it, the blunt force and crude alternative is to say you should devote energy to relationships that are of benefit and cut those that are of detriment but this creates an impression of a shallow mindset where you judge people based on what you can gain from them which isn't the intention but there is truth to that idea. People do this, whether they want to make that admission on a conscious level or whether they are adverse to acknowledging that truth. I frame it in this way only because I am conscious of how difficult it is to communicate nuance in text based communication. Therein lies the problem with the idea of social energy as a whole, at its crudest it can be imagined as a cell phone with a battery that is forever winding down, at some point it will die if you don't stop using it for a while and let it recharge. The trouble with that analogy is that at least when it comes to meaningful relationships, disconnecting from them for extended periods of time generally results in damage to those relationships, so how do you let that cell phone charge when you have to constantly use it?
How do you maintain social isolation without ending up alone?
Peer Pressure
Recent discussions on social media surrounding the concept of Cancel Culture brought up the use of a term that has been around for decades, that is the concept of peer pressure. Most people have a basic understanding of what that is, namely the pressure exerted on an individual by their peers in order to goad them into behaving the same way. Whilst that definition is widely accepted and rarely put to question, it does rely on an implicit definition which it would perhaps be wise to pick apart, that is the definition of what actually constitutes a peer.
If you ask most people who their peers are, you tend to get a mix of responses. Some people define their peers by their age, asserting that for instance in the case of a 20 year old their peers would be those who are at or close to the same age. Other people define peers through proximity with no regard for age, so for example if you work in an office with 12 people then those people are considered your peers due to your proximity even if their ages diverge widely. Others go further and choose characteristics or cultural divisions, sub cultures and groups, for example some people within the LGBT community would consider members of the LGBT community as their peers but would be reluctant to use that term to refer to those that are not part of their community.
Proximity again can be used on a more provincial level with some people defining those in their neighbourhoods, towns, cities, or those in their country as a whole as their peers. Others still use experience and expertise as their dividing line, programmers considering other programmers to be their peers for example, or shared interests such as gamers considering gamers to be their peers, youtubers considering other youtubers to be their peers, actors considering other actors as their peers. Some divide these associations further still and place people by the time period when they "came up" that is to say when they "got their start" in their respective industries again age being discarded so in the case of youtubers this could be the year they started or the year they hit a certain threshold of subscribers, or in the case of actors it could be the year they had their first major role.
In reflection of all these definitions put forward by others, you eventually arrive at the conclusion that there is no single definition that fits as to who and what counts as one of your peers, other than to say that those who are your peers are those you choose to recognise as your peers. Therein lies the ultimate problem with the concept of peer pressure, that if you choose who is and is not a peer then you subsequently choose who has the potential to influence your behaviour and pressure you into doing things as a collective, or whose standing and achievements you compare with your own in order to gauge your success.
The concept of peer pressure is not unique to social interaction; within corporate psychology, and political science for example this concept is known by another name, 'groupthink' or to put it more obsequiously "Being surrounded by Yes Men" - groups of individuals who prefer conformity and uniformity over individuality; these are individuals who will suppress their own thoughts and feelings on matters and agree blindly and simply say yes to every proposal. On a macro level or on an industry wide level you also have alternative definition of peers coming from those who a company or political party choose to recognise as their competition, their market, their base, or any other method of dividing up their industry that they choose to measure through metrics to determine success.
The reason I take issue with the concept of peer pressure is that it implies the groups of people who engage in this behaviour are contiguous and that you can find a defining characteristic that will identify whether an individual will be influenced by another in this way i.e. that if you are aged X years old, have an interest in Y, and support the Z political party then the actions of someone who is also aligned to X, Y, and Z will influence you. Evidently this isn't the case, as these behaviours are driven by other factors. Even those devout in opposition to the idea of conformity have openly participated in it when it promises something that they want, or when it opposes something they did not agree with - this is a problem that exists too in corporate psychology and political science once again, it is self evident that those bodies who oppose certain ideologies and doctrines will actively engage and employ those same ideologies when it suits them, further still because those who participate in groupthink don't think for themselves they don't even recognise when they are doing this. They don't acknowledge their hypocrisy when they support the actions of individuals who act in the exact same way they opposed when those actions were taken by other individuals.
This all brings us back to one key point, individuality should not be something that is expressed at times and suppressed at others, ultimately the actions of most individuals were and remain to be, motivated almost entirely by self interest, and the concept of peer pressure, groupthink, or whatever moniker you wish to apply to it serves only as a potential shield from criticism by others. In other words, self interest drives every decision even those people make out of conformity, if they really did not want to make those decisions in the first place they would oppose them. This does not dismiss the fact that there will often be consequences for disagreement particularly in a corporate settings, but the ease or difficulty of making a choice does not change the fact that it is a choice. Using peer pressure as an excuse is ultimately an attempt at displacing responsibility for the choices you make onto some other authority even if that authority is one that it turns out is incredibly hard to define conclusively.
If you ask most people who their peers are, you tend to get a mix of responses. Some people define their peers by their age, asserting that for instance in the case of a 20 year old their peers would be those who are at or close to the same age. Other people define peers through proximity with no regard for age, so for example if you work in an office with 12 people then those people are considered your peers due to your proximity even if their ages diverge widely. Others go further and choose characteristics or cultural divisions, sub cultures and groups, for example some people within the LGBT community would consider members of the LGBT community as their peers but would be reluctant to use that term to refer to those that are not part of their community.
Proximity again can be used on a more provincial level with some people defining those in their neighbourhoods, towns, cities, or those in their country as a whole as their peers. Others still use experience and expertise as their dividing line, programmers considering other programmers to be their peers for example, or shared interests such as gamers considering gamers to be their peers, youtubers considering other youtubers to be their peers, actors considering other actors as their peers. Some divide these associations further still and place people by the time period when they "came up" that is to say when they "got their start" in their respective industries again age being discarded so in the case of youtubers this could be the year they started or the year they hit a certain threshold of subscribers, or in the case of actors it could be the year they had their first major role.
In reflection of all these definitions put forward by others, you eventually arrive at the conclusion that there is no single definition that fits as to who and what counts as one of your peers, other than to say that those who are your peers are those you choose to recognise as your peers. Therein lies the ultimate problem with the concept of peer pressure, that if you choose who is and is not a peer then you subsequently choose who has the potential to influence your behaviour and pressure you into doing things as a collective, or whose standing and achievements you compare with your own in order to gauge your success.
The concept of peer pressure is not unique to social interaction; within corporate psychology, and political science for example this concept is known by another name, 'groupthink' or to put it more obsequiously "Being surrounded by Yes Men" - groups of individuals who prefer conformity and uniformity over individuality; these are individuals who will suppress their own thoughts and feelings on matters and agree blindly and simply say yes to every proposal. On a macro level or on an industry wide level you also have alternative definition of peers coming from those who a company or political party choose to recognise as their competition, their market, their base, or any other method of dividing up their industry that they choose to measure through metrics to determine success.
The reason I take issue with the concept of peer pressure is that it implies the groups of people who engage in this behaviour are contiguous and that you can find a defining characteristic that will identify whether an individual will be influenced by another in this way i.e. that if you are aged X years old, have an interest in Y, and support the Z political party then the actions of someone who is also aligned to X, Y, and Z will influence you. Evidently this isn't the case, as these behaviours are driven by other factors. Even those devout in opposition to the idea of conformity have openly participated in it when it promises something that they want, or when it opposes something they did not agree with - this is a problem that exists too in corporate psychology and political science once again, it is self evident that those bodies who oppose certain ideologies and doctrines will actively engage and employ those same ideologies when it suits them, further still because those who participate in groupthink don't think for themselves they don't even recognise when they are doing this. They don't acknowledge their hypocrisy when they support the actions of individuals who act in the exact same way they opposed when those actions were taken by other individuals.
This all brings us back to one key point, individuality should not be something that is expressed at times and suppressed at others, ultimately the actions of most individuals were and remain to be, motivated almost entirely by self interest, and the concept of peer pressure, groupthink, or whatever moniker you wish to apply to it serves only as a potential shield from criticism by others. In other words, self interest drives every decision even those people make out of conformity, if they really did not want to make those decisions in the first place they would oppose them. This does not dismiss the fact that there will often be consequences for disagreement particularly in a corporate settings, but the ease or difficulty of making a choice does not change the fact that it is a choice. Using peer pressure as an excuse is ultimately an attempt at displacing responsibility for the choices you make onto some other authority even if that authority is one that it turns out is incredibly hard to define conclusively.
Music Monday #29: One Heart by Celine Dion
One Canadian gives way to another, moving from Bryan Adams in the previous post to Celine Dion once more, which is actually quite amusing to me considering the fact that Celine won the 1988 Eurovision Song Content as mentioned previously, and 3 years prior in 1985 the band Bobbysocks! represented Norway and won singing a song titled 'La Det Swinge', a band that Bryan Adams wrote a song for called 'No Way To Treat A Lady' which went #1 in Norway.
2003 saw Celine Dion release 'One Heart' the third album of hers to appear on this list. I have mentioned in previous posts that the artists I like most take chances with their career [shhh spoilers] which sometimes pays off and sometimes they don't. One Heart was an album where Celine took a chance, she went in a new direction, without a doubt One Heart is the most dance-centric album she has released, in fact the only song she's released since that I think shares the same vibe was 'On S'est Aime A Cause' which appeared on her 'D'elles' album released in 2007. One Heart represents a different style of music to the genres she had explored previously and it worked well. Her voice fit perfectly with the music style. People often discount dance music in particular when dance crosses into pop because they think it's more about the music than the lyrics and any artist that is known for their vocal styling won't fit, but I refute this assertion and One Heart demonstrates why that assumption is wrong.
The opening track is a cover of 'I Drove All Night' which is a song with a very interesting history. It was first recorded in 1987 by Roy Orbison and was intended for release but it was held back. In the same year, Cyndi Lauper went on to record an alternative version of the song, which again was intended for release but was held back. Roy sadly passed away in 1988 at the age of 52 after a heart attack. In 1989 Cyndi Lauper's version of the song was released and went on to become a huge hit. There were reservations but eventually in 1992 Roy's version of the song was finally released. The song then mostly dropped out of public consciousness until almost a decade later when a band named Pinmonkey released a cover, only to be followed a year later by Celine Dion.
The journey that a song can take is something that fascinates me, Celine when she started out in her career spoke only French, she performed covers of some English language songs before she could even speak English with fluency and in the early days of her career releasing albums recorded in English, covers still featured, even today she has covered songs by some artists that I have a particular fondness for notably Frank Sinatra [Shhh spoilers] and in some cases she has even collaborated with them, although sadly in Sinatra's case it had to be through the use of video editing owing to his death in 1998 again from a heart attack although unlike Orbison he had been in decline due to other health problems. Every song is a creation though, it has a life, it has a history, and like all art what you see or what you consume when you experience it is the sum total of the journey that led up to that moment of creation, you experience a finished product to consume, but the history in itself can tell a story that makes it all the more meaningful and can change the experience.
The track that means the most to me on this album however is 'Faith' for the lyrics "Don't be afraid to feel this way, Gonna make you understand, It's not about you, cause I am the fool, Building castles in the sand" - you can probably tell this alludes to the young gay man I was chasing closeted gay guys who were coming to terms with their sexuality and expecting too much of them too soon, this shouldn't need much more explanation.
As a gay man there is an internal conflict that occurs when it comes to who you want to date, that conflict inevitably arises when the question of closets comes into play, whether it's yours, theirs, or both, they complicate things. For those of us who have come out, there's an understanding of how hard it is to live in the closet but also the understanding that no-one should be 'outed' because you are likely to cause a lot more damage than good if you try to do that, people should come out when they are ready. The conflict however revolves around the element of shame that inevitably gets attached to the relationship. Even if you are out, and feel no shame about your sexuality, dating someone who isn't, eventually leads to you taking on their shame, their hesitation and their reluctance to do certain things for fear they might be outed in the process, leads you to feel their shame projected onto you because you can't do what you want to do. There's a very deep conversation to be had here about how far you take that concept particularly when it reaches the boundary of consent and the red line that gets crossed there by many. This is a conversation that is too complex to have here in this post about music but suffice is to say that many gay men choose to completely write off anyone in the closet at all and move on, that has merits and demerits to it too, but we'll leave it at that.
What is relevant here however, is that the song Faith talks about someone who wants to help another understand, wants to be there for them, pledges to be be their side, but has feelings that are strong and can put the other person under pressure and fear that saying no or not being ready will mean they might lose them. It's a complicated song that I don't think can really be understood unless you've been in that head space of a relationship that is strained that could fall apart at any moment but you both want to be together and make it work despite the complications. In parallel the song 'Stand By Your Side' also echoes this sentiment.
Motivation means a lot when it comes to artistic creation, and as I said before, art is the sum total of the experience lived until the point it is created, in this moment it's worth reflecting on Celine's life at the time. When she released her 'A New Day Has Come' album, a year prior she had given birth to her first child, her son René-Charles, the symbolism and the metaphors aren't lost, more than that her hiatus in 2000 had been motivated by her husband's diagnosis with Oesophageal Cancer, the significance of the lyrics to the songs on One Heart emerges in this context, the desire to be there for someone, and help them through something that despite your best efforts you can't really control and can't fix for them.
As a gay man, Celine Dion has been an idol for me from a very young age, she was always someone that I looked up to, someone I admired, and someone I aspired to be like. I saw strength in her, I saw determination, I saw eccentricity that once more was unapologetic, people often think she's a little crazy and she'd even admit that herself because she enjoys life, and she lives it. There's one more album of hers to feature on this list, you can probably guess what it is if you know her discography but we'll get there in time.
2003 saw Celine Dion release 'One Heart' the third album of hers to appear on this list. I have mentioned in previous posts that the artists I like most take chances with their career [shhh spoilers] which sometimes pays off and sometimes they don't. One Heart was an album where Celine took a chance, she went in a new direction, without a doubt One Heart is the most dance-centric album she has released, in fact the only song she's released since that I think shares the same vibe was 'On S'est Aime A Cause' which appeared on her 'D'elles' album released in 2007. One Heart represents a different style of music to the genres she had explored previously and it worked well. Her voice fit perfectly with the music style. People often discount dance music in particular when dance crosses into pop because they think it's more about the music than the lyrics and any artist that is known for their vocal styling won't fit, but I refute this assertion and One Heart demonstrates why that assumption is wrong.
The opening track is a cover of 'I Drove All Night' which is a song with a very interesting history. It was first recorded in 1987 by Roy Orbison and was intended for release but it was held back. In the same year, Cyndi Lauper went on to record an alternative version of the song, which again was intended for release but was held back. Roy sadly passed away in 1988 at the age of 52 after a heart attack. In 1989 Cyndi Lauper's version of the song was released and went on to become a huge hit. There were reservations but eventually in 1992 Roy's version of the song was finally released. The song then mostly dropped out of public consciousness until almost a decade later when a band named Pinmonkey released a cover, only to be followed a year later by Celine Dion.
The journey that a song can take is something that fascinates me, Celine when she started out in her career spoke only French, she performed covers of some English language songs before she could even speak English with fluency and in the early days of her career releasing albums recorded in English, covers still featured, even today she has covered songs by some artists that I have a particular fondness for notably Frank Sinatra [Shhh spoilers] and in some cases she has even collaborated with them, although sadly in Sinatra's case it had to be through the use of video editing owing to his death in 1998 again from a heart attack although unlike Orbison he had been in decline due to other health problems. Every song is a creation though, it has a life, it has a history, and like all art what you see or what you consume when you experience it is the sum total of the journey that led up to that moment of creation, you experience a finished product to consume, but the history in itself can tell a story that makes it all the more meaningful and can change the experience.
The track that means the most to me on this album however is 'Faith' for the lyrics "Don't be afraid to feel this way, Gonna make you understand, It's not about you, cause I am the fool, Building castles in the sand" - you can probably tell this alludes to the young gay man I was chasing closeted gay guys who were coming to terms with their sexuality and expecting too much of them too soon, this shouldn't need much more explanation.
As a gay man there is an internal conflict that occurs when it comes to who you want to date, that conflict inevitably arises when the question of closets comes into play, whether it's yours, theirs, or both, they complicate things. For those of us who have come out, there's an understanding of how hard it is to live in the closet but also the understanding that no-one should be 'outed' because you are likely to cause a lot more damage than good if you try to do that, people should come out when they are ready. The conflict however revolves around the element of shame that inevitably gets attached to the relationship. Even if you are out, and feel no shame about your sexuality, dating someone who isn't, eventually leads to you taking on their shame, their hesitation and their reluctance to do certain things for fear they might be outed in the process, leads you to feel their shame projected onto you because you can't do what you want to do. There's a very deep conversation to be had here about how far you take that concept particularly when it reaches the boundary of consent and the red line that gets crossed there by many. This is a conversation that is too complex to have here in this post about music but suffice is to say that many gay men choose to completely write off anyone in the closet at all and move on, that has merits and demerits to it too, but we'll leave it at that.
What is relevant here however, is that the song Faith talks about someone who wants to help another understand, wants to be there for them, pledges to be be their side, but has feelings that are strong and can put the other person under pressure and fear that saying no or not being ready will mean they might lose them. It's a complicated song that I don't think can really be understood unless you've been in that head space of a relationship that is strained that could fall apart at any moment but you both want to be together and make it work despite the complications. In parallel the song 'Stand By Your Side' also echoes this sentiment.
Motivation means a lot when it comes to artistic creation, and as I said before, art is the sum total of the experience lived until the point it is created, in this moment it's worth reflecting on Celine's life at the time. When she released her 'A New Day Has Come' album, a year prior she had given birth to her first child, her son René-Charles, the symbolism and the metaphors aren't lost, more than that her hiatus in 2000 had been motivated by her husband's diagnosis with Oesophageal Cancer, the significance of the lyrics to the songs on One Heart emerges in this context, the desire to be there for someone, and help them through something that despite your best efforts you can't really control and can't fix for them.
As a gay man, Celine Dion has been an idol for me from a very young age, she was always someone that I looked up to, someone I admired, and someone I aspired to be like. I saw strength in her, I saw determination, I saw eccentricity that once more was unapologetic, people often think she's a little crazy and she'd even admit that herself because she enjoys life, and she lives it. There's one more album of hers to feature on this list, you can probably guess what it is if you know her discography but we'll get there in time.
Posterity
This post was written on the 25th of June 2020 for context, and is in response to a video posted by Jenna Marbles to Youtube but serves also as a general commentary on the state of user-generated content driven websites which I have also mentioned in recent posts myself, a few of which at the time of writing are scheduled for release in the coming weeks which you should have seen by now unless I decided to delete them. The reason I am adding this preface to this post will become apparent when you read through it at length but for brevity this information is provided for context.
I purge my online content on many different sites periodically, not just here on Blogger but on any website that allows me to submit content including social media. The only content that really escapes this purge cycle for me are my published works which aren't practical to revoke, not least of all because physical copies exist in the British Library as is the case for almost all printed media here in the UK - you can find out more about this process here if you are interested as many non-writers are unaware of this fact, if it has an ISBN then a copy generally exists in the British Library with a few exceptions.
One of the reasons I periodically purge content as I have discussed before, is because of the fact that you generally can't control where someone's "entry point" is to your online life, it is impractical to create a "reading order" for posts on this blog and to try and enforce that order, you will usually arrive at this blog either from a search result, a link on social media, or from a bookmark, all of which are beyond my control as to which one you use to get here and where it takes you. Right now there are 349 published posts on this blog and it is just over two years old. I have had many blogs prior to this one and I have deleted those at a natural stopping off point for the same reason each time - the "weight" of the content. As you grow as a person, your thoughts, feelings, and priorities all change as do your opinions that are formed based on those aspects of your life. As a result, a lot of what you create that represented your thoughts and feelings in the moment are no longer relevant or no longer represent you as you are now, because your mental and emotional state has changed and your priorities have shifted onto something else. I purge content because I don't have the time and effort to go through everything I create and re-evaluate it constantly. How much effort would be required to do this is what I refer to as the concept of "weight" when I talk about online content, the more of it there is, the heavier that weight becomes. I think the idea of living your life online is problematic because you have to constantly relive every moment and the more of your life that is shared online the heavier that weight becomes over time. In your everyday life, your brain decides what is and is not pertinent to relive and recall from your past. You do not constantly think about everything you did five or ten years ago, unless there is some trauma attached to those memories and even then reliving those moments generally isn't a constant struggle but rather something that gets triggered by certain stimuli.
I don't think it's realistic for people to simply say "well you posted it so you should stand by it" - that assertion demonstrates a lack of understanding of the fact that content consumption and content production are not the same thing. Production revolves around intent, whereas consumption revolves around perception. Production is dominated by the thought process of the creator, consumption is dominated by the thought process of the consumer. To assert that you must stand by everything you produce implies that you have complete control over the meaning of the content and you don't, you only ever have control over your intent, you can't control others' perceptions of it. Even when you take those perceptions into consideration during the creative process if you are lucky enough to have valuable and accurate insights into your consumer, you only ever have a snapshot of the consumer and therefore create content that is tailored to them in that moment. When they inevitably grow and their perceptions shift, their thoughts, feelings, and priorities change then the meaning of your content also changes with their interpretation and you reach a point where even the person it was created for no longer perceives it the same way.
There was a time when I supported certain youtubers who I won't name because that's not relevant here; what is relevant is that I don't support them now because of a lot of things they did and because the person they are now is not the person I supported back then. This highlights the problem though, if I judged them based on the content they produced in the past, I would support them, but based on the content that they produce now, I can't. This is the other side of cancel culture where people generally get "cancelled" for something in the past that is dug up, these youtubers are people I no longer subscribe to because of what they produce now.
In either direction, I don't think you can live a life where every word you say and every action can be viewed as an accurate depiction of who you are as a person in perpetuity but that is the end result of having a site where content is submitted and remains set in stone. It's one of the reasons I don't use Facebook or other social networks and why I purge twitter periodically too, I know that what was posted on those sites years ago by me were things I posted with zero thought before hand, the vast majority of which although inconsequential is still content that doesn't represent me anymore. You can be as benign or as extreme with that as you want to be, from your favourite Pizza place to which Political Party you support.
The problem with old content online is that it is always viewed in the context of what we know now rather than what we knew then. Sites like Youtube through their design and their use of algorithms to provide suggestions are as much to blame for this problem, as no emphasis is placed on when the content was uploaded, and that is not a factor in whether a video gets suggested. Content is treated as if it is timeless when in reality it exists as part of a timeline but that context is forgotten. This lack of temporal context creates a weird paradoxical temporal stasis where people want you to grow as a person but at the same time stay the same, they want you to evolve as a creator but for your creations to be the same level and standard throughout. For you to create content that is enjoyed by your consumer now, and every permutation and possible evolution of their future selves. These concepts aren't compatible, and it's not possible to create this type of generic content and still make it engaging.
You could literally record a video of you painting a six foot square wall white, and I guarantee you at some point that video will be considered offensive. Is this political correctness gone wrong? No, because without knowing the reasons why it would be considered offensive it's impossible to make that judgement. As for the fact that to most people right now this suggestion will seem asinine that's the point, here in this moment with the context that exists in the present, this idea is something completely benign and generic and it is inconceivable how it could be considered offensive. You can't anticipate every future outcome and still live in the present. To actually live in the present you need to focus on the present not the future and not the past. The problem with websites that accumulate content over time is that every act of consumption is an act in the present moment and the content is then consumed in that context.
There's a reason why your memory forgets things, why you do not carry with you every single moment of your life that you have lived up until this point, it's not relevant to hold on to everything and I believe much as I alluded to in previous posts there has to come a point where you consider whether that old content is worth holding on to. In Jenna's video she mentioned that one of the reasons she wanted to keep all of her old content available was because she wanted to show growth. This was one of the reasons I wanted to keep old blogs available but in the end I decided against it and saved the content for myself to reflect on but removed it from the Internet because that growth and that journey is not reflected in that content, it was never created with that intention, and as much as that may be your motivation for preserving it, you can't control the perception of the consumer, you can't ensure they see it that way.
So the question remains, if everything belonging to you online is used by others as a reflection of you, and taken as an accurate depiction of you as a person as you are now, regardless of how you view it, should you really keep it available? If you have a Youtube channel or other user generated content driven presence that has thousands of submissions, should you perhaps devise criteria for whether content gets to remain in place? I purge content periodically indiscriminately - everything goes, but if you did want to preserve some content then what options are available? Perhaps setting a view requirement e.g. only videos with more than a set number of views stay available, or an age quota, e.g. all videos older than a year are removed. There are smaller Youtube channels that I have seen do this, as their channel grows and their video quality, and production quality changes they delete older videos that don't match their current production value. I've seen youtubers who play old games delete their entire playthrough of a game and redo it with better quality because their access to better production methods improves. Granted these are technical motivations not social or political motivations but still this demonstrates the same principle of having the video itself be a better representation of what to expect from the channel and the creator now going forward.
Posterity is a double-edged sword; you know what you did, people who have been around long enough know what you did, you don't have to deny what you did or try to hide it, but if you wouldn't do it now, then do you have to let others continue to experience it as if you were doing it now for the first time? - That is ultimately what preserving old content enables.
I purge my online content on many different sites periodically, not just here on Blogger but on any website that allows me to submit content including social media. The only content that really escapes this purge cycle for me are my published works which aren't practical to revoke, not least of all because physical copies exist in the British Library as is the case for almost all printed media here in the UK - you can find out more about this process here if you are interested as many non-writers are unaware of this fact, if it has an ISBN then a copy generally exists in the British Library with a few exceptions.
One of the reasons I periodically purge content as I have discussed before, is because of the fact that you generally can't control where someone's "entry point" is to your online life, it is impractical to create a "reading order" for posts on this blog and to try and enforce that order, you will usually arrive at this blog either from a search result, a link on social media, or from a bookmark, all of which are beyond my control as to which one you use to get here and where it takes you. Right now there are 349 published posts on this blog and it is just over two years old. I have had many blogs prior to this one and I have deleted those at a natural stopping off point for the same reason each time - the "weight" of the content. As you grow as a person, your thoughts, feelings, and priorities all change as do your opinions that are formed based on those aspects of your life. As a result, a lot of what you create that represented your thoughts and feelings in the moment are no longer relevant or no longer represent you as you are now, because your mental and emotional state has changed and your priorities have shifted onto something else. I purge content because I don't have the time and effort to go through everything I create and re-evaluate it constantly. How much effort would be required to do this is what I refer to as the concept of "weight" when I talk about online content, the more of it there is, the heavier that weight becomes. I think the idea of living your life online is problematic because you have to constantly relive every moment and the more of your life that is shared online the heavier that weight becomes over time. In your everyday life, your brain decides what is and is not pertinent to relive and recall from your past. You do not constantly think about everything you did five or ten years ago, unless there is some trauma attached to those memories and even then reliving those moments generally isn't a constant struggle but rather something that gets triggered by certain stimuli.
I don't think it's realistic for people to simply say "well you posted it so you should stand by it" - that assertion demonstrates a lack of understanding of the fact that content consumption and content production are not the same thing. Production revolves around intent, whereas consumption revolves around perception. Production is dominated by the thought process of the creator, consumption is dominated by the thought process of the consumer. To assert that you must stand by everything you produce implies that you have complete control over the meaning of the content and you don't, you only ever have control over your intent, you can't control others' perceptions of it. Even when you take those perceptions into consideration during the creative process if you are lucky enough to have valuable and accurate insights into your consumer, you only ever have a snapshot of the consumer and therefore create content that is tailored to them in that moment. When they inevitably grow and their perceptions shift, their thoughts, feelings, and priorities change then the meaning of your content also changes with their interpretation and you reach a point where even the person it was created for no longer perceives it the same way.
There was a time when I supported certain youtubers who I won't name because that's not relevant here; what is relevant is that I don't support them now because of a lot of things they did and because the person they are now is not the person I supported back then. This highlights the problem though, if I judged them based on the content they produced in the past, I would support them, but based on the content that they produce now, I can't. This is the other side of cancel culture where people generally get "cancelled" for something in the past that is dug up, these youtubers are people I no longer subscribe to because of what they produce now.
In either direction, I don't think you can live a life where every word you say and every action can be viewed as an accurate depiction of who you are as a person in perpetuity but that is the end result of having a site where content is submitted and remains set in stone. It's one of the reasons I don't use Facebook or other social networks and why I purge twitter periodically too, I know that what was posted on those sites years ago by me were things I posted with zero thought before hand, the vast majority of which although inconsequential is still content that doesn't represent me anymore. You can be as benign or as extreme with that as you want to be, from your favourite Pizza place to which Political Party you support.
The problem with old content online is that it is always viewed in the context of what we know now rather than what we knew then. Sites like Youtube through their design and their use of algorithms to provide suggestions are as much to blame for this problem, as no emphasis is placed on when the content was uploaded, and that is not a factor in whether a video gets suggested. Content is treated as if it is timeless when in reality it exists as part of a timeline but that context is forgotten. This lack of temporal context creates a weird paradoxical temporal stasis where people want you to grow as a person but at the same time stay the same, they want you to evolve as a creator but for your creations to be the same level and standard throughout. For you to create content that is enjoyed by your consumer now, and every permutation and possible evolution of their future selves. These concepts aren't compatible, and it's not possible to create this type of generic content and still make it engaging.
You could literally record a video of you painting a six foot square wall white, and I guarantee you at some point that video will be considered offensive. Is this political correctness gone wrong? No, because without knowing the reasons why it would be considered offensive it's impossible to make that judgement. As for the fact that to most people right now this suggestion will seem asinine that's the point, here in this moment with the context that exists in the present, this idea is something completely benign and generic and it is inconceivable how it could be considered offensive. You can't anticipate every future outcome and still live in the present. To actually live in the present you need to focus on the present not the future and not the past. The problem with websites that accumulate content over time is that every act of consumption is an act in the present moment and the content is then consumed in that context.
There's a reason why your memory forgets things, why you do not carry with you every single moment of your life that you have lived up until this point, it's not relevant to hold on to everything and I believe much as I alluded to in previous posts there has to come a point where you consider whether that old content is worth holding on to. In Jenna's video she mentioned that one of the reasons she wanted to keep all of her old content available was because she wanted to show growth. This was one of the reasons I wanted to keep old blogs available but in the end I decided against it and saved the content for myself to reflect on but removed it from the Internet because that growth and that journey is not reflected in that content, it was never created with that intention, and as much as that may be your motivation for preserving it, you can't control the perception of the consumer, you can't ensure they see it that way.
So the question remains, if everything belonging to you online is used by others as a reflection of you, and taken as an accurate depiction of you as a person as you are now, regardless of how you view it, should you really keep it available? If you have a Youtube channel or other user generated content driven presence that has thousands of submissions, should you perhaps devise criteria for whether content gets to remain in place? I purge content periodically indiscriminately - everything goes, but if you did want to preserve some content then what options are available? Perhaps setting a view requirement e.g. only videos with more than a set number of views stay available, or an age quota, e.g. all videos older than a year are removed. There are smaller Youtube channels that I have seen do this, as their channel grows and their video quality, and production quality changes they delete older videos that don't match their current production value. I've seen youtubers who play old games delete their entire playthrough of a game and redo it with better quality because their access to better production methods improves. Granted these are technical motivations not social or political motivations but still this demonstrates the same principle of having the video itself be a better representation of what to expect from the channel and the creator now going forward.
Posterity is a double-edged sword; you know what you did, people who have been around long enough know what you did, you don't have to deny what you did or try to hide it, but if you wouldn't do it now, then do you have to let others continue to experience it as if you were doing it now for the first time? - That is ultimately what preserving old content enables.
Controlling Your Emotions
I was quite an extroverted child at first, some might even say I was hyperactive almost all the time, that was until I experienced trauma, after which a personality shift occurred where my personality went to the opposing extreme, I became extremely introverted and reclusive. During my teenage years when this introversion was at its peak, or its trough, depending on your perspective, I shifted my focus from myself onto other people. Rather than focusing on my own impulses to the extreme, I focused on observing other people. These formative years were really the start of my interest in Psychology, and in particular Behavioural Psychology, long before I knew the term and long before I had any real exposure to actual scientific theory that backed up my observations.
Before I knew how to put into words what I was observing, I was able to recognise patterns in other peoples behaviours and I started to categorise people based on those behaviours. I knew how to respond and how to behave around people based on the observations I had made. During this time I wanted to keep people at a distance, I didn't want people to get close to me and I didn't want them to know much about me, both for similar reasons. I lived inside several closets, not just the one created by my sexuality but others too such as the closet create by trauma. In every instance there was an eventual moment of "coming out" where I first had to admit to myself what I was experiencing or what I had experienced, and then eventually admitting that to other people.
As a gay man one thing you learn quite quickly after coming out for the first time is that it isn't a "one and done" process, you are perpetually coming out to people. Every new person you meet eventually has that moment of realisation either when you tell them or when they figure it out for themselves. Those who are more flamboyant or expressive in their sexuality whilst they serve as the vanguard and bear the brunt of most animosity directed at the gay community because they are the most visible element of it, also benefit from the arguable gift of a glass closet, in that everyone who meets them is in no doubt as to their sexuality so they never have to "come out" of the closet, and even when they do it's met with the "we already knew" response.
That personality flip that I experienced after trauma took me to an extreme that I have spent years returning from. The work that I have had to put in and the weight of that effort is not to be understated. Throughout the process however there has been one constant and that has been the emotional guidance system that has helped and often hindered me from navigating through that process. So much to the point where there has been an incredible desire to have a switch that I could manually control that I could use to turn on and off emotions depending on whether they are of benefit or of detriment to me respectively.
Whilst the idea of being able to control your emotions like this might sound quite dangerous and toxic in nature, this is actually an ability most people do possess whether they realise it or not, and an ability which a small percentage of the population lack. The part of the brain responsible for regulating emotions is called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex [ACC], and in a normal healthy brain it is able to have a degree of control over emotional impulses. It's not as simple as an on and off switch as I desire but rather it serves as a volume control dial of sorts. The ACC allows most people to pursue actions against their emotional impulse, in other words it is the part of the brain that allows you to "grin and bear it" and employ stoicism. As I said however, a percentage of the population lacks this level of emotional control and the reason for that lacking appears to be neurological. There have been numerous studies for instance that show for individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD] this ACC does not activate when people with ADHD experience emotional distress.
Knowing that this part of the brain exists and understanding its function is only the first step to developing a means to gain more explicit control over your emotions. There have been studies carried out that seek to determine whether it is possible to train the ACC to activate and whether the intensity of that activation can be controlled or modified. Most of these studies go beyond my understanding of the field however as they branch away from Psychology and into Neurology, the former being a branch of social sciences and the latter being a branch of Neuroscience.
This highlights a fundamental problem that we often run into when we attempt to expand our understanding, we inevitably reach fields of study that require experience, and structured education in order to adequately understand the content. The problem is, not everyone is able to admit the boundary of their understanding and many will often venture beyond it and subsequently draw conclusions that vary greatly in their accuracy or inaccuracy as the case may be.
As far as Psychology is concerned, I have no formal education in the field beyond behavioural psychology as a primer to Human Computer Interaction, a limited exposure to cognitive psychology, again for the same purpose, and also exposure to behavioural psychology through training in Management of Actual or Potential Aggression [MAPA] and Management of Violence and Aggression [MOVA] both of which revolve around the same point of focus, both of which I learned about during my time working for the National Health Service [NHS] here in the UK. The only other formal exposure to Psychology I have had is as a patient going through therapy for various things and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] which I have mentioned in previous posts.
I can recognise the limits of my understanding and also recognise the risk of pursuing interest in a field through self study and exploration without validation and verification to ensure the conclusions drawn are accurate. This is part of the reason why I have not ventured further with exploring the topic of ACC Training to increase your ACC activation, or the potential to do so as from what I have seen these are experimental ideas that are still being studied and continuously developed - most also require functional MRI in tandem to determine if they are working, this isn't about mentality and mindset or how you think about thinking [Metacognition] this is about altering your physiological state which you have no way of monitoring for yourself to determine efficacy.
Still that idea of having more explicit control over your emotions is incredibly appealing and has left me wondering just how much of my inability to focus at times is down to mitigating factors that I can control, and how much is down to the wiring of my brain as I have never actually been assessed for ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder. If either of these were present I would assert that I would be considered very high functioning as yet I have achieved quite a few things that many people with those conditions would find incredibly difficult, not impossible but incredibly difficult.
Before I knew how to put into words what I was observing, I was able to recognise patterns in other peoples behaviours and I started to categorise people based on those behaviours. I knew how to respond and how to behave around people based on the observations I had made. During this time I wanted to keep people at a distance, I didn't want people to get close to me and I didn't want them to know much about me, both for similar reasons. I lived inside several closets, not just the one created by my sexuality but others too such as the closet create by trauma. In every instance there was an eventual moment of "coming out" where I first had to admit to myself what I was experiencing or what I had experienced, and then eventually admitting that to other people.
As a gay man one thing you learn quite quickly after coming out for the first time is that it isn't a "one and done" process, you are perpetually coming out to people. Every new person you meet eventually has that moment of realisation either when you tell them or when they figure it out for themselves. Those who are more flamboyant or expressive in their sexuality whilst they serve as the vanguard and bear the brunt of most animosity directed at the gay community because they are the most visible element of it, also benefit from the arguable gift of a glass closet, in that everyone who meets them is in no doubt as to their sexuality so they never have to "come out" of the closet, and even when they do it's met with the "we already knew" response.
That personality flip that I experienced after trauma took me to an extreme that I have spent years returning from. The work that I have had to put in and the weight of that effort is not to be understated. Throughout the process however there has been one constant and that has been the emotional guidance system that has helped and often hindered me from navigating through that process. So much to the point where there has been an incredible desire to have a switch that I could manually control that I could use to turn on and off emotions depending on whether they are of benefit or of detriment to me respectively.
Whilst the idea of being able to control your emotions like this might sound quite dangerous and toxic in nature, this is actually an ability most people do possess whether they realise it or not, and an ability which a small percentage of the population lack. The part of the brain responsible for regulating emotions is called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex [ACC], and in a normal healthy brain it is able to have a degree of control over emotional impulses. It's not as simple as an on and off switch as I desire but rather it serves as a volume control dial of sorts. The ACC allows most people to pursue actions against their emotional impulse, in other words it is the part of the brain that allows you to "grin and bear it" and employ stoicism. As I said however, a percentage of the population lacks this level of emotional control and the reason for that lacking appears to be neurological. There have been numerous studies for instance that show for individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD] this ACC does not activate when people with ADHD experience emotional distress.
Knowing that this part of the brain exists and understanding its function is only the first step to developing a means to gain more explicit control over your emotions. There have been studies carried out that seek to determine whether it is possible to train the ACC to activate and whether the intensity of that activation can be controlled or modified. Most of these studies go beyond my understanding of the field however as they branch away from Psychology and into Neurology, the former being a branch of social sciences and the latter being a branch of Neuroscience.
This highlights a fundamental problem that we often run into when we attempt to expand our understanding, we inevitably reach fields of study that require experience, and structured education in order to adequately understand the content. The problem is, not everyone is able to admit the boundary of their understanding and many will often venture beyond it and subsequently draw conclusions that vary greatly in their accuracy or inaccuracy as the case may be.
As far as Psychology is concerned, I have no formal education in the field beyond behavioural psychology as a primer to Human Computer Interaction, a limited exposure to cognitive psychology, again for the same purpose, and also exposure to behavioural psychology through training in Management of Actual or Potential Aggression [MAPA] and Management of Violence and Aggression [MOVA] both of which revolve around the same point of focus, both of which I learned about during my time working for the National Health Service [NHS] here in the UK. The only other formal exposure to Psychology I have had is as a patient going through therapy for various things and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT] which I have mentioned in previous posts.
I can recognise the limits of my understanding and also recognise the risk of pursuing interest in a field through self study and exploration without validation and verification to ensure the conclusions drawn are accurate. This is part of the reason why I have not ventured further with exploring the topic of ACC Training to increase your ACC activation, or the potential to do so as from what I have seen these are experimental ideas that are still being studied and continuously developed - most also require functional MRI in tandem to determine if they are working, this isn't about mentality and mindset or how you think about thinking [Metacognition] this is about altering your physiological state which you have no way of monitoring for yourself to determine efficacy.
Still that idea of having more explicit control over your emotions is incredibly appealing and has left me wondering just how much of my inability to focus at times is down to mitigating factors that I can control, and how much is down to the wiring of my brain as I have never actually been assessed for ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder. If either of these were present I would assert that I would be considered very high functioning as yet I have achieved quite a few things that many people with those conditions would find incredibly difficult, not impossible but incredibly difficult.
Podcasts
I really love podcasts as a form of communication and as a for of content distribution and consumption. I took a while to reflect on this and I tried to pick apart why I love the medium so much and I think I have managed to pin down what it is I like and also the things I don't like but we will get to those in a bit.
First and foremost I have always been a fan of one-way communication, by this I mean any medium where you are given essentially static content that you consume first before you get to do anything with it. So for example, Music is a form of one-way communication because you listen to the content, in this case a song, without the ability in the moment to interact and engage with the source of that content, in this case the singer. Movies are another form of one-way communication, you don't get to interact with anything in the movie as you watch it. Books, blogs, and other written forms of communication typically fall into this classification too. The reason I love this type of communication is because you know what to expect to an extent before you consume it, you also know roughly how long it will take you to consume it, and you generally get to decide for yourself when you consume it, at a time and place that is convenient to you. Also in deference to social anxiety it also removes the element of expectation of a reply.
Most of these forms of communication are designed to create content that is consumed either once or repeatedly without expectation of a response, and in many of these cases traditionally there wasn't even a method for you to respond; you generally didn't get the opportunity to give feedback, or praise, or comment on any of these things to the people that created them. Then came the advent of interactive media, which took these forms of communication to another level, where the content went from being static to being something you could interact with. There was a time when the Music industry pre-Internet promoted the idea of fan clubs, where fans where actively encouraged to build communities centred around artists, in return the music industry facilitated interaction with those artists. Official fan clubs would have interviews with the artists, photo shoots, extra behind the scenes information, additional content that regular consumers didn't see. For a time there were magazines devoted to this concept some on a smaller level specific to an individual artist, and some on an industry-wide scale where multiple artists were featured. In the UK the best example of the latter would be Smash Hits Magazine which ran for 28 years.
Movies attempted to have similar forms of engagement although a greater emphasis was placed on producing additional content and with the advent of DVD in the late 90s the push to create interactive content was noticeable but this interactivity was limited because it was essentially branched static content, you didn't actually have influence over the content itself. Nevertheless the idea persisted, to create content that was more engaging, this was something the Movie industry never managed to achieve in any practical sense. Arguably the point at which a Movie actually becomes interactive it evolves into the realm of gaming, in particular narrative gaming or story based game-play.
Similarly the publishing industry never really managed to create books that were interactive until the advent of digital publishing and even then the content was still limited to branching of static content. Without allowing the reader to get involved in the writing process there isn't really a practical way to make this kind of content something you can engage with on that level. Some authors were able to make this transition however and create expanded universes for their content, these universes went beyond the initial publications and created something that the reader could actually engage with. Very few authors have been able to do this though and arguably only those that had massive success financially were even given the opportunity to try.
Then with the growth of the Internet and the emergence of platforms like Blogger and Wordpress the drive to find user generated content became a focus and this exploded and left behind a pit that descends into the deepest abyss imaginable. Blogs became one of the most prolific forms of user generated content online before social networks took their place. Nevertheless to this day blogs still exist as one of the easiest ways to encourage engagement because the act of blogging in itself is engagement. Where the Music industry recognised the creative process could not involve the consumer so a secondary experience based around common consumption was needed, and where the publishing industry recognised that engagement centred around a single publication were limited by the imagination of the author, those who created blogging platforms recognised that both of these could be combined, to create platforms where the imagination of each consumer contributes to the platform as a whole and the size of the platform constantly grows as a result. You are not only encouraged to consume content but to create your own, contribute to the creative process of others, provide comment, feedback, praise, criticism, and generally propagate what would otherwise be an empty room in essence.
Blogging has its limitations however, the written word can only convey meaning to an extent, it lacks context without the author explicitly providing it. The video based equivalent - vlogging - emerged as an answer to this problem, not only do you get the content that would have been written, but you also get the context of tone, presence, progression, and the emotion that the creator holds in mind all with little effort on their part as these are naturally conveyed implicitly through spoken word. The trouble with vlogging however is that visual media is just that, inherently visual. What you produce is judged on the visual appeal which is a problem if you want to convey anything of substance. No disrespect to vloggers but it is undeniable that the first thing you will be judged on before you even open your mouth in any of your videos is the lighting, resolution, aspect ratio, contrast, gain, focus, ISO of the camera you are using, then the audio quality, continuity, branding, camera placement, then we get to the vlogger themselves, what they wear, what they look like, are they attractive, and everything else is all factored in before you even begin to speak at length on the subject you want to talk about.
Podcasts seem to be the answer to the question of how to incorporate the advantages of vlogging into the traditional format of a blog by removing most of the visual distractions. You gain all of the advantages of having the written word articulated as you intended it when written when it is delivered in this way. It also allows you to break free from the constraints of grammar, syntax, and much of the structural limitations of using text based communication to the point where you can create content that is much more conversational and arguably easier to digest for the consumer. Through it all however you are brought back again to the concept of one-way communication. A podcast is recorded and distributed, and then consumed. At the point of consumption you generally don't have any interaction - some producers get around this by streaming their production process so that those who want to interact get to do so at the time and that gets incorporated into the final static process.
In the absence of streaming, the only real way to facilitate interaction with a podcast is to create a community around it, either on the platform that the podcast is distributed through, or via social media or an official website that acts as a companion to the podcast. These are all delayed interactions though so they have influence over future publications but not over what is already out there, the latter is limited only to feedback.
What I like about podcasts is that you get to consume the content without any expectations placed on you. You can consume it whenever you want, you can do other things at the same time because you need only listen, no visual engagement or focus is needed. You are placed in a very different mentality listening to a podcast than with other forms of media as a result of the fact that they are typically conversational, but the crux here is that a conversation is usually a two-way experience but as we have already stated at length, this is one-way which means you're essentially being placed in the mentality of being receptive. By this I mean, in a truly receptive conversation each side would hear the other out before giving their response. I listen to podcasts and think more about what the person is saying than I would if they were in front of me saying the exact same thing purely because we are conditioned to expect conversations to be two-way and the absence of response is seen as rude, or ignorant when in reality refusing to hear someone out is rude and ignorant.
To that end I would say in a rather bizarre statement, that a podcast is the opportunity to have a conversation where the other person hears you out before they respond. That is of course if you give the consumer the opportunity to respond, some podcast creators don't have communities created to accompany their productions and don't engage at all. I have noticed however that the most successful podcasts do facilitate this response, as I said above this is done through either social media, the podcast distribution platform, or through companion websites. I've seen some very interesting conversations emerge as a result of podcasts and I think that is entirely down to the fact that you listen to the podcast before you comment, you hear the other person out.
The other main reason why I love podcasts is because it shifts peoples' perceptions quite a bit in terms of the creators and their guests. On more than one occasion I have seen a title of an episode mention the guest and fully anticipate the episode to be a train wreck and then find my perception of the guest flipped on its head when they are in a situation where they sit and talk without dramatics, without cameras to play to, without anything "extra" and have to rely on their spoken word to communicate. When we talk about the creative process there is a state of mind referred to a "flow" which is achieved when the artist manages to engage in the creative process and let their consciousness flow freely. When you listen to podcasts and get to hear the creators and their guests discuss topics without everything else attached to them you get to experience this flow and with it you gain a greater insight into the person behind the creation.
I will also say this has also made me realise some people are in the wrong job - this is something I have said before in respect of other industries but this insight in particular really makes you see how some people rely on certain facets of their public persona to generate their fame and fortune whilst completely discarding that which is arguably much more substantial and meaningful, then again that also reflects the reality that people are often overlooked in the fields where they would excel given the chance and opportunity to do so.
First and foremost I have always been a fan of one-way communication, by this I mean any medium where you are given essentially static content that you consume first before you get to do anything with it. So for example, Music is a form of one-way communication because you listen to the content, in this case a song, without the ability in the moment to interact and engage with the source of that content, in this case the singer. Movies are another form of one-way communication, you don't get to interact with anything in the movie as you watch it. Books, blogs, and other written forms of communication typically fall into this classification too. The reason I love this type of communication is because you know what to expect to an extent before you consume it, you also know roughly how long it will take you to consume it, and you generally get to decide for yourself when you consume it, at a time and place that is convenient to you. Also in deference to social anxiety it also removes the element of expectation of a reply.
Most of these forms of communication are designed to create content that is consumed either once or repeatedly without expectation of a response, and in many of these cases traditionally there wasn't even a method for you to respond; you generally didn't get the opportunity to give feedback, or praise, or comment on any of these things to the people that created them. Then came the advent of interactive media, which took these forms of communication to another level, where the content went from being static to being something you could interact with. There was a time when the Music industry pre-Internet promoted the idea of fan clubs, where fans where actively encouraged to build communities centred around artists, in return the music industry facilitated interaction with those artists. Official fan clubs would have interviews with the artists, photo shoots, extra behind the scenes information, additional content that regular consumers didn't see. For a time there were magazines devoted to this concept some on a smaller level specific to an individual artist, and some on an industry-wide scale where multiple artists were featured. In the UK the best example of the latter would be Smash Hits Magazine which ran for 28 years.
Movies attempted to have similar forms of engagement although a greater emphasis was placed on producing additional content and with the advent of DVD in the late 90s the push to create interactive content was noticeable but this interactivity was limited because it was essentially branched static content, you didn't actually have influence over the content itself. Nevertheless the idea persisted, to create content that was more engaging, this was something the Movie industry never managed to achieve in any practical sense. Arguably the point at which a Movie actually becomes interactive it evolves into the realm of gaming, in particular narrative gaming or story based game-play.
Similarly the publishing industry never really managed to create books that were interactive until the advent of digital publishing and even then the content was still limited to branching of static content. Without allowing the reader to get involved in the writing process there isn't really a practical way to make this kind of content something you can engage with on that level. Some authors were able to make this transition however and create expanded universes for their content, these universes went beyond the initial publications and created something that the reader could actually engage with. Very few authors have been able to do this though and arguably only those that had massive success financially were even given the opportunity to try.
Then with the growth of the Internet and the emergence of platforms like Blogger and Wordpress the drive to find user generated content became a focus and this exploded and left behind a pit that descends into the deepest abyss imaginable. Blogs became one of the most prolific forms of user generated content online before social networks took their place. Nevertheless to this day blogs still exist as one of the easiest ways to encourage engagement because the act of blogging in itself is engagement. Where the Music industry recognised the creative process could not involve the consumer so a secondary experience based around common consumption was needed, and where the publishing industry recognised that engagement centred around a single publication were limited by the imagination of the author, those who created blogging platforms recognised that both of these could be combined, to create platforms where the imagination of each consumer contributes to the platform as a whole and the size of the platform constantly grows as a result. You are not only encouraged to consume content but to create your own, contribute to the creative process of others, provide comment, feedback, praise, criticism, and generally propagate what would otherwise be an empty room in essence.
Blogging has its limitations however, the written word can only convey meaning to an extent, it lacks context without the author explicitly providing it. The video based equivalent - vlogging - emerged as an answer to this problem, not only do you get the content that would have been written, but you also get the context of tone, presence, progression, and the emotion that the creator holds in mind all with little effort on their part as these are naturally conveyed implicitly through spoken word. The trouble with vlogging however is that visual media is just that, inherently visual. What you produce is judged on the visual appeal which is a problem if you want to convey anything of substance. No disrespect to vloggers but it is undeniable that the first thing you will be judged on before you even open your mouth in any of your videos is the lighting, resolution, aspect ratio, contrast, gain, focus, ISO of the camera you are using, then the audio quality, continuity, branding, camera placement, then we get to the vlogger themselves, what they wear, what they look like, are they attractive, and everything else is all factored in before you even begin to speak at length on the subject you want to talk about.
Podcasts seem to be the answer to the question of how to incorporate the advantages of vlogging into the traditional format of a blog by removing most of the visual distractions. You gain all of the advantages of having the written word articulated as you intended it when written when it is delivered in this way. It also allows you to break free from the constraints of grammar, syntax, and much of the structural limitations of using text based communication to the point where you can create content that is much more conversational and arguably easier to digest for the consumer. Through it all however you are brought back again to the concept of one-way communication. A podcast is recorded and distributed, and then consumed. At the point of consumption you generally don't have any interaction - some producers get around this by streaming their production process so that those who want to interact get to do so at the time and that gets incorporated into the final static process.
In the absence of streaming, the only real way to facilitate interaction with a podcast is to create a community around it, either on the platform that the podcast is distributed through, or via social media or an official website that acts as a companion to the podcast. These are all delayed interactions though so they have influence over future publications but not over what is already out there, the latter is limited only to feedback.
What I like about podcasts is that you get to consume the content without any expectations placed on you. You can consume it whenever you want, you can do other things at the same time because you need only listen, no visual engagement or focus is needed. You are placed in a very different mentality listening to a podcast than with other forms of media as a result of the fact that they are typically conversational, but the crux here is that a conversation is usually a two-way experience but as we have already stated at length, this is one-way which means you're essentially being placed in the mentality of being receptive. By this I mean, in a truly receptive conversation each side would hear the other out before giving their response. I listen to podcasts and think more about what the person is saying than I would if they were in front of me saying the exact same thing purely because we are conditioned to expect conversations to be two-way and the absence of response is seen as rude, or ignorant when in reality refusing to hear someone out is rude and ignorant.
To that end I would say in a rather bizarre statement, that a podcast is the opportunity to have a conversation where the other person hears you out before they respond. That is of course if you give the consumer the opportunity to respond, some podcast creators don't have communities created to accompany their productions and don't engage at all. I have noticed however that the most successful podcasts do facilitate this response, as I said above this is done through either social media, the podcast distribution platform, or through companion websites. I've seen some very interesting conversations emerge as a result of podcasts and I think that is entirely down to the fact that you listen to the podcast before you comment, you hear the other person out.
The other main reason why I love podcasts is because it shifts peoples' perceptions quite a bit in terms of the creators and their guests. On more than one occasion I have seen a title of an episode mention the guest and fully anticipate the episode to be a train wreck and then find my perception of the guest flipped on its head when they are in a situation where they sit and talk without dramatics, without cameras to play to, without anything "extra" and have to rely on their spoken word to communicate. When we talk about the creative process there is a state of mind referred to a "flow" which is achieved when the artist manages to engage in the creative process and let their consciousness flow freely. When you listen to podcasts and get to hear the creators and their guests discuss topics without everything else attached to them you get to experience this flow and with it you gain a greater insight into the person behind the creation.
I will also say this has also made me realise some people are in the wrong job - this is something I have said before in respect of other industries but this insight in particular really makes you see how some people rely on certain facets of their public persona to generate their fame and fortune whilst completely discarding that which is arguably much more substantial and meaningful, then again that also reflects the reality that people are often overlooked in the fields where they would excel given the chance and opportunity to do so.
Music Monday #28: Anthology by Bryan Adams
He turned 60 last year you know, I know age is nothing but a number and has little relevance to someone's career, but the reason I mention it is because Bryan Adams is one of those artists that I have a vision of in my mind that was created at the time when I first discovered his music, and that vision is what remains, even now. That image of who he was is one I formed in 2005 when he released 'Anthology' prior to this I had heard his name and I knew one or two tracks but I hadn't paid much attention to him.
Anthology is a greatest hits album that brought together music from the better part of three decades leading up to its release. I have the International version and from it there are quite a few tracks that I love but those that stand out the most are ' Summer of 69' [make of that what you will], 'Everything I Do', 'There Will Never Be Another Tonight', 'All For Love', 'Best of Me', 'Don't Give Up', and 'Here I Am' all of which you can probably guess fit a theme, follow a narrative that I identified with, and are pretty self explanatory. The truth is I can't break these down to just a few and piecing together all the lyrics would only lead to me repeating much of what I have already shared throughout this series of posts.
The two tracks I will single out though are 'Everything I Do' and 'Here I Am' which are worthy of particular note. The former represents the first love song that I really connected with on an emotional level that ran a little too deep for me. I had heard love songs before that I identified with, some of which have been mentioned already in this list, but this song cut deep and struck a nerve, I know that's a cliché for many people though, I have visions of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy in this moment for the music video he created when he was lovesick, but there is comedy in tragedy, and life imitates art, and sometimes art imitates life, sorry Oscar Wilde.
This is one of those instances, where yes as much as it may seem sardonic that is how I felt - bear in mind though when I bought Anthology I was 17, my life experience was limited and everything was amplified as I didn't yet have the context to put everything into in order to weigh it up. Indeed as I have grown and gained much more experience in life and in love the weight of that song has grown heavier and the lyrics mean much more, attached to more than just one person at this point you could even flip the script and say the lyrics are directed at my inners self now talking to yourself as if they were a third person and telling them everything you do is for them, which ironically isn't that far from the truth if you choose to separate your ego from your sense of self and treat it like a third person.
'Here I Am' on the other hand it should probably come as no surprise by now as a gay man represents something that I've already touched upon, the struggle for self acceptance and the ability to say those words and mean them that you're happy with who you are, where you are, and that you've made peace with the world - I'd like to say I am there but still I have work to do before I get there. I am a lot more comfortable with who I am than I was at 17.
Anthology is a greatest hits album that brought together music from the better part of three decades leading up to its release. I have the International version and from it there are quite a few tracks that I love but those that stand out the most are ' Summer of 69' [make of that what you will], 'Everything I Do', 'There Will Never Be Another Tonight', 'All For Love', 'Best of Me', 'Don't Give Up', and 'Here I Am' all of which you can probably guess fit a theme, follow a narrative that I identified with, and are pretty self explanatory. The truth is I can't break these down to just a few and piecing together all the lyrics would only lead to me repeating much of what I have already shared throughout this series of posts.
The two tracks I will single out though are 'Everything I Do' and 'Here I Am' which are worthy of particular note. The former represents the first love song that I really connected with on an emotional level that ran a little too deep for me. I had heard love songs before that I identified with, some of which have been mentioned already in this list, but this song cut deep and struck a nerve, I know that's a cliché for many people though, I have visions of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy in this moment for the music video he created when he was lovesick, but there is comedy in tragedy, and life imitates art, and sometimes art imitates life, sorry Oscar Wilde.
This is one of those instances, where yes as much as it may seem sardonic that is how I felt - bear in mind though when I bought Anthology I was 17, my life experience was limited and everything was amplified as I didn't yet have the context to put everything into in order to weigh it up. Indeed as I have grown and gained much more experience in life and in love the weight of that song has grown heavier and the lyrics mean much more, attached to more than just one person at this point you could even flip the script and say the lyrics are directed at my inners self now talking to yourself as if they were a third person and telling them everything you do is for them, which ironically isn't that far from the truth if you choose to separate your ego from your sense of self and treat it like a third person.
'Here I Am' on the other hand it should probably come as no surprise by now as a gay man represents something that I've already touched upon, the struggle for self acceptance and the ability to say those words and mean them that you're happy with who you are, where you are, and that you've made peace with the world - I'd like to say I am there but still I have work to do before I get there. I am a lot more comfortable with who I am than I was at 17.
Brace For Impact
I'm 32 years old and in my lifetime the end of the world has been predicted many times. The first major end time prophecy I was aware of was one that centred around the year 2000, not in relation to the Y2K bug which I have written about in the past but rather in relation to the religious significance of the year. The millennium came and went and the world kept turning, life went on. 2010 rolled around with a similar prophecy but on a smaller scale and the same happened again, life went on.
Then came 2012, perhaps one of the biggest prophecies in terms of cultural significance and the traction it gained, the Mayan Apocalypse as it was termed was to happen on the 21st of December 2012, and much anticipation was built up, and still, the day came, and went, and life went on.
Recently this Mayan prophecy resurfaced, the 21st of June was posited as the "correct" date of the Mayan apocalypse adjusted for changing calendars that caused an 8 year disparity between the actual date and that which appeared on calendars. Again, the day came, and went, and life went on.
2020 has been a horrible year, if ever a year was worthy of the title annus horribilis, then 2020 could stop now and have that title safe for many years to come and yet we have just over 5 months left to go before we get to put it behind us.
What I find fascinating about all of these predictions is that although the world did not end as was predicted, great moments of renewal and change happened. The year 2000 brought a new dawn for mankind, 2010 saw the nascences of technological revolutions gain traction, even 2012 brought with it a tentative end to a period of great upheval, the Arab Spring which commenced in 2011 largely came to an end in 2012, although not all of its objectives were achieved, and arguably in some cases what followed was much worse, the point is that moment of transformation did occur, although not in the way that anyone expected.
2020 has brought with it now a moment of transformation where great change is once again possible, not only in a metaphorical sense, in terms of potential, but also in practical terms. We stand at a precipice, the magnitude of the task that lies before us is still immense but for the first time in generations a global consensus is emerging, although that consensus is coming very slowly, one thing this pandemic has managed to do is rip apart the manifestos of politicians and shred political ideology and expose the truth, that no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we are all connected and we are all interdependent and this idea that we can exclude ourselves from that narrative and go our own way without consequence is being shot to shit.
I am in no doubt that this year will get much worse before it gets better but that darkness although tiring does not intimidate me. My aversion isn't borne of fear it is quite simply borne of the foresight that what is to come is going to be exhausting and there is no escaping it. In a way this certainty above all else has been the first concrete thing to hold onto in a very long time. It has been years since I could look to the future and feel confident that I knew what was coming, and even though the only thing I can say with confidence is that a shit storm is coming, that I know for sure, and with that certainty I can prepare, physically and mentally.
The question most people ask is how do you do that? The answer is simple, arm yourself with coping mechanisms. If there is something you do not know how to deal with then take this opportunity to learn. If you don't know how to deal with grief, take this moment to search out information about it and learn as much as you can. If you don't know how to live on a budget, how to survive unemployed, how to make things last longer and how to repair things then take this opportunity to learn, there is a world of information at your fingertips right now and plenty of people who are bored out of their minds desperate for something to do. If you want to learn how to sew, how to cook, how to save money when you have virtually no disposable income then seek out that information now.
Beyond pragmatism look too at sources of information on mental health and well-being, learn how to cope with stress and anxiety, look to all of the things you once dismissed so quickly with derision and see how you can incorporate them into your life. Look at how others cope with these things and learn what you are capable of withstanding. Know your limits and know how to find escape, how to find relief, how to unplug your mind.
The biggest mistake you can ever make in life is living in denial because you aren't just denying what is coming but you are denying yourself the opportunity to brace for what is coming and arm yourself. This is an incredibly dark time for humanity but remember that when you exist in darkness your eyes adjust so that you can see better, those who stare at the light hoping it will last forever are the ones who are blind when it goes out.
You don't have to prepare for the end of the world, you don't have to expect your plane to crash, or that you will die in the process, instead listen to the safety announcements, brace yourself for turbulence, brace yourself for impact, know where the exits are, know where the lifebelts are, give yourself the best chance of survival that you can, in the extreme learn how to swim if you don't know already, whatever you need to do in order make it through, do it and do it now.
Then came 2012, perhaps one of the biggest prophecies in terms of cultural significance and the traction it gained, the Mayan Apocalypse as it was termed was to happen on the 21st of December 2012, and much anticipation was built up, and still, the day came, and went, and life went on.
Recently this Mayan prophecy resurfaced, the 21st of June was posited as the "correct" date of the Mayan apocalypse adjusted for changing calendars that caused an 8 year disparity between the actual date and that which appeared on calendars. Again, the day came, and went, and life went on.
2020 has been a horrible year, if ever a year was worthy of the title annus horribilis, then 2020 could stop now and have that title safe for many years to come and yet we have just over 5 months left to go before we get to put it behind us.
What I find fascinating about all of these predictions is that although the world did not end as was predicted, great moments of renewal and change happened. The year 2000 brought a new dawn for mankind, 2010 saw the nascences of technological revolutions gain traction, even 2012 brought with it a tentative end to a period of great upheval, the Arab Spring which commenced in 2011 largely came to an end in 2012, although not all of its objectives were achieved, and arguably in some cases what followed was much worse, the point is that moment of transformation did occur, although not in the way that anyone expected.
2020 has brought with it now a moment of transformation where great change is once again possible, not only in a metaphorical sense, in terms of potential, but also in practical terms. We stand at a precipice, the magnitude of the task that lies before us is still immense but for the first time in generations a global consensus is emerging, although that consensus is coming very slowly, one thing this pandemic has managed to do is rip apart the manifestos of politicians and shred political ideology and expose the truth, that no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we are all connected and we are all interdependent and this idea that we can exclude ourselves from that narrative and go our own way without consequence is being shot to shit.
I am in no doubt that this year will get much worse before it gets better but that darkness although tiring does not intimidate me. My aversion isn't borne of fear it is quite simply borne of the foresight that what is to come is going to be exhausting and there is no escaping it. In a way this certainty above all else has been the first concrete thing to hold onto in a very long time. It has been years since I could look to the future and feel confident that I knew what was coming, and even though the only thing I can say with confidence is that a shit storm is coming, that I know for sure, and with that certainty I can prepare, physically and mentally.
The question most people ask is how do you do that? The answer is simple, arm yourself with coping mechanisms. If there is something you do not know how to deal with then take this opportunity to learn. If you don't know how to deal with grief, take this moment to search out information about it and learn as much as you can. If you don't know how to live on a budget, how to survive unemployed, how to make things last longer and how to repair things then take this opportunity to learn, there is a world of information at your fingertips right now and plenty of people who are bored out of their minds desperate for something to do. If you want to learn how to sew, how to cook, how to save money when you have virtually no disposable income then seek out that information now.
Beyond pragmatism look too at sources of information on mental health and well-being, learn how to cope with stress and anxiety, look to all of the things you once dismissed so quickly with derision and see how you can incorporate them into your life. Look at how others cope with these things and learn what you are capable of withstanding. Know your limits and know how to find escape, how to find relief, how to unplug your mind.
The biggest mistake you can ever make in life is living in denial because you aren't just denying what is coming but you are denying yourself the opportunity to brace for what is coming and arm yourself. This is an incredibly dark time for humanity but remember that when you exist in darkness your eyes adjust so that you can see better, those who stare at the light hoping it will last forever are the ones who are blind when it goes out.
You don't have to prepare for the end of the world, you don't have to expect your plane to crash, or that you will die in the process, instead listen to the safety announcements, brace yourself for turbulence, brace yourself for impact, know where the exits are, know where the lifebelts are, give yourself the best chance of survival that you can, in the extreme learn how to swim if you don't know already, whatever you need to do in order make it through, do it and do it now.
Forgotten Ways
There's a rather simple game available right now on Steam called Forgotten Ways. In its simplest terms it is a maze exploration game. You navigate a 3D maze that is aesthetically pleasing interspersed with notes and clues left behind to guide you on your way. The game feels unfinished, more of a beta than a final release as it appears to have been originally designed in Russian and translated into English as the translation is somewhat lacking. At £1.69 [$1.99] though I wasn't expecting much from it, the main appeal was the visual design which reminded me a lot of The Witness by Jonathan Blow the developer behind Braid. They have a number of shared elements predominantly the lack of enemies, no time constraints, no pressure, and minimal use of audio, effectively creating a relaxing experience.
With everything going on in the world right now I've taken to exploring games once again. I've mentioned in the past that I originally wanted to pursue games design as a career and tailored my education to that goal with the ultimate prize being my degree in Computer Science with Games Technology. However gaming has been something that I have had a love hate relationship with, again I have discussed this before on this blog. Games like The Witness and Forgotten Ways however appeal to another side of me, that is the side that questions how far you can stretch the definition of a game. I know how to solve a Rubik's Cube, by definition it is a puzzle, and therefore considered a game, but once you learn the algorithm to solve the cube, if you use that algorithm to solve it then you remove the gameplay element and pursue instead something else, more akin to instruction.
The Witness and Forgotten Ways both have one thing in common in this regard, that they are games you can really only "play" until you learn how to solve the puzzle you are presented with, once you know the solution then it's not really a game anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like both games, and I would like to be able to do more with them, but neither one incorporates dynamic puzzle generation - except for one particular part of The Witness which I won't discuss here as this post is intended to be spoiler free for both games.
This hints at a much deeper problem with life itself, there are many things we only get the pleasure of enjoying once, after which no other experience will be able to recreate that moment, you can't re-experience epiphany. On a somewhat macabre note, I have been contemplating the possibility of life after death, and one of the possibilities that is often thrown around is the concept of getting to live life again, to do it over but with different starting conditions. The main criticism with the possibility of this happening that people tend to have is that if it were de rigueur the preferred path onward then surely evidence would exist, some hang over would remain, some hint that you had been here before and had these experiences prior - the more I reflect on the desire to have novel experiences once more the more I would have to argue if this were possible then you probably wouldn't want to remember anything from your past lives. Really the only motivation to remember prior experience would be driven by ego and the desire to have an advantage next time round by knowing things so you would not have to relearn them.
You can replay The Witness, and Forgotten Ways, and still have some form of gameplay to those subsequent experiences if your memory doesn't hold up. If you can forget the path and forget the solutions then you can approach both games with an analytical mindset, but in both cases without completely forgetting what you experienced the first time round your memories will inevitably be jogged - it's ironic that this is the main obstacle to replay when they are both considered "walking simulator" games. The only other conclusion to draw is not to consider them games at all but instead to considered them interactive art installations - 3D virtual landscapes with limited interactivity intended to encourage the viewer to explore and reflect on the experience.
If you think of life itself in the same way, what conclusion do you draw? How would your experience of life change if I were to tell you life exists as one big art installation that you are born into and allowed to interact with for no other purpose than to experience it and reflect on it?
With everything going on in the world right now I've taken to exploring games once again. I've mentioned in the past that I originally wanted to pursue games design as a career and tailored my education to that goal with the ultimate prize being my degree in Computer Science with Games Technology. However gaming has been something that I have had a love hate relationship with, again I have discussed this before on this blog. Games like The Witness and Forgotten Ways however appeal to another side of me, that is the side that questions how far you can stretch the definition of a game. I know how to solve a Rubik's Cube, by definition it is a puzzle, and therefore considered a game, but once you learn the algorithm to solve the cube, if you use that algorithm to solve it then you remove the gameplay element and pursue instead something else, more akin to instruction.
The Witness and Forgotten Ways both have one thing in common in this regard, that they are games you can really only "play" until you learn how to solve the puzzle you are presented with, once you know the solution then it's not really a game anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like both games, and I would like to be able to do more with them, but neither one incorporates dynamic puzzle generation - except for one particular part of The Witness which I won't discuss here as this post is intended to be spoiler free for both games.
This hints at a much deeper problem with life itself, there are many things we only get the pleasure of enjoying once, after which no other experience will be able to recreate that moment, you can't re-experience epiphany. On a somewhat macabre note, I have been contemplating the possibility of life after death, and one of the possibilities that is often thrown around is the concept of getting to live life again, to do it over but with different starting conditions. The main criticism with the possibility of this happening that people tend to have is that if it were de rigueur the preferred path onward then surely evidence would exist, some hang over would remain, some hint that you had been here before and had these experiences prior - the more I reflect on the desire to have novel experiences once more the more I would have to argue if this were possible then you probably wouldn't want to remember anything from your past lives. Really the only motivation to remember prior experience would be driven by ego and the desire to have an advantage next time round by knowing things so you would not have to relearn them.
You can replay The Witness, and Forgotten Ways, and still have some form of gameplay to those subsequent experiences if your memory doesn't hold up. If you can forget the path and forget the solutions then you can approach both games with an analytical mindset, but in both cases without completely forgetting what you experienced the first time round your memories will inevitably be jogged - it's ironic that this is the main obstacle to replay when they are both considered "walking simulator" games. The only other conclusion to draw is not to consider them games at all but instead to considered them interactive art installations - 3D virtual landscapes with limited interactivity intended to encourage the viewer to explore and reflect on the experience.
If you think of life itself in the same way, what conclusion do you draw? How would your experience of life change if I were to tell you life exists as one big art installation that you are born into and allowed to interact with for no other purpose than to experience it and reflect on it?
Word for Word
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that one of the things I did during lockdown was to focus on language learning. I have been learning Spanish for many years but I have also taken a particular interest in Swedish lately - sparked by the decision to binge-watch the entire series of True Blood and a particular fascination with Eric Northman played by Alexander Skarsgård, and Pamela Swynford De Beaufort played by Kristin Bauer van Straten both of whom speak Swedish to each other in a few scenes - it was those scenes where I understood what was said with little effort that piqued my interest.
If you set out to learn a language and hope to find translations that say what you would say in English word for word then you're probably not going to get very far with your endeavour. For example the word "tack" in Swedish literally translates as "thanks" and the word "snälla" literally translates as "please" - what you'll find however is that a lot of situations in English where the word "please" is used, in place "tack" is used when speaking in Swedish. You can insist on being literal and learn the literal translation and stick with it, but it won't be natural to a native speaker to hear you say it, and will be an indicator that you learned the language later in life as a second language.
This is one of the things I love about learning languages, the fact that there is an element of cultural exchanged involved, that as some point you have to give up the idea of 1:1 translation and learn how the same meaning would be communicated in the language you are learning. I think this is one of the reasons people often fail to make progress in learning to speak another language, the idea that you need to learn how to take your English thoughts and translate those into another language proves to be the greatest barrier to language learners; those that progress and gain proficiency in multiple languages on the other hand learn to "think" in another language and learn to associate the language with the concepts and the ideas they represent instead, that way you don't think in one language, then translate, instead you think in that language.
The idea of thinking in another language can seem alien at first especially to people who are trying to learn a new language for the first time having never acquired another language or never been successful in their study of other languages in the past. What you have to remember though is that as a child you learned what an Orange was before you knew what to call it. You saw it, you recognised the size, the shape, the colour, and learned to associate the word "Orange" with what you saw, and eventually reached the point where you were presented with an orange and knew what to call it without having to stop and think about it. As you can imagine, doing this for everything you encounter in life is time consuming, it took you many years, in some cases even decades to get to the level of proficiency you now possess in your native language. When you set out to learn another language, you are guided by the desire to compress this process down into a matter of weeks rather than waiting years, the futility of this endeavour is what ultimately leads to the failure rate of language acquisition that we see.
If however you abandon the aspiration of learning "everything" in a short space of time and instead focus on the "core" of the language, the subset of the language that you will use the most then you can make your goal much more realistic. This focus however requires you to forgo your ego and accept that there will be things you just don't know how to say, and that in time you will learn these words through "osmosis" as it were. That is a word that is often used in reference to this process but at its most fundamental it is the assertion that the most important words you need to remember will be acquired naturally. This of course is a lot easier when you have exposure to others who speak the language you want to learn - when you can use immersion. This isn't always possible.
Immersion is very useful but if you don't have the opportunity to live in an environment where the language you are learning is spoken every day then realistically this isn't possible. Barriers to this might be economic, you may not have the finance to be able to do this or it may be due to factors beyond your control (like a global pandemic) or it could be that such a place doesn't actually exist - many languages are considered "dead" when they are not used everyday anywhere in the world e.g. Latin [although the Vatican does use a derivative known as Ecumenical Latin], others are considered esoteric when they are only used by those who have knowledge of them e.g. fictional languages like Klingon or High Valyrian, and some languages are constructed to serve a purpose e.g. Esperanto which was designed to be a "Universal" language always intended to be secondary.
So if you can't immerse yourself in a language what other options do you have? Well in my experience the only other option is to increase your exposure to that language. If software you use supports multiple languages, then try changing the interface language to the one you are learning - if you are familiar with the interface you'll be able to navigate it even in another language and you will learn where certain words are used in practice. If you can read a bit of a language then national news outlets provided by public broadcasters tend to use the most academic form of the language free from colloquialisms, clichés, and local dialect quirks. If you have a particular love of a book or movie series that you have watched many times over, see if you can find a translation of that content as you will be familiar with it. Books can be a great way to learn if you can manage to read them, it may seem like an odd idea as an adult but books particularly aimed at children are a better place to start. Music is another option if you can explore artists that produce content in the language you want to learn then you can further increase your exposure, the same applies to podcasts and online radio streams as those will also give you exposure to people speaking the language in their natural voice, the more relevant it is to your interests the more engaging you will find the content.
If you set out to learn a language and hope to find translations that say what you would say in English word for word then you're probably not going to get very far with your endeavour. For example the word "tack" in Swedish literally translates as "thanks" and the word "snälla" literally translates as "please" - what you'll find however is that a lot of situations in English where the word "please" is used, in place "tack" is used when speaking in Swedish. You can insist on being literal and learn the literal translation and stick with it, but it won't be natural to a native speaker to hear you say it, and will be an indicator that you learned the language later in life as a second language.
This is one of the things I love about learning languages, the fact that there is an element of cultural exchanged involved, that as some point you have to give up the idea of 1:1 translation and learn how the same meaning would be communicated in the language you are learning. I think this is one of the reasons people often fail to make progress in learning to speak another language, the idea that you need to learn how to take your English thoughts and translate those into another language proves to be the greatest barrier to language learners; those that progress and gain proficiency in multiple languages on the other hand learn to "think" in another language and learn to associate the language with the concepts and the ideas they represent instead, that way you don't think in one language, then translate, instead you think in that language.
The idea of thinking in another language can seem alien at first especially to people who are trying to learn a new language for the first time having never acquired another language or never been successful in their study of other languages in the past. What you have to remember though is that as a child you learned what an Orange was before you knew what to call it. You saw it, you recognised the size, the shape, the colour, and learned to associate the word "Orange" with what you saw, and eventually reached the point where you were presented with an orange and knew what to call it without having to stop and think about it. As you can imagine, doing this for everything you encounter in life is time consuming, it took you many years, in some cases even decades to get to the level of proficiency you now possess in your native language. When you set out to learn another language, you are guided by the desire to compress this process down into a matter of weeks rather than waiting years, the futility of this endeavour is what ultimately leads to the failure rate of language acquisition that we see.
If however you abandon the aspiration of learning "everything" in a short space of time and instead focus on the "core" of the language, the subset of the language that you will use the most then you can make your goal much more realistic. This focus however requires you to forgo your ego and accept that there will be things you just don't know how to say, and that in time you will learn these words through "osmosis" as it were. That is a word that is often used in reference to this process but at its most fundamental it is the assertion that the most important words you need to remember will be acquired naturally. This of course is a lot easier when you have exposure to others who speak the language you want to learn - when you can use immersion. This isn't always possible.
Immersion is very useful but if you don't have the opportunity to live in an environment where the language you are learning is spoken every day then realistically this isn't possible. Barriers to this might be economic, you may not have the finance to be able to do this or it may be due to factors beyond your control (like a global pandemic) or it could be that such a place doesn't actually exist - many languages are considered "dead" when they are not used everyday anywhere in the world e.g. Latin [although the Vatican does use a derivative known as Ecumenical Latin], others are considered esoteric when they are only used by those who have knowledge of them e.g. fictional languages like Klingon or High Valyrian, and some languages are constructed to serve a purpose e.g. Esperanto which was designed to be a "Universal" language always intended to be secondary.
So if you can't immerse yourself in a language what other options do you have? Well in my experience the only other option is to increase your exposure to that language. If software you use supports multiple languages, then try changing the interface language to the one you are learning - if you are familiar with the interface you'll be able to navigate it even in another language and you will learn where certain words are used in practice. If you can read a bit of a language then national news outlets provided by public broadcasters tend to use the most academic form of the language free from colloquialisms, clichés, and local dialect quirks. If you have a particular love of a book or movie series that you have watched many times over, see if you can find a translation of that content as you will be familiar with it. Books can be a great way to learn if you can manage to read them, it may seem like an odd idea as an adult but books particularly aimed at children are a better place to start. Music is another option if you can explore artists that produce content in the language you want to learn then you can further increase your exposure, the same applies to podcasts and online radio streams as those will also give you exposure to people speaking the language in their natural voice, the more relevant it is to your interests the more engaging you will find the content.
Music Monday #27: J to Tha L-O!: The Remixes by Jennifer Lopez
I'm cheating. To be fair this isn't the first time I have cheated making this list but I justify it for the fact that this album is all music by the same artist so technically even though it's a compilation and not a greatest hits album I say it still counts.
2002 saw Jennifer Lopez release 'J to Tha L-O: The Remixes' which brought together remixes of tracks from her first two albums 'On The 6' and 'J.Lo' both of which get an honourable mention because I love almost every track on both of them but I couldn't justify including both of them on this list as well as this one and this one I wanted to include the most.
I love every single track on this album, from start to finish I can listen to the whole thing without skipping anything. By now you will know that's rare, there are only a handful of artists I can say that for. If I had to pick one track above all else that I love the most it would have to be Hex Hector's Momentous Mix of 'Waiting For Tonight' - this was the first time I heard Hex Hector's work and it would not be the last, indeed he'll get a mention again before the end of this list for a remix he did of another incredible artist but we'll get to that in time.
Waiting For Tonight in all its incarnations remains my favourite Jennifer Lopez track, the lyrics are perfection and every new incarnation is an experience of something new yet familiar that lets me find new ways to enjoy it all over again. The lyrics are pretty direct their meaning isn't obscured, it's about longing for a love, waiting for it, and the moment when you finally get that chance to embrace it, this fits me like a glove there's really not much more I can say it doesn't need explanation and doesn't need to be justified if you've been reading these posts in series you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from me now.
Jennifer Lopez served another purpose for me though, she fed my desire to learn other languages, her music introduced me to the world of latin pop music, and the tracks she recorded in Spanish I devoured with gusto when I started learning to speak Spanish. It won't come as a surprise then that I own the European Edition of the album which includes 'Una Noche Más' along with 'Si Ya Se Acabo', 'No Me Ames', and 'Que Ironia' all as bonus tracks, and that Una Noche Más was my favourite in particular.
I've followed J-Lo's career for 20 years, I own almost all her albums there's one or two I didn't care for but only positives here so we'll gloss over those. I'd also like to take a moment to say I quite like her acting career as well, and that I think critics have often been quite harsh on her to the point where I think it's expected that critical reviews of her acting ventures will be biased toward the negative. The best example of this that I can think of is 'The Cell' a movie released in 2000 that deals with many of the concepts that 'The Matrix' centred on which was released a year prior. The Matrix remains one of my favourite movies of all time so perhaps I am biased here due to the fact that the subject matter overlaps in parts, but nevertheless the reaction critically to The Cell got quite negative and spiteful at times, I'd just like to point out the movie grossed over 3x its budget at the box office so I definitely would not consider that a box office bomb, but that is the slant some of the reviews choose to take with it, and this bias is repeated across many other movies J-Lo has been in.
You don't have to like everything someone does and that's definitely not the case here, there are albums of J-Lo I don't own, and as for her acting career that is quite extensive, in researching this post I discovered just how many productions she's appeared in, over 100 at this point, which I was completely unaware of, I only knew of a handful of the titles that featured prominently in pop culture over the years. This isn't something unique to J-Lo for me though, I haven't explored Movies to the same extent that I have with Music, whenever I check anyone's IMDB profile it always amazes me just how long those list of appearances are, even when you filter them down to only include Movies and not TV shows etc.
Regardless, J-Lo is a staple in my music library and is one of the few artists as I said that can produce an album where I love every track. I would hate to lose her contributions and I would definitely notice if they disappeared. She also shares something with Madonna and Cher that I admire and that is her willingness to evolve, adapt, survive, and take risks. They don't always pay off but then if they did they wouldn't be risks would they? In the same vain she's also unapologetic, she is who she is, and she knows it, you can like it, or hate it, she's not going to change who she is because of your opinion which is something I've tried to live my life by - and at times failed miserably, but I still try, because it's more important for you to like yourself and who you are than to have people around you like you, the latter only leads to a life of misery and a place where you have to deny your nature and repress yourself for other peoples' amusement and that's incredibly toxic, I know from experience the damage that can do. Be who you are, stay true to yourself, and fuck the people who try to tell you otherwise, life is too short to be miserable.
2002 saw Jennifer Lopez release 'J to Tha L-O: The Remixes' which brought together remixes of tracks from her first two albums 'On The 6' and 'J.Lo' both of which get an honourable mention because I love almost every track on both of them but I couldn't justify including both of them on this list as well as this one and this one I wanted to include the most.
I love every single track on this album, from start to finish I can listen to the whole thing without skipping anything. By now you will know that's rare, there are only a handful of artists I can say that for. If I had to pick one track above all else that I love the most it would have to be Hex Hector's Momentous Mix of 'Waiting For Tonight' - this was the first time I heard Hex Hector's work and it would not be the last, indeed he'll get a mention again before the end of this list for a remix he did of another incredible artist but we'll get to that in time.
Waiting For Tonight in all its incarnations remains my favourite Jennifer Lopez track, the lyrics are perfection and every new incarnation is an experience of something new yet familiar that lets me find new ways to enjoy it all over again. The lyrics are pretty direct their meaning isn't obscured, it's about longing for a love, waiting for it, and the moment when you finally get that chance to embrace it, this fits me like a glove there's really not much more I can say it doesn't need explanation and doesn't need to be justified if you've been reading these posts in series you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from me now.
Jennifer Lopez served another purpose for me though, she fed my desire to learn other languages, her music introduced me to the world of latin pop music, and the tracks she recorded in Spanish I devoured with gusto when I started learning to speak Spanish. It won't come as a surprise then that I own the European Edition of the album which includes 'Una Noche Más' along with 'Si Ya Se Acabo', 'No Me Ames', and 'Que Ironia' all as bonus tracks, and that Una Noche Más was my favourite in particular.
I've followed J-Lo's career for 20 years, I own almost all her albums there's one or two I didn't care for but only positives here so we'll gloss over those. I'd also like to take a moment to say I quite like her acting career as well, and that I think critics have often been quite harsh on her to the point where I think it's expected that critical reviews of her acting ventures will be biased toward the negative. The best example of this that I can think of is 'The Cell' a movie released in 2000 that deals with many of the concepts that 'The Matrix' centred on which was released a year prior. The Matrix remains one of my favourite movies of all time so perhaps I am biased here due to the fact that the subject matter overlaps in parts, but nevertheless the reaction critically to The Cell got quite negative and spiteful at times, I'd just like to point out the movie grossed over 3x its budget at the box office so I definitely would not consider that a box office bomb, but that is the slant some of the reviews choose to take with it, and this bias is repeated across many other movies J-Lo has been in.
You don't have to like everything someone does and that's definitely not the case here, there are albums of J-Lo I don't own, and as for her acting career that is quite extensive, in researching this post I discovered just how many productions she's appeared in, over 100 at this point, which I was completely unaware of, I only knew of a handful of the titles that featured prominently in pop culture over the years. This isn't something unique to J-Lo for me though, I haven't explored Movies to the same extent that I have with Music, whenever I check anyone's IMDB profile it always amazes me just how long those list of appearances are, even when you filter them down to only include Movies and not TV shows etc.
Regardless, J-Lo is a staple in my music library and is one of the few artists as I said that can produce an album where I love every track. I would hate to lose her contributions and I would definitely notice if they disappeared. She also shares something with Madonna and Cher that I admire and that is her willingness to evolve, adapt, survive, and take risks. They don't always pay off but then if they did they wouldn't be risks would they? In the same vain she's also unapologetic, she is who she is, and she knows it, you can like it, or hate it, she's not going to change who she is because of your opinion which is something I've tried to live my life by - and at times failed miserably, but I still try, because it's more important for you to like yourself and who you are than to have people around you like you, the latter only leads to a life of misery and a place where you have to deny your nature and repress yourself for other peoples' amusement and that's incredibly toxic, I know from experience the damage that can do. Be who you are, stay true to yourself, and fuck the people who try to tell you otherwise, life is too short to be miserable.
Saturation Point
In most industries when you reach a saturation point, that industry no longer becomes profitable to anyone but the company or companies that saturate the market. In the UK for instance in the business of food supply there are 4 big retailers, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons, there are a few smaller national chains that typically serve a niche market or carry a price tag that excludes most people from shopping there. There are also independent stores, and a there are budget stores. That pretty much sums up the ecosystem that exists in terms of food supply. If you wanted to become a new national retailer of food you would find that a very difficult task to achieve, indeed in other countries where companies like Amazon have wanted to venture into this industry they have found it easiest to pursue acquisition as an entry strategy and buy up existing business.
The point I am making here is that once the saturation point is reached, the industry stops being profitable to new entrants and you eventually reach a point where less startup companies try to break into the industry as a whole. This also applies to individual products within the industry, there are a number of big brand names that establish themselves and gain a reputation for certain foods. Take sauces and condiments as an example, in the UK these are dominated by Heinz, Colman's, HP, and Schwartz. There are other brands that provide something specific like Bisto who mainly produce Gravy granules and Stock, and there are a plethora of independent producers who make one thing really well like Levi Roots which makes Reggae Reggae Sauce. Again this establishes the ecosystem that exists but beyond this existing ecosystem any new entrant is met with barriers to entry. Levi Roots is a prime example, the founder Keith Graham and his story is quite well known as he featured on Dragons' Den, the UK TV reality show based on the Japanese original called Money Tigers, US readers will know the format as Shark Tank. The point here is that Keith needed the trifecta of finance, exposure, and connection provided by the show in order to get his product into every store in the UK - the sauce is incredible and he deserves the success he has had but for his success story there are countless others who did not succeed.
This ultimately brings us back to the core problem that saturation creates, that is it prevents success of anything other than that which is already successful. A brilliant product in and of itself isn't enough to promulgate within that environment. I was thinking about this concept whilst browsing Steam for something to play. The more I reflected on the fact that the abundance of choice provided by Steam made choosing incredibly difficult, the more I realised this has become a problem everywhere. Netflix has the same problem, Disney+ has the same problem, even social media sites to an extent have the same problem, you have to know what you want before you visit these sites in order to find it. "Browsing" these sites for something new is incredibly difficult, despite their attempts at providing curation and algorithmic suggestions the abundance of content is reaching a point where there is so much you can not conceivably navigate through it.
I have mentioned in the past that this is one of the biggest problems with YouTube as a website, you go there to consume your subscriptions, to watch a video someone sent you or that was embedded in another website, or you constantly watch videos it recommends for you, beyond these entry points it's very difficult to "find" something new to watch that you might actually like. Steam was once only a platform for Valve and a handful of other publishers to distribute their games but has grown to the point where anyone can submit a game, much like Amazon provides Kindle Direct Publishing as an open platform for anyone to write and submit content to for approval. The latest figures I could find for Steam releases on Statista, a statistics and research website, cover 2004 through 2018. This chart shows that in 2004 there were just 7 games submitted to the platform but 2018 saw 9,050 games submitted. At the end of 2018, there were a grand total of 27,279 games available on Steam. That also means that 33% of the games available on Steam were submitted in 2018, rising to 59% when you combine 2018 and 2017 or 74% if you include 2016 as well.
If the trend continues, then it's fair to say that Steam has already far surpassed the point of saturation, as a service it is no longer viable to discover games, instead it is akin to YouTube, something that you visit if you know what you are looking for already, or want to consume content you know in advance is waiting, or something you want to see suggestions based on what you already consume through the platform - Steam doesn't do this last one very well, it does have a feature providing this in a way but not to the same extent of a never ending list that YouTube provides. The other problem is that YouTube videos can be consumed in bulk by binging one after the other, it's very difficult to "binge" games in the same way. Taking the 2018 total of 9,050 as an example you would have to play 25 games per day in order to play them all in the space of a year, practically speaking that won't be possible, even if a large chunk of those games could be played through in under an hour, the games that take much longer would negate those gains that's before you even factor in rest breaks to sleep, eat, drink, bathe etc.
Youtube passed this milestone many years ago, at present as of 2020 around 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, that's 262.8 million hours of video per year, or 30,000 years of content per year, in other words even if you devoted every single second of your life to watching YouTube you would not even scratch the surface of the content that is uploaded in a year. Or to put it another way, 720,000 hours of video are uploaded per day, so it would take you 82 years just to watch all of the content that was uploaded today.
When it becomes impossible to consume everything, and impossible to browse through everything on offer, at what point does the creative process have to end? There is no sign of the rate of submissions slowing down, even though these platforms have huge swathes of content already available. The platforms themselves don't want to delete anything for that matter, even when a game has literally never been downloaded by anyone at all it still remains on Steam so long as the developer wants it to remain available. The same applies to Amazon with the Kindle Store, a book with zero sales and zero downloads will remain on the store, just as all your old tweets and status updated on social media also remains. The cost is negligible to these platforms to host this content but that cost will rise over time and in years to come when these platforms become less profitable there will inevitably be the question of whether zero consumption content will be removed.
There is a service I have mentioned before called Forgotify which plays only music tracks from Spotify that have zero as their playcount. The latest statistics I could find for them was cited in an article in 2017 the original link no longer works sadly but at the time there were 4 million songs on Spotify that had never been played. Again hosting this content comes at a negligible cost to Spotify but as the service grows that cost will accumulate over time.
The point I am making here is that once the saturation point is reached, the industry stops being profitable to new entrants and you eventually reach a point where less startup companies try to break into the industry as a whole. This also applies to individual products within the industry, there are a number of big brand names that establish themselves and gain a reputation for certain foods. Take sauces and condiments as an example, in the UK these are dominated by Heinz, Colman's, HP, and Schwartz. There are other brands that provide something specific like Bisto who mainly produce Gravy granules and Stock, and there are a plethora of independent producers who make one thing really well like Levi Roots which makes Reggae Reggae Sauce. Again this establishes the ecosystem that exists but beyond this existing ecosystem any new entrant is met with barriers to entry. Levi Roots is a prime example, the founder Keith Graham and his story is quite well known as he featured on Dragons' Den, the UK TV reality show based on the Japanese original called Money Tigers, US readers will know the format as Shark Tank. The point here is that Keith needed the trifecta of finance, exposure, and connection provided by the show in order to get his product into every store in the UK - the sauce is incredible and he deserves the success he has had but for his success story there are countless others who did not succeed.
This ultimately brings us back to the core problem that saturation creates, that is it prevents success of anything other than that which is already successful. A brilliant product in and of itself isn't enough to promulgate within that environment. I was thinking about this concept whilst browsing Steam for something to play. The more I reflected on the fact that the abundance of choice provided by Steam made choosing incredibly difficult, the more I realised this has become a problem everywhere. Netflix has the same problem, Disney+ has the same problem, even social media sites to an extent have the same problem, you have to know what you want before you visit these sites in order to find it. "Browsing" these sites for something new is incredibly difficult, despite their attempts at providing curation and algorithmic suggestions the abundance of content is reaching a point where there is so much you can not conceivably navigate through it.
I have mentioned in the past that this is one of the biggest problems with YouTube as a website, you go there to consume your subscriptions, to watch a video someone sent you or that was embedded in another website, or you constantly watch videos it recommends for you, beyond these entry points it's very difficult to "find" something new to watch that you might actually like. Steam was once only a platform for Valve and a handful of other publishers to distribute their games but has grown to the point where anyone can submit a game, much like Amazon provides Kindle Direct Publishing as an open platform for anyone to write and submit content to for approval. The latest figures I could find for Steam releases on Statista, a statistics and research website, cover 2004 through 2018. This chart shows that in 2004 there were just 7 games submitted to the platform but 2018 saw 9,050 games submitted. At the end of 2018, there were a grand total of 27,279 games available on Steam. That also means that 33% of the games available on Steam were submitted in 2018, rising to 59% when you combine 2018 and 2017 or 74% if you include 2016 as well.
If the trend continues, then it's fair to say that Steam has already far surpassed the point of saturation, as a service it is no longer viable to discover games, instead it is akin to YouTube, something that you visit if you know what you are looking for already, or want to consume content you know in advance is waiting, or something you want to see suggestions based on what you already consume through the platform - Steam doesn't do this last one very well, it does have a feature providing this in a way but not to the same extent of a never ending list that YouTube provides. The other problem is that YouTube videos can be consumed in bulk by binging one after the other, it's very difficult to "binge" games in the same way. Taking the 2018 total of 9,050 as an example you would have to play 25 games per day in order to play them all in the space of a year, practically speaking that won't be possible, even if a large chunk of those games could be played through in under an hour, the games that take much longer would negate those gains that's before you even factor in rest breaks to sleep, eat, drink, bathe etc.
Youtube passed this milestone many years ago, at present as of 2020 around 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, that's 262.8 million hours of video per year, or 30,000 years of content per year, in other words even if you devoted every single second of your life to watching YouTube you would not even scratch the surface of the content that is uploaded in a year. Or to put it another way, 720,000 hours of video are uploaded per day, so it would take you 82 years just to watch all of the content that was uploaded today.
When it becomes impossible to consume everything, and impossible to browse through everything on offer, at what point does the creative process have to end? There is no sign of the rate of submissions slowing down, even though these platforms have huge swathes of content already available. The platforms themselves don't want to delete anything for that matter, even when a game has literally never been downloaded by anyone at all it still remains on Steam so long as the developer wants it to remain available. The same applies to Amazon with the Kindle Store, a book with zero sales and zero downloads will remain on the store, just as all your old tweets and status updated on social media also remains. The cost is negligible to these platforms to host this content but that cost will rise over time and in years to come when these platforms become less profitable there will inevitably be the question of whether zero consumption content will be removed.
There is a service I have mentioned before called Forgotify which plays only music tracks from Spotify that have zero as their playcount. The latest statistics I could find for them was cited in an article in 2017 the original link no longer works sadly but at the time there were 4 million songs on Spotify that had never been played. Again hosting this content comes at a negligible cost to Spotify but as the service grows that cost will accumulate over time.
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