I really hope this news cycle about Gen Z’s disinterest in the attention economy in favor of the physical realm is based on real events and not the result of some psyop-like clipping-based marketing campaign, which is a thing I learned about only recently, probably like everyone else my age who needed a reason to not have to check out the band Geese. This is not so much because I am nostalgic for the physical media of my youth — I prefer it, but I also remember what a cassette tape usually sounds like and have concluded that when considering nondigital music formats, individual mileage may vary. Rather, I believe that any activity that draws people away from the instant, always-on gratification of a screen and reacquaints them with the frictive joys and turmoils of living in real life is to be recommended with enthusiasm. Any opportunity to reclaim your attention from the companies that profit from it or deny them — and thereby deprive them of — your attention in the first place should be celebrated like an act of personal defiance. No matter your generational cohort, giving your attention to art in the physical world is the kind of defiance that is easy to do and available to everyone. Listening to music on vinyl counts, but so does contemplating the graffiti on a billboard or a train. Bonus points if you don’t even snap a pic and actually just remember what you were looking at!
Defying the companies that brought you social media, trapped you in it, and are now using it to stuff your eyes and ears with AI-generated brain-poison weakens their grip on society. The more time you spend outside their algorithmic miasmas, the worse those miasmas feel when you do step in them, and eventually, when seen from outside, the world within the phone looks pretty vile. Need proof? The next time you’re driving around, spend an hour listening to KTCU or KXT, then switch to Spotify. Every time I do this, my ears feel stressed from the return to the tinny world of the streamer. If your car is old, pop a CD in the dash, then, when it’s over, stream it. To say the difference is palpable is probably obvious, but the difference is palpable. Choosing the audio quality of old media — and the focus required to get to the end of a single artist’s work, rather than passively absorbing a hundred artists blurring into one another on an hours-long playlist — over the sucky-sounding, hyper-convenience of a streaming service just makes your brain feel better.
Though these are the thoughts of a 48-year-old man who just got out of the shower, they are indeed still thoughts, and as I write this, it is a quarter past noon, and I’ve really looked at my phone only twice since I’ve woken up today, choosing instead to continue shoveling through an ever-expanding, digging-up-my-backyard project, make breakfast, and listen to ZZ Top’s Eliminator on my record player. “Got Me Under Pressure” sounded like a good way to get pumped up about meeting a deadline, and while it did nothing to mitigate the self-created stress of my own procrastinative lean, cueing up a song on a record felt better than having to poke at my phone about it.
I remember what it was like to be 23-years-old in 2001, but I don’t know what it is like to be a 23-year-old now, and maybe all these think pieces about Gen Z’s shift in media preferences are overblown and not actually representative of the 70 million or so people who fall within that generation’s birth-year parameters. But I hope y’all really are coming around to the old shit and peacing out on constant app-based habituation. My cohort is a little smaller than yours, but long ago, we all bought a shit-ton of records, tapes, and CDs, and our youths and young adulthoods were blissfully free from having to post, like a post, share a post, or accept a cookie. In fact, we were encouraged via radio and CDs to tell those who would offer us such cookies that they could take that cookie and shove it. Sixty million of us uncs might be right about something. Life before the smart phone was pretty fun. We should all just put them down and hear the world around us.
