This week is the 40th Anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. It’s one of my favourite albums of all time. As I listened to it again this week, it struck me that I don’t listen to albums much any more. More often than not it’s a play list on my iPod or 8tracks on the web.
And that is a shame, because although I get to hear lots of music I like, I miss out on the experience of the complete album, carefully crafted, with tracks thoughtfully chosen to create the whole experience and capture a mood, idea or moment.
Dark Side is an album that makes this point. One of the stand out characteristics is its connectedness, not just to the listener, but also in the way every track is connected. The LP (that’s long player for the digital generation) was conceived as two pieces of music, one per side. Although a couple of tracks were released as singles, e.g. Time, it's when the album is taken as a whole that everything comes together.
New technology brings many benefits and the advent of portable digital music has certainly brought many, but it as have the potential to destroy - that’s why its called disruptive technology. It’s been happening for centuries - remember the Luddites?, but is there a point at which we lose more than we gain from the impact of technology?
I made a connection between my Dark Side experience and a book I’m currently reading. In Arc 1.x, a New Scientist collection of articles, Samuel Arbesman proposes that in the near future only computers will be able to make new discoveries. He suggests that in the relentless pursuit of advancement, the world has become so complex that we are reaching the point of being unable to understand the world we live in. He quotes Don Swanson, who described this complexity as “undiscovered public knowledge”.
What this says to me is that as we create new ways of doing things, introducing new technology to become more efficient, faster, smaller we are in danger of losing the connection with the world and the people around us. Danny Hills in Scientific American calls it the transition from enlightenment to entanglement - a point at which we no longer understand the systems of our own making. We are at the point where we can do almost anything. Whether we should do it, is now a more important question. Are we still able to understand the consequences of our intention?
