Graduate students spend a lot of time talking.
One topic that we used to discuss, as music students, was various styles of music. Academic music of course, nothing more popular than Laurie Anderson.
In retrospect, we came off as a bit pretentious.
A quick look at the various periods of music history reveals that style periods got shorter as time marched on. While we don’t know as much as musicologists would like about music much before about 1300, surviving manuscripts show that styles moved fairly slowly and regionally until about 1650. Things sped up a little bit from 1650 to the late 1800s, still with strong regional and nationalistic bias. And the 20th century is a wild mish-mash of quickly developing styles. Regional styles — from New Orleans Jazz to the British Invasion or East Coast vs West Coast Rap — quickly break out and are adopted/adapted elsewhere.
Our theory about this exponential acceleration of style development was communication.
If Mozart wanted to know what was going on musically in London, he needed to take a coach to France and from there, a boat to England (a long and arduous trip) or wait for somebody to come to Vienna with news — and preferably manuscripts. Those of us in the New World could largely forget getting the most modern music of Europe.
On the other hand, a budding 20th century composer in Los Angeles could be in New York or London or Vienna or Moscow to find out what is going on in a matter of hours. In fact, he or she could get recordings of the latest music from around the world locally, maybe the same day. Now, our budding composer doesn’t even need to leave the computer chair — the latest videos and music are a few clicks away. How might his or her art developed differently, perhaps more deeply and perhaps not, without this instant kaleidoscope of influences?
We students were much too self-absorbed to apply this line of thinking to other areas of history. In fact, one great factor in the American Revolution was the delay in getting information to and from England an ocean away — a fact glossed over in history textbooks. A great controversy of math is who actually invented calculus: Leibniz or Newton? They were far enough apart that they apparently came up with the same idea independently of one another!
Faster communications has also changed how we do business. In the old days, if you wanted to buy say, 100 shares of IBM you had to call your stockbroker, have him look it up on the ticker-tape (or call someone for a quote). After you gave the buy order, he would have to call his company’s floor broker in New York, who would literally go out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the station where a specialist handles shares of IBM, and shout the order. Only when the sale was actually made would your broker know what you paid. Now all small orders and many larger orders are handled electronically. This allows more people to participate, and that in turn results in more volatility. Whether that is good or bad entirely depends on where you are in the market.
Not that many years ago, there was no computerized collection of real estate listings. Realtors worked from a big binder of listings and waited for a turn with others in the office. It was bad enough that when real estate expert Barbara Corcoran started her own brokerage, she instituted a rule against “pocket listings” — that’s listings that individual agents keep in their pockets instead of putting them in the big book. As recently as 1996, agents would snatch new listings that were perfect for their clients off the fax machine before their colleagues knew about them. Before the age of faxes, your Realtor had to actually take your purchase offer to the listing office personally! If that were true in 2004, the housing bubble might have played out very differently.
Faster communications and travel are undeniably a good thing for modern medicine. Who can forget the real-life sled dog Balto saving Nome, Alaska from an epidemic? Now, sick people can be at a hospital very quickly in most cases, medicine flown in from around the globe in hours, and top experts consulted via phone and video conference in minutes.
Perhaps now communication is too fast for our own good. One politician anywhere in the world can mangle a sentence, and it’s on the evening news for all to misinterpret. One man can spew hate-speech on the radio or TV, and have a million others up in arms — and it only takes one to start shooting. There’s no time to temper it, no time to think about it. Hear, Feel, Do.
Let’s all take the time to consider what communications we want in our lives, and think seriously before we act.
Cross-posted at The Moderate Voice.
Health “Reform” Roundup: on alternative medicine; the reason some Americans would “lose” coverage with a public plan is that they would drop expensive private policies in favor of the public plan; AMA lines up on the wrong side, as usual; how mandatory health care would “work”; Pelosi admits that there won’t be enough votes for a plan that doesn’t include a public option.
In Closing: LIEberman tries to make a compromise that isn’t a compromise between Israel and Palestine; I almost can’t believe they finally made the DTV transition; sometimes urban renewal requires a bulldozer; the truth about “clean coal” is that the by-products are so toxic the DHS doesn’t want anyone knowing where they’re stored; Civil War trivia; 83% of charter schools have “accounting irregularities“; and family arrested for keeping their kids in “squalor.” Now, as a parent, I’d just like to know how much mess I am allowed to have. Is this mess threshold higher or lower if I can’t afford electricity and running water? Does the number of adults in the household change the allowable mess level? How do these rules effect homeless families? At what point is bad housekeeping and no money for utilities a crime? I hope I never need to know first hand.