Before Spotify and streaming, culture cost time and effort. This series makes the case it was worth it.

“People and places were websites.”

That thought wouldn’t have made any sense in 1979, standing in the showroom of my local hi-fi audio retailer with saved-up money for my first stereo system. But it’s the best way to describe the information architecture of the world I grew up in.

The record store clerk who silently judged your purchases at the register, he was a database, and you were a search query. The friend whose stoner older brother owned every album was an algorithm, the source of the obscure material (album cuts) you’d have never been able to sample otherwise. The shop where you first spotted The Sporting News, a recommendation engine on a physical street.

You would stumble upon something new — a movie, band or author – decide whose opinion to trust about the new thing, and then soak up knowledge from people who knew more than you and spend time around guys who cared about these things. 

Then the Internet relocated every one of these experiences from a storefront to a screen.

Getting music meant you had to go somewhere, know somebody and spend money. Making the effort was included in the experience. That’s what this series is about: what I’m calling Excellent Media Experiences, or EMEs.

An EME passed through an editor, a DJ, a clerk, some gatekeeper who came between you and the experience you sought. And it cost you. Either you coughed up $7.99 at the register, drove somewhere to get it or spent part of a week waiting for the record store to restock.

Each entry covers one EME and asks the same two questions. What made this experience excellent, and what have we gained or lost? The series starts with buying an album, then moves through magazines, late night television, Saturday Night Live, FM radio and the arrival of cable, the EMEs that built a typical ‘coming of age’ then.

Spotify now hands you nearly every recorded song. Streaming gives you an entire TV series on a single afternoon and without leaving your basement. The Internet delivers miracles, and I’m not here to argue that’s a bad thing. But the trade-offs deserve to be mentioned. 

The universal experience of watching the same three channels and talking about it with your buddies the next day, has been replaced by a fragmented universe of personalized feeds that reflect what we already believe. The moment of hearing something new on the radio, something you couldn’t have predicted or programmed, has grown rare.

Back then, information arrived in intervals: a newspaper each morning, the evening news at 5:30, weekly magazines on Tuesdays. Now individuals publish constantly, to screens that travel with you, and content follows you rather than waits.

That older pace made you work for what you found. Knowledge of esoteric bands, possession of cult classic movies on video, subscribing to niche magazines all added up to something that now seems quaint since it’s out there now, for all.

What follows looks back to what those experiences actually brought, before we forget what they were. Read the entries in order or start anywhere:

Comments are closed.