Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Celebrity Series of Boston: part of lo-fi movement or strictly digital?

Nipvic

Analog/digital, lo-fi/hi-fi, old/new; the analog, the old school, has gone underground, so says the Chicago Tribune. Adherents to technologies of the past such as cassette tapes, buttons, first generation video games, printed magazines and vinyl records are a persistent underground movement, one that favors the physical and the tactile over the digital. As Christopher Borelli of The Chicago Tribune writes:

"They are the Chicago Lo-Fi Resistance. They are not an organized group, or a collective of practicing luddites, or an especially underground insurrection. But the name fits: How else to describe a loose cadre of antiquarians doing their part to resist that hurtling pace of our digital existence?

Ask them why, and you get a flood of reasons: Nostalgia, politics, quality. They do not share a hive (analog) mind – each has his or her reasons. In fact, if they share anything, it's this: A desire for a more tactile world."

Click here to read the rest of Christopher Borelli's article.

...and while you are reading ask yourself, "Is the Celebrity Series of Boston part of this movement?" It seems to me there are arguments for and against: we have been doing this for over 70 years (we are older than, say, Atari); we present scads of live performances (the original musical medium, pretty tactile stuff); we celebrate musical forms of the past and the distant past. On the other hand we are current, we have a web site (and a blog, ahem); we are Twitterers; we are implementing a state of the art computer-based ticketing system; and things are generally "going digital" in our workplace. So which is it?



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