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forsythIt's funny, kind of. Since I've been working in the music department of B&N, I've started appreciating quiet more. In part, I blame the overhead play music, since we only ever have a dozen CDs at most and can go through almost all of them in a day. And we have to have the music on, all day, all month. You learn to tune it out very quickly, but it's still there, no matter how much you ignore it. Which is especially frustrating when the music sucks. Though even when it doesn't suck, it takes almost no time to get tired of it.
Thanks to this, I've gotten more appreciative of quiet. I used to almost always have winamp running in the background, playing music. And I still do much of the time, but there's also times when I leave it off, because I don't want the noise. Which often only serves to make the computer's own noise draw more attention, but I can just turn the computer off, too.
Quiet's often helpful for thinking, and much better for reading, since you can concentrate on just the one thing. And it can be more relaxing than even music designed for relaxation.
Part of this ties into some stuff I've been thinking about for a while, which is noise. When you're standing around in the music section with no customers and just CD sorting to do and annoying overhead play music on, your thoughts go interesting directions. See, noise is like a weed. A weed's just a plant growing it's not supposed to. Noise is information without context. It's not a perfect analogy, but I hope it makes sense.
Context is a key part of information. Without context, it's just a thing. A yellow dot with no context could be a sticker, a warning light, the sun, or Pac-Man sleeping. Things are defined by where they are and how they interact with other things. Information is no different. A beep is just a beep, unless you know that beep means your cookies are done, your car is low on gas, or that you've got mail.
With all the information in modern society, most of it's inevitably noise. This isn't quite Sturgeon's Law, since I'm not judging the quality of it. Snippets of conversations, fragments of songs, marketing jingles, the noise of machines, there's things like that all around us almost all the time. Even just the short bits can trigger meaning, because we're familiar with it already.
If that last paragraph seems incomplete, it kind of is. I tried writing the next sentence several times, but it kept turning into hypothetical bullshit that I couldn't even get past me. There's more than enough bullshit on the web as is, and more than enough people decrying modern society's flaws. I'm not certain it's really a flaw, more of an unintended side effect, and probably inevitable when people live together. And all in all, it's probably better than some hypothetical world where people can tune out anything not directly related to them, people are more than good enough at that already without any kind of technological help. The point of this all was the simple sentence "Information without context is noise." Which isn't exactly a unique insight. It was even in the third edition book of Mage, or the Virtual Adept handbook, I forget and don't feel like looking it up. I had considered using that as a starting point for this post and didn't for no greater reason than I forgot about it until now. And I'm not going to go back and rewrite this whole thing at this point.
Technorati Tags: Music, Work, Mindscribbles
Thanks to this, I've gotten more appreciative of quiet. I used to almost always have winamp running in the background, playing music. And I still do much of the time, but there's also times when I leave it off, because I don't want the noise. Which often only serves to make the computer's own noise draw more attention, but I can just turn the computer off, too.
Quiet's often helpful for thinking, and much better for reading, since you can concentrate on just the one thing. And it can be more relaxing than even music designed for relaxation.
Part of this ties into some stuff I've been thinking about for a while, which is noise. When you're standing around in the music section with no customers and just CD sorting to do and annoying overhead play music on, your thoughts go interesting directions. See, noise is like a weed. A weed's just a plant growing it's not supposed to. Noise is information without context. It's not a perfect analogy, but I hope it makes sense.
Context is a key part of information. Without context, it's just a thing. A yellow dot with no context could be a sticker, a warning light, the sun, or Pac-Man sleeping. Things are defined by where they are and how they interact with other things. Information is no different. A beep is just a beep, unless you know that beep means your cookies are done, your car is low on gas, or that you've got mail.
With all the information in modern society, most of it's inevitably noise. This isn't quite Sturgeon's Law, since I'm not judging the quality of it. Snippets of conversations, fragments of songs, marketing jingles, the noise of machines, there's things like that all around us almost all the time. Even just the short bits can trigger meaning, because we're familiar with it already.
If that last paragraph seems incomplete, it kind of is. I tried writing the next sentence several times, but it kept turning into hypothetical bullshit that I couldn't even get past me. There's more than enough bullshit on the web as is, and more than enough people decrying modern society's flaws. I'm not certain it's really a flaw, more of an unintended side effect, and probably inevitable when people live together. And all in all, it's probably better than some hypothetical world where people can tune out anything not directly related to them, people are more than good enough at that already without any kind of technological help. The point of this all was the simple sentence "Information without context is noise." Which isn't exactly a unique insight. It was even in the third edition book of Mage, or the Virtual Adept handbook, I forget and don't feel like looking it up. I had considered using that as a starting point for this post and didn't for no greater reason than I forgot about it until now. And I'm not going to go back and rewrite this whole thing at this point.
Technorati Tags: Music, Work, Mindscribbles
