Ted Gioia: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let’s start with some questions about music. Do you think our collective memory from music is decaying more rapidly because communications technologies move so much faster and preserve things so much better? What people don’t understand is that, for most of history, music was a kind of cloud storage for societies. I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don’t have semiconductors or spaceships. If you go to any traditional community, and you try to find the historian, generally it’s a singer. Music would preserve culture; it would preserve folklore. Well, nowadays, we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things. And I think there’s a strange shift. Both we rely on the cloud to preserve our music, but also, we no longer rely on music to preserve our culture. This is potentially a dangerous thing because it could create a situation where our musical lives grow more and more distant from our actual social lives with the people around us in our larger community. Does music today still carry new ideas? If you think about radio in the 1960s, there’s the idea of drug culture, of psychedelia, antiwar protests. Those are often carried by music and by the radio. But today, the internet carries the ideas more or less for free. Do we even need music for that?…

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