It's a new year, and as we continue to face this brave new world, I continue to look for ways to bring into the future good ideas from the past while adapting them to a present context. One such idea is that it is a privilege to be responsible for the things you actually own. There is an endless conveyor belt of distractions coming from the Internet, and those in charge want you to keep on licking it up, little piggy. You can instead manage a limited set of materials, devices, software, files, and Internet-powered connections, so that you (yes, you) get to be the one who decides your own entertainment diet. I'll have more to say on this broader topic in the future, and I'll continue to repeat Linda Ellerbee's iconic quote, "Ask yourself: who's in charge here?" For now, I'd like to focus on a specific subset of this entertainment responsibility: interacting with owned digital files on an iPod. (I'm looking forward to covering the material changes I've made to my iPod in a future installment, stay tuned!)
If you use the iPod stock software (version 1.3 since the late 2000s, still works!), you can click the center button of the click wheel a few times to access an affordance for rating the currently playing song, sliding the click wheel to a number of stars and clicking the center button again to apply that rating. When I was a young adult, I rated ★★★★★ to any song that felt like it "defined my identity". When I was a confused young professional, I began to see ratings as something that should fall on a bell curve, where I preferred ★★★☆☆ meaning "decent enough, does the job, average" instead of ★☆☆☆☆ meaning "I had a bad experience, so it's categorically bad for everyone" and ★★★★★ meaning "I hope this business or person or service succeeds". (You may have rated a rideshare driver ★★★★☆, and the company probably immediately reached out with, "Oh my god, are you OK? What happened? We're letting that driver go. What can we do to regain your trust to get back to ★★★★★?") Nowadays, I'm thankful that I've come up with a consistent system to rate songs on my iPod that doesn't need to worry about bell curves or identity. The rating system is below.
★☆☆☆☆: I do not actually like listening to this song. I should remove it from my iPod.
★★☆☆☆: This song is filler or an interlude for an album. It works in the context of an album, but I'll probably skip it while on shuffle.
★★★☆☆: Perfectly decent song. I'll probably let it play on shuffle. Connective tissue in the context of an album.
★★★★☆: A good song. I'll definitely let it play on shuffle. A highlight in the context of an album.
★★★★★: An excellent song. Will not skip on shuffle. A star in the context of an album. A song I could listen to any time in basically any situation.
Now, many songs will end up being ★★★☆☆, but that's good, because if everything is shitty or everything is amazing, then nothing is.
May your methods of evaluation adapt to your present circumstances,
Arthur Hovinc
No comments:
Post a Comment