It's all me, me, me

Very belatedly catching up with Dan Hill's treatise on the context for music listening (well, it was very long, and I've been moving to south london - didn't you know?). Hard to disagree and refreshing to read such a reflective piece on an area too often characterised by heady technophilia (or luddite nostalgia). On the subject of the representativeness or otherwise of the various "presentations of self" available through digital media, that certainly strikes a chord. My audioscrobbler list is certainly skewed, for example, partly as a result of the deficiency of metadata encouraged by interface limitations which means that much of my classical music is incorrectly tagged, and partly as a result of the fact that most of it just isn't on my digital player because basically, it's no good shuffling Mahler's 3rd, and rarely any good listening to it on the move. But aren't all digital self-presentations partial, edited, filtered either by accident or design? Obviously that's part of the point. If you don't know me, you won't know what lifestooshort's real name is and maybe that's my way (like so many bloggers') of dealing with the somewhat amorphous and abstract possibility of strangers reading my intimate thoughts (though to be fair that's less likely to happen to me than it is to Dan . . .)

However, while Dan's dreaming of multidisciplinary approaches to bring analogue richness into our brittle digital world, we could also have a little think about the problem of personal history - nobody's digital life really started more than a few years ago. Nick Drake only scores highly on my audioscrobbler, for example, because I got into his music a few months ago. My mother isn't there on my flickr space because she passed away a few years ago. Some people get round these problems by introducing a back-catalogue, but that seems like a lot of effort. I suppose this isn't really a big deal for anyone but us in the in-between generation - but then I suspect that our children will be an in-between generation fo tomorrow's technologies too. So perhaps we should reconcile ourselves to these inadequacies and abandon the narcissistic quest for vicarious, virtual self-presentation?