Memories of the Phonograph

 

Hats off to the Phonograph! ©1982 is the book that was the primary source for the themes of phonograph connections in popular culture now seen in Phonographia.com.

The original book (unpublished) focused on phonograph advertising and the "B-side" of the phonograph's history including how the phonograph was marketed, how it changed the definition of home and personal entertainment and how the phonograph continued to evolve in the popular culture revolution of recorded sound.

Over forty-years later much has changed. More and more primary sources are now on-line; microfilm has been replaced by on-line digitized documents and services like newspapers.com make searches on thousands of newspapers and millions of pages easily accessible. Hundreds of thousands of recordings are on-line and research by collectors and scholars from many fields has produced diverse, colorful, and well-documented material for anyone interested in the history of the phonograph and recorded sound.

Using a website and digital components means that Phonographia.com doesn't have the tangible qualities of a book. A digital recording, likewise, doesn't have the tangible experience of actually playing a record on a phonograph.

But a website obviously allows innumerable examples of phonograph connections to be shown, provides multi-media options and links to anything on the intranet.

All, of course, unimaginable in a book.

Phonographia.com is also easy to update: Find a new connection, add, edit; find a new connection, add, edit; and repeat like a broken record. It's been a project based on what I see, remember, connect and then paste into the website...which also means it has limitations at each of those steps because of its author.

But the limitations of an individual will not be the challenge of the future. An Internet Bot can already use any of the WIP Phonographia 'lists', galleries and themes and find an unbelievable number of new connections in minutes, seconds, microseconds...who knows how much, how fast, and what future results will be.

How soon will Phonographia.com become a web artifact? Sooner than later I would guess, but perhaps even then it could still be viewed on something like the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine -- which in my case would be synchronistic since I was always a fan of Sherman and Mr. Peabody.

Who knows when the Internet itself will become part of the "Dead Media Project".

At that point (if I was still here) I'd probably be saying that a book would have been a better idea than a website.

I hope Phonographia's virtual scrapbooks are enjoyed now and in the coming years.

This planet and its beings, however, have much bigger challenges in the next decade than finding phonograph connections or speculating about the future of sites like Phonographia.com.

In this time and place I would suggest that we need to give more attention to our connections with humans, and prioritize planet Earth over all personal toys including our new relationships with AI creations who will likely introduce the biggest changes ever for the human race.

Am I a Luddite?

No, but I do believe we must prioritize, conserve and preserve the planet and all beings if we are going to be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eyes and not have to apologize for our failures regarding the human experiment and planet Earth.

That is all!

DB

Updated February 16, 2023

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