Monday, January 26, 2009

An Experiment for Dealing with Media Overload

from PSFK.com

An Experiment for Dealing With Media Overload
from PSFK by Dan Gould

What’s the best way to sort, wade through and make sense of the oceans of digital media that’s stored on our hard drives? Inspired by musician Bill Drummond’s experiment of only listening to music starting with B for a year, Russell Davies is testing out the same filtering strategy on a compressed scale. In order to deeply engage with new music, and learn to pay attention in a new way, Davies is only listening to music starting with the same letter of the alphabet, one letter a week.

He explains:

I find that unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.

So I thought I’d try a 26 week experiment; listening to a new letter every week. Just to see what I notice. This is week A.

Projects for paying attention to attention. Those seem interesting now.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/oct/15/9
http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2009/01/talk-about-the-as.html

1 comment:

  1. This is a really good idea. Its always fun to find new music or an artist you never heard of before, but with so much out there its hard to filter out the crap.

    I still think that way too many people put there stuff on the internet, but this sounds like a pretty good idea on trying to find some decent music out of everything on the internet.

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