Well put, Brian. That's exactly it. Browsing is something which always fascinated me about open stacks at Stanford University Libraries. The lack of same in closed stacks, like Hoover and the Biblioteque Nacional always frustrated me. I used to go to Tower just to peruse the collection, see what was there, pick it up, examine the liner notes. Guess I'm a dinosaur. I don't mind the new formats, Amazon, MP3 or any of that aspect of the commodity economy. I just miss the use-value of browsing stacks of recordings.
[WS:] I am totally with you on this. I spend most of my time in front of a computer and I greatly benefited from instant electronic access to all kinds of archived material - not just music. Just to give one example - when I was an undergrad, compilation of bibliography was the most challenging, tedious and time consuming task of writing term papers or master's theses - as people did it by hand, by perusing library catalogs. Today, I can accomplish the same task in two or so hours, and with more extensive coverage.
But physical contact with the material medium is equally important - for example I detest reading text on the screen, and tend to print every electronic document I receive, even knowing that it is not good for the environment (but hey, my printing is nothing comparing to the colossal waste produced by advertisers, and I recycle paper religiously). E-books are not my cup of tea either, except reference materials.
My quarrel is not with the technology itself but with certain applications of that technology that make escapism into solipsism easier. I feel the same about cars - they are great machines, but they isolate people from one another and from their environment. I realized that for the first time about 20 years ago in California, when my car broke down while on a vacation trip and I had to take a Greyhound bus home. I realized then that one can see a very different picture of this country, and one's environment in general, from a bus or a train or simply walking on foot than from a car, especially when driving it. Very, very much different, indeed.
Likewise, it is very different world when everyone on that bus or train is wearing a headset - or ear buds (to be more 21st century.) It is much difficult to start a conversation with someone wearing them - even if it is just one ear bud as Tayssir suggested. While it is possible to have a conversation wearing one ear bud - that conversation would very likely have a certain half-ass quality (both literally and figuratively), and I would not probably want to waste my time on it.
Back in my college years, people would throw a party because someone got a new record album - which could be a quite expensive proposition on the other side of the Iron Curtain - and wanted to share it with friends. Recorded music was a medium to maintain social relations and friendship. Likewise, people attended concerts, but listening to music was only one purpose - another equally important goal was to maintain social relations. With the advent of personal listening devices, it became a medium of escape into solipsistic solitude and breaking those social relations.
Or take for example Power Point. It looks like a great presentation tool, especially for someone who used to schlep slides and handouts on transcontinental flights. But then, if you see many of those Power Point presentations one being a carbon copy of another, all overloaded with cutesy graphics, animated effects and bells and whistles - you begin to think "What is the fucking point?" Indeed, it seems that as the medium production becomes easier, the contents become more obscure and difficult to grasp.
I like new technologies and I am usually very eager to adopt them. I think that with few exceptions, new technologies are generally a good thing and improve the quality of life. But I am also well aware of negative sides or rather uses of these technologies, especially their impact on human psyche and society. It therefore surprises me when people like Doug condemn silly infatuation with new technology in one aspect of social life that they dislike (e.g. capitalist markets), but on the other side of their mouth show the same infatuation with new technology in the aspect of social life which they happen to like (e.g. pop culture industry.)
Wojtek