Like most people, music has been a main component of my life and my memories. Wanting to play my parents’ Go-Go’s records over and over when I was four, watching my father install our first stereo system with a CD player, getting my first CD (the Backstreet Boys, of course) and listening to it on my boombox in my bedroom. These are just a few memories that I have growing up and the way I listened to music. But with digital music, listening to music has changed from an activity that had little variety (you only have a certain number of CD’s or tapes at your fingertips, and sharing is a pain) and required heavy equipment. Now I have thousands of songs at my fingertips in a small compact device that I take everywhere. And if I hear a song I like, I can easily and instantly purchase it and listen to it. While the digital process may cause music to lose some of its “authentic” sound due to compression like AAC (which my Itunes uses), but I do not have a keen enough ear for such things.
The benefits of the amount of digital material one can store also affects photos. Because of compression I can get photos of my baby cousin via email and I can post photos of my artistic work online for others to enjoy. But I while I can’t tell the difference in compressed digital music and analog music, I can tell the difference between compressed photos and high-quality photos. Photos are too easily distorted in colors and pixilation when compressed, sometimes ruining photos and memories. I might just be a bit bitter, since I ruined quite a few photos of my trip to Italy, simply because I was trying to post them on my Myspace. But I feel the pro’s out weigh the cons, because digital photos allows for easier sharing and transferring of information. Also, Photoshop is quite addicting and makes cool stuff.
While digitizing media does take away from the quality, the ability to share this information easily is far more valuable. It allows for a transfer of knowledge, culture and the human experience (which is best expressed through mediums like music and imagery) and without digitizing or compression it is much more difficult to do this.
