TrueLife - Floating on a Stream of Consciousness - Analog vs Digital

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

http://www.davidasalomon.com/ https://davidsalomonblog.wordpress.com/ https://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=A5537C https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Sins-Influenced-Middle/dp/

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this special election edition of floating on the stream of consciousness with George and David. I want to say thanks to everyone's patience. patience. I had some technical difficulties getting through, and it's interesting because today's topic is analog and digital, and we were having some issues there. We were. So, David,

for those who may not have heard your gracious introduction about what it is you do, would you be so kind as to share that with them again? Sure. So happy to be with you, as usual, George, even though we had to deal with the gremlins in our computers, that seemed. So I am the director of undergraduate research and creative activity at Christopher Newport University in Newport, Newport, News, Virginia. I've been a professor of medieval and Renaissance, religion, literature, and culture for about 30 years. I've written a bunch of books. My most recent book is on The Seven Deadly Sins.

And I enjoy meeting with my friend George here on a pretty much a weekly basis. That's right. to talk about just about anything. We were all over the place. Yeah, I think that those are some of our best cast, and that's why we talk about the stream of consciousness here. Right. You know, I guess maybe to start it off, just real quickly,

I can't believe I'm 48 years old, and I still have a problem sometimes with the time change. I think I moved to Hawaii. So time doesn't change over here. It doesn't. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought. See, so, yeah, well,

You're, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I got, I got a little bit on you here. And, uh, yeah, I don't know. The time change thing, just, uh, we were trying to negotiate when we were gonna meet, negotiating between Eastern time, which, and we just changed the clocks and Hawaii time when you didn't. And, uh, we were very confused. Yeah. I had another guest this morning and the same thing had happened. I, I, I was at seven, I was, at seven, I was. was like, okay, I'm waiting. And then I go, son of a gun, it's 705. I think maybe I sent them the wrong thing. And it's weird because I did send them the wrong link. But then they got back to me and they said, hey, we're not going to meet until an hour later. I was like, what?

No, I have a thing in an hour. So that happened to us. One of the very first times that we chat, it must have been the last time we changed the clocks. And I was here and we had changed the clocks that weekend. And I didn't realize you didn't there. And so it was 6 a.m. or something there. And you were like, no.

reading it an hour. Very strange. Well, apparently it's all going to go away, maybe. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting. And it brings us into this idea of analog and digital, right? Like, what is, what is this thing time that we're doing? And, you know, what, I read something interesting. And when you had proposed this topic, I had just finished reading, um, this, this book right here. I'll show it to you. This is a fascinating author for those who may want to check this out. Young Chulhan and it's psychopolitics. And in here, he talks about these new types of technologies that seem to be infiltrating our system

through government and education. And he talks a little bit about, you know, isn't it strange that in today's world, the smartphone is very, it's almost synonymous with the rosary. And that kind of gets me to digital and analog. Like, you have this handheld device in both times. You know, it's a tool for monitoring, maybe self-monitoring on both of them.

You know, one is the beads and the, The other ones like this slick fondle slab that you still pull in your hand and you pull out to try and get a vision of heaven or maybe a vision of hell, you know, or there's all these tools for control on there. So I want to bring that up and throw that past you as we got on there. What do you think about that? Well, yeah, I mean, technology certainly has infiltrated the world of ritual. Yes. You know, religious ritual, spiritual ritual, and even secular ritual, for that matter. But I know when I first started teaching that course called Hamilton Hyperspace, my gosh, that must have been in the very late 90s.

I think it was 98 when I started teaching that course when I created it. The first book that I used in that course was a book by David Noble called The Religion of Technology, which is a really terrific book. Even though now it's, my gosh, 23 years old. It's kind of outdated. but he is talking about in that book the ways in which technology over time has really really sort of become insidious in the world of religion and spiritual practice. And it's something which certainly scholars and critics have talked about for the last two decades, the ongoing influence of technology on those aspects of our lives.

And I think you're right. I mean, some people do treat their smartphones as if it were prayerbees. Yeah. Or for that matter, any real, any talisman that you might carry. And it's quite interesting because it has, there are a lot of implications for it on the level of theology and then on the level of spirituality. right two different things but I know there you know lots of of technology discussions in the world of theology I mean dating back to my gosh I mean the printing press right I mean you know the first printed book is a Bible and that the effects that that was going to have on spiritual practice is part of the the really what

what really began the Protestant Reformation right difference and the ability to have a text in front of you, because now print is widely available versus you got to have a priest in front of you who can read the text to you and interpret it. Now you can interpret it on your own. That's a huge change. But even there are modern things like,

you know, I mean, in Judaism, for example, I remember there's there's been an ongoing discussion in Talmudic interpretation about the roles of technology in our lives on a daily basis. Example, several years ago, I remember there was a discussion about answering machines. This was back when answering machines were relatively new. And there was the question about whether or not you could have your answering machine

accept a message on the Sabbath because you're not supposed to use technology on the Sabbath. It's a tech-free zone. And so even if you didn't answer it and didn't listen to the message until after the Sabbath, was it okay for your answering machine to answer the phone during the Sabbath and take the message? And there was a whole discussion, Talmudic discussion. I don't know that it's ever been actually settled. I was looking it up this morning to see what the latest is on it. And the latest that I found is that from the interpretation that I see is that it's still prohibited.

it's not clear that it's not a violation. It's what the interpretation. So how's that for vagueness? But, you know, then technology comes in in other places. There's a whole, I was surprised to see how many websites there are now where you can go on and you can actually enter many of them for free, a prayer, which will be brought then printed off and brought to the, Western Wall in Jerusalem and put into the wall. So for those who don't know, I mean, you know, the Western Wall is in many ways a pilgrimage site for Jews, the same way that Rome and Santiago de Campa Stella and places like that are for Catholics. And the idea is that you would go to the Western Wall and you can write a prayer on a piece of paper and stuff it into the cracks in between the stones.

And it will be supposedly answered by God. God. And there was a guy who, it's got to be 20 years ago, decided he was going to set up a fax machine near the Western Wall. And you could fax him your prayers and he would put the prayer into the wall for you. Now I see that there are multiple websites where you can do that. Many of them actually don't cost anything. You just put your, you type in your prayer. I'm looking at one right now. Yep. You put in your prayer and it will be printed out or will be placed in the Western Wall by a student. and, you know, I mean, is that the same thing as going and doing it? You know, we've talked often about the process being more important than the destination, right? The journey. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either, but I still cling to that idea that there's something in the process. It's not so much the destination.

Right. It's the journey because that's where you come across. That's what you have to take the road to Damascus, you know. Yeah, I mean, the journey, I think the journey is the key to existence. Yeah. Right. I mean, without the journey, what's the point? Yeah.

You know, it's like everyone who says, well, you know, science is trying to find the answers to the universe and understand the origins of the universe and come up with, you know, unified field theory. and it's like, okay, but if they did, then what? You know, if you've got all the answers, what's the point? I mean, it's like students who study Shakespeare and say, well, you know, there's nothing more to say about Shakespeare. It's like, well, if that were the case, we wouldn't be studying. I mean, there is no definitive answer.

And what's important is, you know, the journey that you take to come up with the answer that you get, that you come up with, and what that does. for you and others, how that helps them. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating to think about. You know, if you don't take the journey, you to sit around all day. And you can, I guess you could go places in your head, but. Well, virtual reality, right? Yeah, or faxing.

Yeah, imagination. Yeah, well, do you want to go analog or digital on this, right? Yeah. You know, so there, you know, imagination's the analog way. And, you know, you want to go digital and you get a, get an Oculus headset. And you could, you could go that way. you know and and whether or not one is a better experience and be what the quality of the experience is

or whether or not the authenticity the experience is different I mean I would argue that the authenticity of an imaginative experience is is higher than the authenticity of a virtual reality experience now I know a lot of people will disagree with that but I'm just thinking about the ways and which poets like Wordsworth and Blake and Keats, the Romantics really encouraged us to engage in the imagination. And whether or not the experience that you have with virtual reality

stands up to that same level. I don't think it does. I don't see how it could. I don't know. I don't like the Oculus glasses. I don't like that virtual reality stuff, to be honest. It just, it seems to, it's too much for me what Jean-Baudreard called the simulation. It's not real.

Whereas an imaginative experience to me is closer to reality. It's my reality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's something fault, like it's a, it's a false shadow or it's, it's just a, an imperfect copy of what is true in your reality. Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting to think about.

But yeah, what is Oculus? Like to have a digital, so to have this thing strapped to your face and seeing the ideas of other people. Like you are not getting to see your interpretation of reality or seeing someone else's interpretation of it. Yeah. Although I suppose the users would argue that you're seeing it through your own eyes. But, I mean, I don't know. I mean, you know, we're both on the same page on this. We need the other side to join us to give us the other perspective

because that just doesn't work for me. I remember the first time I strapped one of those things on. It was many years ago when they first came out with them. I was in one of those big box electronics stores, and they had a setup where you could try them. And it was a basketball game. So you put them on and you were playing basketball. And it was, I mean, it was a very strange sensation.

But, I mean, for somebody, for me, particularly because I have terrible motion sickness, it was very unpleasant. It was very unpleasant because I was always aware that it wasn't reality. I think that's the thing. It was trying to trick my brain, but my brain wouldn't be tricked. Because that's, I think, what virtual reality is trying to do, right? It's trying to trick your brain into thinking that, this is real.

Yeah. But your brain is, you know, usually smarter than that. You know, think about rudimentary versions of that. I remember when the movie earthquake came out in the 1970s, and there was a big to do about that film because it was filmed in censor round. What the hell of sense around? So we went to the go see the film. I remember my mother, I think.

and I sat, we sat down in the theater in the Bronx, and I'll never forget I had my piece of licorice in my hand. And the first time the, the earthquake began, it, it felt like the whole theater was rumbling. And I remember I sat there the whole time with this one piece of liquorish in my hand because I was afraid to eat it because it was so nerve wrecking. But censor round was nothing more than they had the base turned up really high on the speakers. So it felt like everything was rumbling. Right. You know, but, but that, that, that, that, that, that tricking of your brain and whether or not that's successful, I think that's the key to virtual reality. Is that the key to digital? It is in many ways, I think. Um, I mean, digital versus analog is an interesting issue these days,

isn't it? Yeah. I mean, you know, we, we have so little left in our world that really is truly analog. And it's interesting, I think we mentioned last time that record players and records are coming back, right, which is analog. And the difference is, of course, that the way I discussed it with my students, at least, is analog, you can sort of see the mechanics of how something works. Digital usually can't. So we think about, you know, and what really intrigues me about this is the meta.

metaphors that we still use, right? You tell someone in a car, roll down your window. Well, who still has a car that has windows that you roll down? You know, it's, you press a button and it roll and it goes down. But we still say roll down your window. You know, we still say turn the light on, even though it's not, it doesn't work that way anymore. Light switches in many rooms. It's a different kind of light switch. I mean, on, off, flipping a switch. I mean, I can remember my grandmother used to say, put a light up, put a light up because she grew up in a time before widespread electricity and put a light up was light the candle, put a light up. You know, our grandparents who used to refer to refrigerators as ice boxes. Yeah. Because that's what they were originally, right? A big box with a block of ice on top of it and it kept the food cold. And so, you know, some people will still refer to an ice box. And so there are a lot of metaphors like that for things that we have moved away from in an analog sense to a more digital sense. And I mean, personally, I can appreciate the analog world. And there are some

things that I think I still want that way. I'm not getting them more and more because it's just not available. You know, you think about movies, right? I mean, we used to go to the movie theater, and in the back of the movie theater, it was a projection room with big projectors,

and they had, you know, reels and reels of film, and now everything is digital. They download the films. The projectors are digital projectors. There's no film anymore. I mean, those of us

old enough to remember sitting in theaters when, you know, something would go wrong with the projector or the film would break in the middle of the film. And, you know, everybody goes, oh, and you sit there waiting while they fixed it. That rarely happens anymore. If it, you know, if it does, it's because somebody probably kicked the plug out from the, more than anything else. But I just, I have an appreciation for that analog world that I think, I think sometimes I lament losing. Sure. And it's not to be a Luddite. It's not to say, you know, oh, all technology is bad.

It's just I think there's a place for everything. And as we've talked about before, just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should, right? I mean, there are some ways that, you know, maybe the old way is better. I don't know. I mean, you know, I oftentimes wish that, you know, cell phones didn't exist. And they're just a gigantic pain in the ass. And the way that people are tethered to them, it's almost become an extension of their physical beings, right?

A lot of people have written about this in the last few years about how just the technology is now an extension of our bodies. Yeah. And I don't know. That bothers me. Yeah. I think it should bother you. you know, when I think of the world of the digital and I think of technology, it seems it's heavily influenced by the incentive structure. And that incentive is to make money. So it's not essentially about making life better.

It's not about more wholesome. It's about more profit. And I think that that is something that digitalization has driven a wedge between. You know, when you separate the product from the worker, you separate the meaning from those two things. And that's what digitization can do really well, is it drives this wedge right in between what's real and what's not in the amount. And someone else's idea of real, because that's a strange. But you can see that. You can see the birth of that in just the whole automation system. Yeah. Right.

And automation on the assembly line and that kind of thing, where it takes a, way that the person, the person's involvement. I mean, the craft, right? We talk about craftsmanship and the art of craftsmanship and the way that so much of that is just gone now. It's really sad that most of what we deal with on a daily basis is, is manufactured in bulk, you know, so much so now that it's become such an anomaly when you buy something that's, quote, unquote handmade, right? And make it such a big deal about, oh, well, it's handmade. You know, well, what does that mean?

You know, it means they charge more money for it. So it must mean that it's better. Yeah, I'll break it down even further. When we talk about, I wrote some stuff down here about analog and digital. And on the topic of analog and digital and technology, an analog device records wave forms as they are. a technology in a digital format, it samples analog waveforms

into a limited set of numbers and then records them. And if you think about that for a minute, that's why digital is such a cheap representation of the analog because it's only taking small samples and then trying to mix them together. You don't have that whole thing anymore. And you don't get into the whole person.

And that's the argument that a lot of audio files will make with the difference between vinyl and MP3s or even CD quality and saying that the vinyl gives you a richer, more full sound. And I don't know enough about audio to speak eloquently about it, but it gives you a wider range of sound

than you would get electronically. And, you know, there were so much complaint at the beginning when we started having MP3s when iPods first came out that well the quality is just not as good right the quality of the audio is not as good it's it's it's it's just less um that isn't the case necessarily anymore uh because they've improved ways of doing this but there are certainly still people who are swear by vinyl for a fuller richer sound and um you know it scratches and flips and all um you know i mean it's it's so funny

because those of us who grew up listening to records got so used to, you know, maybe there was a scratch at a certain point during a certain song that then when you hear it, you know, on a CD, you expect to hear that scratch. You don't hear it. And it's like, well, wait a minute, that became part of the song for me.

Yeah. You know, I got two points. I'll bring up one and then I'm going to put up this comment from our friend of the show here. But, you know, when I think of a record And I think about the, the, what it takes place to play a record. You got to take it. You got to make sure the needles in there, right, and it goes along the groove.

And it's circular and rhythm. And there's something, like you can see the right speed, the right size. You might have to put the little cone in there if it's a 45 or like one of the 38s or whatever. And, you know, there's, you can actually see the process happening. Yeah. And I think in digital, you lose the ability to see the process happening. And when you no longer have the ability to see, you're blind in some ways. You know, and that gets us to what Ben is saying here is that, you know, it doesn't engage the full aspect of human experience.

You're only engaging, he was talking about virtual reality, you're only engaging the visual and auditory. But I think it's pretty similar for digital in a lot of ways. Sure. And I think you're right. I mean, you know, the difference between, I mean, I have a couple of old record players down the hall here because my students last year, use them when they curated the show that they did for their museum studies course. And one is an old crank record player that actually still works. And the other one is an older, the trolla, which currently doesn't work.

I wasn't able to fix it. But the kids love it when I play a 78 on the crank record player and show them how it works. You've got crank it up. It's not no electricity. You crank it up because it's got a spring. inside and then you release it and the record starts spinning and then you put the the needle down on it and you start hearing sound and the look on on the faces of you know not just college students but kids when they come through when I do that it's it's like you've just done some

magic trick um which is is funny because really it's the it's the opposite that's true the magic trick is turning on you know myself phone, which has, you know, how many songs are in here? You know, where are they? How is that happening? Whereas if I show you that on a record player like that, you can see exactly how it's happening. Yeah, I'm glad you said magic trick because I think what's happening is a magic trick, and it's the disappearance of critical thinking due to digital technology. Yeah. And I want to give you an example of that. The example I'm thinking about is in the news recently, there was this Google engineer who was speaking with an AI algorithm called Lambda, I believe.

I forgot the gentleman's name who was doing it. And he came out and he said, look, this digital technology is a sentient being. And he gave a, he, if you could go on and read the conversation he had with that particular program. And it sounds amazing. However, I recently talked to one of the world's greatest science fiction writers, a gentleman by the name of David Walton, his new book living memory, great book by the way. And I asked him this question, and he started laughing. And he goes, you know, that's the problem. He goes, what he asked that chatbot, what he asked that program was a very fascinating

human question. But he could have very easily asked that computer, you know, I'm flying through space with my four flamingo friends. And one of them said that they like to eat worms on Thursdays with their head below ground. How do you think I should communicate to my, my flamingo friend, the right way to tell him he shouldn't do that? And that chatbot would have a great. way of explaining to you this nonsense answer.

But it's this idea. Once you've lost the idea of the analog, now you can be told anything by the digital. And you don't have any reference to back it up. Like there's nothing there for you to have to fall back on. If you live for nothing and die, if you don't live for something, you die for nothing. The problem with that is our becoming enamored with the digital. Yes. and basically coming to worship it.

I mean, that, you know, I can Google something and, well, I mean, Google said it, so it must be right. Right. And we value that over the word of a human being who is an expert who says something different. It's like, well, but I saw it online. It must be right. And I think that that's really a frightening development in the last, you know, 30 years since Tim Learner's developed the World Wide Web, is this swing of the pendulum from initially we didn't trust anything that we were seeing on the Internet.

And now, too many people just will accept that as gospel truth. And you're like, well, wait a minute. And you say it's the death of critical thinking, right? I mean, where's your critical thinking if you're just being spoon-fed things from a computer search engine that's working on algorithms? and you're not challenging or questioning it, you're just accepting whatever it is that you're being given. I mean, we're in the bravenor world, right?

Yeah. You know, it's really frightening that that's the way people are starting to gravitate. And boy, that's just such a part of the issue today with education. There's a great line that I came across. and actually I give myself credit because I was editing a paper that I'm publishing and I actually had quoted this and I forgot all about it. But there's a terrific scholar of Augustine called Brian Stock. He's really a fantastic writer. I think he's a historian and I believe he's now probably retired.

But he's written several really just incredible books on Augustine. And in one of his more recent ones, he has a. this statement, he says, humans cannot explain natural order, but through the practice of the liberal arts, they can arrive at some understanding of narrative order within themselves. So it's the importance of liberal arts education. Yeah. Is, you know, we can't explain what's going on in the world, but through the liberal arts, I can come to some understanding of the narrative order within me. And then I can use that to kind of try to reflect what the hell's going on in the world, right?

It's one of the things that we've continued to come back and forth with in our discussions is subjectivity versus objectivity. Yeah. Right. And my ability to see the world objectively versus only seeing it subjectively, right? If I can only see things through my own perspective and I can't get out of that, then my critical thinking is shot to hell. Yeah.

Critical thinking is the ability to look at something. objectively, right, and try to strip it of any kind of bias that I might have, whether that bias is taught, whether it's natural. I mean, you know, what I mean is, you know, let's say I'm colorblind and I don't see color properly. You know, it's the ability to see something by taking away whatever that biases that I might have and look at it from that perspective. And that is something which we desperately try to teach students, especially in liberal arts education, and have, I would say, since Plato's Academy, I tried to do that. And it's only gotten that much more difficult in the digital age. That's really well said.

But in hearing that, it brought this thought to my mind that maybe the digital age has made synonymous objectively with objectified because people are just objects now in some ways. And they see like how many men see women as objects, you know, or how many people see, how many employers see their employees as objects? You know, they don't look at them objectively. They just see them as objects or, you know, the theory of replacement. I think that's what the digital, the digital, digitization takes out the humanity of things. It puts the magic in the machine.

Even at the level of just, you know, these days, you know, how many repair people are there for things? When, you know, growing up, I mean, if your TV broke, you called the repairman, the TV repairman. They were listed in the yellow pages. That's a profession which has gone the way of the Dodo Bird. even things like, you know, I was noticing this the other day because I was someplace and I drove past one and I was shocked. It was what my father used to call a shoemaker, right, a cobbler, a person who fixed shoes. Those are few and far between now because they, it's a dying thing. Your shoes fall apart, you throw them out, you buy new shoes.

You know, I can remember quite vividly growing up, you know, my father giving me his dress shoes. and taking them to a shoemaker and have new souls and heels put on them. And he would do that occasionally when they wore out instead of just throwing them out and buying new shoes. But again, now we're back with craftsmanship. Because a lot of that has to do with a craft. I mean, the guy who fixed your TV, I mean, that was a craft, right? It really was.

And those kinds of crafts are dying. I mean, even to the point where now you've got folks who, you know, we have a, we had a new stove put in a couple of years ago. And about a year ago, something funky happened with it that I just didn't think should have. And so I called because we had bought the extended warranty on it. And they sent somebody out. And the guy looked at it and he said, yeah, he says, we can fix that. He said, it's going to cost about 400 bucks. And I'm like, what?

You know, it was just because it's not worth it to fix these things anymore. Instead, we live, as everybody knows, in a disposable culture, right? Throw it out and buy a new one. And that's just something which it reinforces the lack of value and worth in things. They just don't have the same value that they once did. Even cars, right? My father had cars and he had them until they drove them into the ground, you know? And obviously people don't keep cars that long anymore, but you really can't.

They don't last. They're not built to last. Planned obsolescence. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, as hideous as those those, those. all of appliances were that we had in the 1960s and 70s, you know, you could launch a rocket off those things. They weren't gone anywhere.

Yeah. But that's not the case with the stuff you buy now. It's interesting to think, you know, most people won't draw this comparison, but I think it's fair. And the comparison is if the things around us are planned to become obsolete sooner rather than later, then what does that say about our values? What does that say about the way we see the world? When you and I have this conversation and we can tell you, you know, my aunt's 57 Ford Fairlane lasted a long time.

My 2020 Accura or Lexus hybrid is already got 40,000 miles on it. And I can't even change the oil on there because I'm on the right tool, you know? And it's interesting that, and I think it's a good measure of who we are by the things we're surrounded by. and if they're all built to fail, you know. Well, I mean, I bought a Mini Cooper two years ago. I love my Mini Cooper. And I'm not a car guy, but I love my Mini Cooper. But when I bought it, and they were showing me the car, and I took it for a test drive.

I took it for a test drive. I got back to the lot, and I got out of the car with the sales girl, salesperson, saleswoman, excuse me. And I said, I said, well, how do you pop the hood? and she said, well, why do you want to pop the hood? And I said, well, I want to look under the hood. And she said, well, there's nothing to see. You pop the hood on this thing, and there literally is nothing to see, because nothing is serviceable by us. Nothing is accessible.

In fact, I don't even think I can fill the windshield wiper fluid myself because it's all sealed off. So, you know, and it remains in some ways in that way, kind of a mystery. You know, what's under there? How much of that is electronic? How much of it is actually moving parts? I don't know. Probably not as much as once was. Yeah.

But I think you're right. I mean, it speaks to how we value things, you know, and the devil's advocate would say, oh, well, you're talking about being materialistic, right, about holding onto stuff and the value of stuff. And it shouldn't have that much of a value. And no disagreement there, but it also speaks to the ways in which we think about the things that we have around us. Yeah. And how important they are. And how important they are when it comes to things like sentimental value and personal value, right? I'm not talking about monetary value only. And I think that's where people fall into the trap. They think, oh, well, you're only talking about the monetary value of something. No, I mean, things have value beyond their monetary value. I mean, you know, just sitting here at my desk, I mean, this silly apple paperweight,

it's a paperweight that's an apple. This was given to me decades ago by a student. I can't even remember what student it was, to be honest, but it's been so long. It's been sitting on my desk, my entire career, right? Now, this is probably, you know, if this was at a yard sale, it would probably be a dollar, right? It has no monetary value, but it has a lot of value to me, personal value, because, as I say, it was given to me by a student. It has always been sitting on my desk. It's just, it's part of who I am as a professor.

And so I think that, you know, if we separate the monetary value from personal value, that will help a lot with the discussion about these things, right? I mean, this has more monetary value than this, right? My cell phone. But what means more to me? Well, it's definitely this, right? I care less about the cell phone because guess what? In a couple of years, I'm going to trade this in for another cell phone. It's not going to matter.

It's not like I'm personally connected to this thing. But this, I do have some more of a personal connection to. And so, you know, if you want to, you know, really go crazy, analog digital, right? Yeah. Sorry, I'm holding things up. No, not an all. I held up my phone and a glass apple. Well, it's because if I were to take the,

if I was to play the devil's advocate on there, what about the pictures on your phone? Those people have to have some sentimental value. Like, how does that fit into it? They do. And that's really problematic. Yeah. I think that's a real problem.

You know, I love looking at old pictures, print pictures. You know, and I think we mentioned last time, it's interesting. There's a resurgence in the sale of single lens reflex, reflex cameras, and actual film. That there's a resurgence in the use of it. A lot of that coming out of the pandemic, people going back to those old ways. But, I mean, I hate that all of my pictures of digital now. I don't like it. I had boxes of old photographs.

which over the last few years I have scanned in digitally, so I have digital copies. And, you know, it was a lot of work to do because we're talking about probably thousands of photographs. I mean,

these are photographs that go back to my grandparents. And the reality was that once I was done scanning them in, I turned to my wife, and I said, now what am I supposed to do with them? Right?

And she said, not to be flippant, throw them out. Right? That was the point of doing this. Is that now you don't have to have space to have them. And oh my God, it was like you were asking me to cut off a limb, throw out these photographs. Some of them are 100 years old. Who the hell am I to throw them out? Yeah. And so,

you know, I have saved a lot of them. Hopefully my wife's not listening because she didn't know where they are. You're in trouble. So, David, I feel like we're just getting warmed up. But due to the technical difficulties we had, I'm going to have to go to the dentist and get some of warm. done there. I'm sorry. Yeah, I know. But anyway, they give you glasses to wear to, some dentists do that now, give you virtual reality glasses to wear during your dental visits so you can relax. I've noticed what they come in now and they can take a, they'll put a wand through if they're going to do a crown and they'll get a whole 3D imaging of my mouth that comes up on a screen. No kidding. And I was like, wow, look at this. And then that way

they could just print out the crown right there, bingo, bingo. Wow. You know, so on some level, we should continue this conversation because I think we've barely scratched the surface on it. I think that there's a lot we can get into there. But as for now, what is it that you have coming up? What's the blog post going to be about this work? Where can people find you and what are you excited about?

Sure. So my website is David A. Solomon, s-l-o-m-M-O-N dot com. and there you can find the links to my books and the blog and all of my other consulting and appearances. And what the most recent blog post is about is about division, which is probably appropriate given the fact that today is election day. And your birthday. Happy birthday. Yes, thank you very much. And the piece on division, I think, is, I don't feel like it's finished.

So I'll be eager to hear if people have any comments about it because I think there's more to be said there. What am I excited about? I just began reading this new book on D.H. Lawrence called Look, We've come through, Living with D.H. Lawrence. It's by a woman in Laura Fagall. She is a professor at King's College, London. And she wrote this book about, as she calls it in the subtitle, Living with D.H. Lawrence, the pandemic. She decided that during the pandemic, she was going to write a book on Lawrence. And so during the time that she was in the lockdown in the UK, she went through all of his

work. And it got an interesting review. And I ordered a copy immediately from the UK. It's not published here yet in the States. And just started reading it this morning. It was quite good. Nice. I'm going to have to check it out myself. Maybe we can try to get it on the podcast. We could talk to it together. Yeah. That would be awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I got. got a um gosh darn it i can't i have a book too that i wanted to talk about and tell you about about angels and demons i think they would like professor out of yale i believe a psychologist who is actually i don't want to butcher it i'll send you the notes on it because i think you find it really interesting what some of the work you're doing terrific so fantastic that's what i got going

on coming up in the future i got some great podcast coming up later this week and david and i will be back to you on Tuesday, probably continuing our discussion and floating down this stream of digital waterways and analog boats and whatnot. So that's what I got. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Go check out David's work. Check out his blog. Check out his book, The Seven Deadly Sins. It's a really great read. I think you enjoy it. That's what we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.