A wonderful essay in the new issue of Hedgehog Review, and a welcome reminder of how much better reading in print is than reading online: the beautiful high-resolution photography, the excellent typography and layout, the complete absence of flickering ads, pop-ups, notifications from other tabs or other apps.
How much is that kind of thing worth to you? Maybe not much, but it’s worth thinking about, I believe. I’ve written before about this, but let me reaffirm: There’s a lot to be gained through redistributing your media portfolio.
Forget streaming music: buy vinyl or CDs or even digital files. Listen to the music you love best until it wears grooves in your mind, just as we just to do back in the Media Stone Age. Infinitely better than filling your ears 18 hours a day with AI slop (labeled, lyingly, as coming from reputable musicians) on Spotify. For the amount of money you spend on one streaming service, you can in a year (especially if you shop with care) pick up enough wonderful music to last you a lifetime. If you buy digital files you won’t even need new equipment, but it’s worth remembering how cheap CDs are, even new ones. Portable CD players too.
Subscribe to fewer TV/movie sites. I’ve never subscribed to HBO or Hulu or DisneyPlus, and here’s my relationship with Netflix: every once in a while I subscribe for a month just to watch a few things I really want to see. Last time that happened? Three years ago, when Apollo 10½ came out. I don’t miss any of those services, ever. We have a family Apple Plus account, so when I want to watch digital movies or TV I use that, but mainly I buy Blu-Rays and watch the best ones over and over. If you don’t want to or can’t pay full price, you can buy them cheap from eBay or Half Price Books.
Subscribe to fewer Substacks and to more print periodicals. Keep them lying around and read them when you need a break from screens. Write in them. Cover them with sticky notes. Tear out pages you like and put them in folders, just as my late and much-missed friend Brett Foster used to do, if that’s what turns you on. (I loved looking through Brett’s scrap folders, full of torn-out pieces of newspaper and scribbled lines of poetry.)
Just try it! Cancel a few digital subscriptions and start enjoying the blessings of physical media, of really owning what you really like. After a few months you can go back to Rent-a-Life and full-time chasing the Discourse if you want. But I bet you won’t want.
