Listening at the Double

The excellent Lifehacker sent me to the somewhat bizarre Buddha Machine Wall. This web site lets you blend short loops of "Buddhist temple music" together, making an ambient soundscape to cut out surrounding distractions. Although you'd think it would get repetitive and annoying, I've managed to play it for hours: it does shut out the surroundings, and in addition I don't even notice it after a few minutes. This is a lot better than my usual technique of listening to music, which does affect my concentration (though not as much as some of the noise going on in my office).

However, it does feel like a waste. When I listen to Spotify, getting to know new albums, I feel as if I'm doing something productive. Ironic, as all I'm doing is consuming, but there you are. Just listening to a wall of sound doesn't cut it.

It would have once, but I think my problem now is a continual feeling that I'm not processing information as fast as I should.

To help with this, I've started listening to podcasts and audio books at higher speeds. Both BeyondPod, my podcast app, and Audible both let you play at a variety of faster (or lower) speeds. I tend to stick between 1.25 and 1.5 times normal speed. Any faster than that and it's too easy to lose the thread. It doesn't work for music, unsurprisingly, and it's not very good for comedy,where timing is all important, but otherwise it works really well. Now the challenge is to train myself up to be able to listen at x2.

Cheating in Audio

I started listening to audiobooks a couple of years ago, through the admirable Audible company. I mostly listen to the books while cycling home, which makes it difficult to skip back a few seconds when my concentration slips and I miss a bit. I soon realised that this mode of reading is more suitable for fiction than non-fiction. The mind-blowing 'Decoding Reality' really deserves a re-listen in less distracting circumstances, while '50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know' I gave up around number 15, after a near miss turning onto Haxby Road while using rather less of my brain than I really ought to have.

For stories though, it's ideal, and I'm using it to catch up on authors I might otherwise never have found the time for, or getting through the complete works of Stieg Larsson (sadly only three).

I had one worry though: is listening to a novel rather than reading it cheating?

Recently I was sat down with a real book, 'Use of Weapons' by Iain M. Banks. It's one of his Culture novels (masterpieces of SF, if you've never tried them), and I stopped to count the ones I'd already read. I knew there were three, and that one of them was an audiobook. The interesting thing was that I couldn't remember which of the three was the one I'd listened to. As far as my memory was concerned, I had the internal 'soundtracks' of three novels, and I couldn't tell the difference in quality between the one I'd heard through my earphones and the ones I'd made up myself as I read the written words.

So as far as I'm concerned, the answer is 'No: audiobooks are not cheating'. At least, it isn't for me. The end result in my memory seems to be exactly the same, except that I can now combine some of the more tedious parts of my life with probably my favourite hobby.

Social Networking and Me

Just been listening to last week's This Week in Google podcast, much of which centred on the recent concerns about Facebook privacy, as well as Facebook's apparent attempts to own the web. My own experience with Facebook used to be limited to a brief flirtation with it a couple of years ago. I gave up after a couple of weeks: I found I had little interest in giving the world a blow by blow account of my life, and I resented the wash of messages being a Facebook member generated, many from people I didn't even know. The final straw was a suggestion from a woman I'd never heard of that I should give her a slap. So I cancelled my account, or at least I think I did; it wasn't very straightforward.

Twitter and I have a similar relationship. As someone who's supposed to be tech-savvy, I felt I ought to open a Twitter account, but I quickly got fed up with having to repeatedly check for new messages (when I tried feeding them into Goggle Reader, I got someone else's messages instead--something to do with Google Reader not being set up to do logins). I do not share my user name, and have never tweeted. Despite this, I do get followers, though not for very long. None of them are names I recognise, and they all seem to be following hundreds of others without anyone reciprocating.

As someone who doesn't care to share the minutiae of his life with the world, the privacy issues of Facebook and others are less of a worry for me than the time it would take keeping up with all the messages they generate. I already have difficulty getting through all the blogs and podcasts I follow, as well as the music I want to listen to and the books I want to read, not to mention having a bit of a life away from the keyboard. Earphones and mobile devices have helped a lot: I've just finished listening to 'The Age of Innocence' (a novel I would probably never have got around to reading) on an Audible book, all done while cycling to and from work, or pounding the streets delivering election leaflets last month (much good that did). Even with their help though, there's still more content I want to consume than I can fit in to a day.

Despite me not being interested in Facebook and Twitter, in the last few weeks it's started to seem that I can't go anywhere on the web without being asked if I want to tweet about it or share it with Facebook. It feels like there's another layer being built over the web, one made up of the shared recommendations on social networking sites like Facebook, and maybe the time will come when newcomers to the web can be persuaded by the likes of Facebook to only access web pages via their site, in the same way that AOL and CompuServe tried with their home page portals.

Even Spotify, my beloved music streaming service, now invites me to share all my listening experiences. As if there might be someone out there who wants to know, in real time, which piece of music I've just listened to. Actually, I think I will start doing that, purely in the interest of research. I'll find out how long my few Twitter followers can stay interested in a stream of tweets directing them to pieces of music they've likely never heard of.

Or maybe I'll get some recommendations back.