The very pre-selected, guided nature of this system tended to focus the attention. Of course an enormous amount of material accumulated as the recording industry matured. By the 1960s the selection seemed almost infinite, though in fact choices were withdrawn nearly as fast as new ones came onto the market. But once a selection had been made, the ear-only engagement went its linear way as long as the listener pleased, without a multiplicity of options presenting themselves. The role of the internet in the shortening of attention spans and the normalization of the multitasking mentality is by now the subject of hundreds of books and articles (current example: Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads), and that of the social media and the proliferation of devices in foreclosing the development of any contemplative, day-dreaming, fantasizing faculties in the young is beginning to be appreciated. All of us who grew up in internet-free days, and who have taught long enough to watch the changes in students since, can attest to the general fragmentation of time, the substitution of the virtual for the real, the absence of context for the ever-present array of free and equal choices, and the unchallenged sway of eye over ear (for everything on the internet is visual first, aural second) that daily shape their jittery, wired sensoria. ^(I)

To be sure, the apparently limitless, apparently unmanipulated, apparently free bounty of the online cosmos is a great resource that can be turned to constructive, enriching, deepening purpose by searchers of mature judgment, discipline, and focused concentration. Those are exactly the skills young students, let alone children (and childhood is where the basic mental structures are jimmied into place), haven’t yet acquired. While that cosmos, extensive and packed with goodies though it is, is truly neither limitless nor unmanipulated (it is limited by the choices of those who feed it something, then manipulated via bot and algorithm by the pre-emptive presence of the corporate interests that seek to live off it), it is experientially  undetermined to those setting out to explore it. They forage over a boundless field that is defined by no features of permanence and weight, but by a million of shiny hue and pop-up evanescence. Unsurprisingly, they reap a random harvest.

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Now for the corrections and elaborations a small technical calamity prevented me from including on my last post. They concern Norma, and they come from two colleagues, Matthew Gurewitsch and Will Crutchfield. My thanks to both for keeping me straight. Matt points out that it is a sacred “selva,” not “scelta,” that Adalgisa finds depopulated at the start of Scene 2, and that the span from 1950 to 2017 is 67, not 77, years. I plead midnight blear in both cases. Will notes that though the great Brünnhilde, etc. Lilli Lehmann did perform the role of Philine in Mignon, she didn’t in fact record “Je suis Titania.” He suspects I’m misremembering and confusing Lehmman with her great rival Brünnhilde, etc., Lillian Nordica, who did record this coloratura showpiece, and I suspect he’s right.