Some of the recurring themes I hear in the Irish Session Etiquette podcast are:
- The music used to be part of a larger tradition of getting together
- The music wasn’t around for its own right, but as a backdrop for dancing
One story in particular has stuck with me: people would come over to somebody’s house and there would be food, music, dancing, and storyteling. It wasn’t a big celebration or anything, it was just a thing everyone did once in a while. When radio came along, there would be some listening to the radio, too. And when the first television came around, there was quite a bit of watching television. Eventually, every house had a television, so you didn’t need to go anywhere to watch your show. And the musicians got together with the dancers in the pub for a while, until the dancers stopped coming.
I don’t think social media or AI are anything new when it comes to isolating people from one another. It rather seems that this is the first time humanity has paid attention to it.