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>People seem to think that everything is on the internet, and >at your fingertips, and that this explosion of information can >only have positive effects superceeding the 'old model' as we >shall call it now. >But I think that what is happening is that people are actually >being led down to narrower paths than they'd like to admit.
I suppose it all depends on the person you're talking about. I can't speak for everybody else's internet experience, but I hear way, way more types of music and individual artists now than I did pre-internet, and it's not even close. And most of it comes from user-generated-content sites - discussion forums, for example. I post here and people recommend hip hop I ought to check out. I post at the Metal Archives and the Nuclear War Now forum for metal, and the VIP dancehall forum for reggae/dancehall. I also use discography sites - discogs.com, Metal Archives again, allmusic, several others - to explore outward from artists I already like. What other bands was this guy in? What other bands are on that guy's label? etc. etc.
>It's all about how the information is presented, and the >inclusive nature of the information providers. If everyone >giving you information are cynically motivated and concerned >with their own bottom line, then it will only incentivise >keeping people in boxes in order to more competently mine them >for money, or data, or both.
I'm not sure how what you're describing has much to do with most of the user-generated content on the internet.
>These companies like facebook and twitter and google shape >your search results to give you more of what you impulsively >want, besed on previous searches and postings.
Yes, but why lean on them? I only use Facebook to talk to my friends. I only use Google to search for restaurants in my town. I only use iTunes to organize my albums. When I go looking for music, I do it on my own terms - I don't just click on the paid, sponsored link right in front of me on one of the four major corporate sites. I would hope that most other serious music listeners are doing likewise.
>Contrast that with the 'old model', which was more generalised >and catholic, where you were exposed to all types of shit from >the boring to the exciting, and YOU had to decide what was >boring to you and what was exciting to you, and spend the rest >of the time imagining better entertainment cuz it wasn't ON >all the time like the internet is. I'm saying that led to >better art, HUNGRIER art.
This is a weird argument. The shit you were exposed to pre-internet was pre-filtered and sorted. You weren't given "all types of shit," you were given a whole lot of like six types of shit and a tiny dribble of a few others. That doesn't seem like a problem? And what is preventing YOU from deciding what is boring or exciting now? I certainly make my own choices. I don't log in to Amazon and wait for their "recommended for you" page to come up, and then say "Yes, overlord, feed me more opinions."
And by the way, speaking of things that aren't new, THAT isn't new. Google and Amazon have new algorithms that make it possible to be more personalized and invasive about it, but the deliberate segmenting of popular culture has gone on for a long time. Classic rock radio, 2 hours of alternative music or hip hop or metal on MTV, hip hop and rock and jazz magazines... all along people have made a business out of, "If you like this, maybe you'll also like this!" And just like with Amazon, a lot of those people directly profited off of dividing up and narrowing your tastes, and marketing to them. We're getting better at it and increasingly more specific, but it's a trend that well pre-dated the internet. However, now as then, you have the choice of branching out whenever you want. You don't have to stick to one web site/one genre of music, and you can ignore the algorithm sites altogether if you like.
Fundamentally, I feel like a lot of the anti-internet/anti-"new model" backlash is just coming from a place of "This is how it used to work, and we don't know how it's going to work going forward... therefore it's probably going to be worse." How can we know that? I think there are a lot of positives to it, and the negatives we're afraid of might not actually turn out to be negatives. It might just be different - not worse, not better.
And I guarantee that with enough digging you can find sentiments much like yours from a decade, two, or five ago. People expressing the same fears about the dawn of recorded music, the dawn of radio, TV, MTV, chain music stores, programming blocks, genre radio stations, etc. But in the current generation(s), we have very little hindsight. Like every other group of people that ever got old together, we just assume that what's coming next is bad and we are permanently losing something better. What makes it better? Because we grew up with it, I guess, and we're used to it. --
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