Wouldn't it be awful if we all liked the same things. It's a platitude I hear fairly often and I often have to tell it to myself to try and get past the fact that a lot of you have truly horrible taste in music. But a world where we all like the same things?! I mean, just imagine the sheer horror of it...
Imagine a world where art-house movies are widely screened in multiplexes across the land. That's right you're never more than 3 miles from a Werner Herzog retrospective!
Imagine a world where mummy-porn and fan-fiction were not the fastest growing forms of literature.
Imagine a world where a new release of an album of Japanese noise music is as immediately available in music shops worldwide as the latest pop chart-topper. Hell, imagine a world where there are still shops where you can buy music!
Imagine a world where a young, exciting composer's work is given the same attention currently being reserved for two French dudes re-hashing 70's dance music.
Imagine a world where your favourite sitcom never gets cancelled and you have to quit your job because there's just too much great TV on. No bland, soul-crushing production line talent shows or moronic brain-numbing so called "reality" television.
Imagine a world where right-wing nut jobs are not given newspaper column space to rant on inane, white middle-class suburban topics...and cars.
Imagine a world where fewer people waste money on video games where blokes shoot other blokes from behind brown chest-high walls and instead buy more puzzle games about infidelity.
Imagine a world where no matter who you meet you can bond over a shared love of music, art, literature, film... Every club plays your music, every shop sells your clothes and you can still buy those limited edition orange chocolate Kit-Kats.
How truly awful that all sounds.
Putting away the over-the-top sarcasm (although in that ideal world it would indeed be the highest form of wit) this hypothetical scenario could in fact soon become a reality. Well in a sense. Rather than everyone sharing your passions why not just limit the world so the only things you ever see are those that you're most interested in. This is where 21st century, Generation Me technologies come to the rescue.
We are entering an age of media tailored specifically to our needs. For example my personal view of the world is hand-crafted by a number of internet-based services I use and subscribe to. The individualised film genre picks of Netflix (ah, I see you enjoy Critically-acclaimed Visually-stunning Cerebral Foreign Dramas); the personalised magazine app Zite (please limit my news stories to those about Feminism, Video Games and North Korea), Amazon's recommendations (the least accurate of the bunch as they get screwed up every time I use it for buying gifts), last.fm's ability to tell me what musicians sound like other musicians and even my supermarket has a recommended for you section! Its the classic marketing phrase "If you like this, then you'll love..." fed through a supercomputer which can empirically prove it knows what you like better than you do.
It's not going to stop there, of course, we're only at the beginning of the emergence of technologies that serve discovery through familiarity. The new PlayStation 4 will go so far as to pre-download games it thinks you'll like. While DIY Youtubers and Kickstarter projects are democratising creative production - you want it? you make/pay for it. What now for 20th century behemoths like broadcast television. It would be nice to think that all creative persons are in it for the love of the medium but everyone needs money. Why risk a new idea when hundreds of fans will directly pay you to write a sequel to that one successful thing you did?
Even your social world can be tailored to your needs. Follow only your favourite comedians on Twitter (that's all its good for). Some old school friend wittering on about Muse on your Facebook timeline but you don't want to decrease your total friend count? (I mean you did go to school with them and that's a bond that lasts forever!) Just denigrate them to "Acquaintance" and you'll never have to hear from them again!.
I'm conflicted. I do really enjoy having technology that only shows me what I want to see. Technology that only tells me about my kind of obscure music, mutes annoying friends and recommends black and white documentaries about homeless people in New York. Thanks to them I can now live in a world where I can pretend people like Carly Rae Jepsen don't exist. But I'm afraid of the consequences of this. In world where all our entertainment is chosen for us based on some cryptic algorithm, how does one discover new, unexpected experiences. Those rare, ecstatic, eureka moments in life where one's taste is completely altered for good. We've all had those moments and they don't often occur within our safe zones. They dwell in wild and untamed lands, the gateways to which I worry are becoming harder to find.
I fear that what we'll be left with is an increasingly retro-ised culture and maybe a purely static one. People by and large will stick to what they like and if that's all they're ever exposed to then why bother looking elsewhere. If culture had always been purely democratic would we ever have had jazz or rock 'n roll or punk? "If you like teenage rebellion we also think you'll also like middle age conformity." While I have the overwhelming desire to coin the phrase "culture of equilibrium" to describe where I think we're going I know I'm definitely getting in way over my head. I'll just finish with Tom's Truism Of The Day™ - "Try new things, you just might like it."
