“People have access to unlimited information on the internet. They are still idiots when it comes to politics, history, economics, science, and music.”
Well, yeah. But commerce isn’t about refining taste; it’s about getting what you want most efficiently. According to that standard, the web beats specialty shops hands down. You may argue that specialty shops helped educate taste and raise people above the level of idiots. They did. But as I’ve been saying, commercial enterprises, however refined and rarified, are poor substitutes for actual community.
It’s not the Athenian agora at your local Alternative Record Store. At best its nerds lording over their fiefdoms.
“But wandering in a vast wasteland (or the warehouse at the Smithsonian) doesn’t mean that you will automatically gravitate to what you are looking for.”
No, but how about we talk about these things with our actual friends, family, etc.? How about if we form friends and mentors on the basis of what consumer goods we have in common these become actual friend/mentorships instead of convenient acquantancships which pop into use only when we cross the threshold of the store entrance? How about we use basic things like author’s own bibliographies and recommended reading lists to guide our readership, for instance? The back pages of our favorite books are no wastelands.
“Being told that some obscure cut is “good” may not sound that way if you haven’t heard “this” or grown up in that environment.”
I agree in that music is something to be heard with other people. Much morseso than it was meant to be experienced alone, at least. But why does said environment have to be in a store? Stores are primarily for buying. Even the ones that you hang out in regularly for hours on end. You could just as easily be hanging out elsewhere listening to the same thing with real friends, acquantances, and friendly strangers, especially in the age of the internet. I realize in the past you might have had to go to the local record shop to hear that sort of thing, but no longer.
“The signal to noise ratio of people hyping things has become higher than ever”
Yes, absolutely. But I’ve never been on board with the sort of people who see the alternative as a true alternative to the mainstream. To me it’s always seemed but a smaller mainstream. A consensus for people who don’t necessarily like the larger consensus. Give me the unlimited wasteland of easily accessable information for me to shoot through like a rocket-car on the salt flats any day.
“And now we have hipsters for food called ‘foodies’”
I once read that a gentlemen never discusses food, and I think it’s a noble point.
“No one would put up with their friend telling them EVERY meal what they had for breakfast, lunch and dinner the day before. On line, they think we all give a damn.”
For clarity’s sake, let me state emphatically that I do not see internet communities as substitutes for commercial communities, let alone good, old-fashioned regular communities. The internet is not a vast wasteland, it is a cesspool. That is, if you’re looking for contact with other humans. If you’re looking for a tool to help you buy things, on the other hand, it is unbeatable.
“if you want to BUY something rather than just copy it, you still have to find a vendor”
LEt me not speak for music, which is not my main area of interest anyway. So far as books go, the internet has opened up a world of easy perusal and purchase impossible in the popular local used bookstore in the college town I used to live.
the corner store or local DJ WAS community.