People who go so deep on a subject that they become – to others – an expert judge in matters of taste. With wine or whisky, quite literally.
Going deep also requires time, sustained interest, and attention. All things that are not encouraged or highly prized by our society.
I hadn’t thought of it quite this way, but developing taste requires choosing what to give your attention to.
Intentionality.
You cannot develop a useful preference for or against something if you don’t know what you are listening to or watching, if you can’t describe what it is to find more of it. You can only say you like or dislike it in the moment… if you are actually giving it your attention and not treating it as background noise.
Jay calls this choosing discernment (a good word for it — I feel like I’ve reached for “sensibility” before):
My strawman Bourdieu argues that taste is completely shaped by external social structures. But through the practice of Discernment, individuals can make critical judgments for themselves.
Discernment allows people to shape their own tastes and preferences. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting culture based on one’s social background. Practising discernment cultivates a more nuanced understanding ones cultural world.
Social media exposes us to volume, but makes it hard to direct attention within it. Streaming encourages us to be passive listeners or watchers, vehicles for consumption. They provide endless libraries of largely mediocre media too large to choose within ourselves, forcing our reliance on algorithmic recommendations that give us either more of exactly what we liked before or feed us what they’d like us to see.
Paris Marx puts it: “I want to be more intentional about what I watch and listen to, and many streaming services actively discourage that. They want you to accept the rule of the algorithm…” (Emphasis mine.)
In Filterworld, Kyle Chayka attributes this passivity to our lack of influence over the algorithm, so “we consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material.” Our attachment to any particular source isn’t valuable to the corporations behind the feed — is actually undesirable because attachment puts value on something specific, which could increase the cost to keep it in their library. Spotify is already taking the excuse to not pay bands not popular enough to demand fair compensation. Streaming services are axing their catalogs left and right. They desire our attachment to the service rather than the media we consume through it; the behavior they want to encourage is spending time and attention on their service rather than any other. The media they provide is only a means to that end.
Matthew Graybosch describes how push technologies steal attention, while pull technologies give you agency:
RSS is “pull technology”. It’s there if you want it, and when you’re ready you pull the feed and get updates. This, in my opinion, is how the Internet should work.
Newsletters, app notifications, etc. are all part of the opposite paradigm: “push technology”…
The difference between pull technology and push technology is that the former relies on polling and the latter runs on interrupts.
I think push / pull is a useful categorization tool: does this tech empower me to make my own choices (pull), or does it seek to guide my behavior (push)? Who is in control? Is it a tool or a service?
I appreciate Graybosch’s point:
The use of push technology has turned computers and the internet from technologies that could serve and assist us into technologies that rule us.
Even living relatively outside the filter — with no streaming music service, no video streaming service, no corporate social media — much of the cultural material I consume is still inexorably shaped by the forces of the algorithm as a tool of capitalistic intensification. It’s homogenizing music; it’s homogenizing interior design and architecture; even advertising and typography. That’s why I value other people’s recommendations so much these days — they come from taste, not data.
Further reading:
Spotify DJ is like a music pokie by Rach Smith
I don’t need to know what my favorite songs are about to love them—but sometimes it helps (or: “The Commander Thinks Aloud”) by Keenan
We can have a different web by Molly White
This is what the internet looks like now by Ryan Broderick
How I’m doing the Internet in 2024 by Chris Glass
The Revenge of the Home Page by Kyle Chayka (New Yorker)
See also:
The value of deep learning
Gulping information
Style vs. taste
The source of coolness
Article pairing: the monotony of modern culture
Nicheless culture
Doc Searls