Manufacturing Groupthink

Ever since I started reading again ina serious mannter, I have been wondering why did I not know of certain writers. Yes, there was no internet back then, so there was a limited amount of information sources. But Gabriel Garcia Marquez was famous by the time I graduated from high school. It may be that I was not paying enough attention - or was not motivated enough to pay attention. 

These thoughts, however, got me thinking about gatekeepers and groupthink.

What supports my own fault in not having discovered Marquez or Thomas Mann or Joyce Carol Oates is that I had gone through a similar discovery with music when I was younger. A friend told me about Lou Reed, Matt the Hoople, and David Bowie even though the radio ignored them. Creem, and Rolling Stone told me about others. Searching through record store bins with a sense of curiosity brought The Clash and The Cramps into my life. Maybe I wanted to be a musician more than a writer.

The same problem seems to exist even with the internet. Maybe it is worse, since it seems now the internet tends now more to constrict then expand our world. Read The music industry is engineering artist popularity – listeners are right to be angry by Shaad D'Souza.

Spotify also wouldn’t speak to me on the record; this lack of information from all sides makes it hard for anyone to consume music on the service in any kind of informed way. A representative for a major label told me they don’t think their label actually uses discovery, despite speculation that they do, a fittingly oblique response for such a mystifying topic. The promise of the internet was that it would allow us to cut out middlemen and buy music direct from the artist, but the reality is that quite the opposite has happened – we’re faced with an even more infernally complex system. Spotify users remain in limbo, left to guess how much of their feed is what essentially amounts to undisclosed advertising – and how much, at the other extreme, is totally randomised.

Lift up your eyes and look around. Be curious. Explore. The world needs to be experienced, not curated.

sch 9/14