Online dating: This is maybe the kind of thing that seems way more significant when you're struggling to find a partner and your biological clock is ticking (like many of my friends), or you were never single during the ascendancy of online dating and are every so slightly curious how your twenties might have gone differently (a "friend"--happy as a clam now...) And once you've found a partner (if that's what you were looking for), online dating probably seems just cool, but almost taken for granted--like why would you not use the internet as a resource for finding a date?
I know from friends' experiences that online dating does commodify the appraisal of people in ways uncomfortable admittedly in our particularly romantic moment in human history, but still, it's our moment--comparisons to dowries, etc. is not usually soothing to people. It's a little weird to have your attributes listed in resume form to be compared with many, many other applicants (though maybe not significantly weirder than having your rack compared to that of the woman sitting next to you at the bar). My friend's boyfriend consoled her that she "won," when he decided to stop dating others but seemed to be privately wondering if there was someone else, say 10% better than my friend just one click away.
There are lots of links relevant to this digitally born change. Here's a well done recent piece by Nick Paumgarten of the New Yorker. And here's a link to the initial search page that also has a blog, some mail and a chat with him about the subject.
The declining sway of critics: In general this falls under Weinberger's discussion of the decline of gate-keeping, prestige-wielding experts. I'm thinking here especially of book and music critics, and particularly of their sway on me in a a clear-cut way: how I decide whether or not to buy a book or cd/record. It may not be as relevant to others, or to the success of books and music releases, regarding which there are more significant factors. (For example, the viability of albums is probably a bigger deal than which albums people get.)
Anyway, I now read Amazon.com user reviews more than book and music "criticism." The former is far more relevant to me in deciding if I'm likely to enjoy the book or album. For books, I enjoy reading "real" critic reviews when I get the chance, but the main point of a critic's review is the production of its own compelling text--the review. This is much less the case for customer reviews. In skimming the customer reviews, I can figure out pretty quickly which ones to ignore. There's a feature of how many people found the review helpful as well. Recently, I've started to make a point to survey the spectrum of reviews based on how favorably they grade the book (the spectrum being one through five stars). So I'll read a couple 1-star or 2-star reviews. If the criticisms seem compelling, I may second-guess acquiring the book. Here is an example, pictured below, where I was sure I would love the book, but on the counsel of several highly critical reviews (dwarfed by the glowing ones), decided to read one of the other 500 books I own but haven't had a chance to read.
For for the music I like there often isn't any criticism at all--or it's not useful, as in the case of jazz, where 99% of "official" reviews read like advertisements designed to further the cause of jazz as a whole. Also, a lot of the music I'm interested in doesn't have sound samples; if they do, a 30 sec sample is sometimes helpful, but sometimes not.
Anyway, the average customer review is not well-crafted as a piece of writing, but it doesn't take long to find some interesting points being made--sometimes more interesting, and often more relevant to me, than the points addressed in a sophisticated, witty review in a magazine or newspaper. For someone who has always liked reading non-fiction in general and criticism in particular, it is amazing to me to realize that nowadays I probably spend more time reading mini-reviews by "random" customers on amazon.com than reviews by esteemed critics. In addition, the latter are sometimes (again, you have to sift) more expert in the more tangible sense--on the particular subject under review--than the print-published "expert." So the appraisal of "random" customers, in some cases, has more traction with me than the appraisal of even an insightful "official" review. Appraisal seems almost synonymous with criticism, but actually is one of many components in traditional criticism. For (most) customer reviews, that's all there is, which is often what I want. Speaking of which...
The new media giving us what we actually want: In a recent Atlantic Monthly article, entitled "Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media," James Fallows makes a number of interesting points about the shift to "infotainment," which can be considered a more "perfected" market, whereby we get more and more of "what we want and less of what someone else thinks we should have."
Again, to invoke Weinberger, we filter, rather than receive limited, pre-filtered material. The complaint, clearly, is that the pre-filtered material is better for us than the junk we wind up consuming. Obviously not everything is junk and the article discusses much of what is better (and not just more appealing), or will become better, ranging from coverage of the Middle East to extremely local news that is too insignificant to be processed by the "old" media, to more creative responses to rampant misinformation like the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert model, in which the narrative is switched, rather than directly corrected in the traditional way.
The article concludes with an interesting take on Carr's concerns (though it doesn't mention him). Fallows suggests that individuals who resist the distractedness of digital life either will gain a competitive advantage or distraction will be a trait but not necessarily a defect of modern life...
The bottom line for me is the need to take responsibility for what you consume digitally. (Not to mention what you produce digitally.) You can't say, "There are so many McDonald's chains around I can't help but gorge myself on Big Macs and fries." There's other food besides junk food. Like most analogies, there are differences. (In this case, there are many neighborhoods where it is difficult and expensive to eat right, but that's another issue...) Navigating the digital world, for me at least, is a way bigger challenge than navigating the grocery store. Self-filtering is empowering but also daunting...in any case there's not really a choice moving forward.
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