Anyway, today he was contemplating the discovery of new things. I've given this idea some thought on my own, when I realized I was never really listening to music on the radio anymore. Basically, I do all my music listening when I'm driving in my car, and nowadays I nearly always listen to NPR on my local station.
And this is both good and bad. The good part is that I rarely get bombarded by something I don't like, but the bad part is that I don't hear a lot of new stuff, either. Well, I didn't for quite a while.
As Joe says,
Of course, people talk about this all the time, about how technology has allowed us to retreat into ourselves. You can -- you do -- find yourself surrounded by opinions you share, shielded from things you find offensive or uninteresting, living in a world where everything you see or hear or read or touch is, like the prizes at the end of the Newlywed Game, "chosen just for you."
He mentions it as being progress, but I wonder. That is, in and of itself, it does seem to be progress, but the question I end up with is whether or not it leads to further progress. And I'm not sure what the answer there is, although the genius recommendations that he also mentions could prevent that being a problem.
That is, if you take several of those recommendations, you could end up pushing outside of your comfort zone, but still finding stuff you like. So I guess we'll see what happens.
But some of what he was talking about is definitely true. Like him, I don't browse book stores like I used to do (and never did, quite as freely as he did); in fact, I don't even go into stores all that often. The bulk of the books I buy, I get online. Movies? Ditto.
It's a strange world we live in.
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