My friend started using his Last.fm account as it's meant to be used: as a way to show your friends what music you've been listening to. But he now considers his account "ruined" because it reflects his actual tastes, rather than the tastes he would like his friends to believe he holds.
I think it's interesting how the idea of "taste performance" goes entirely against the spirit of the social networks to which it applies. I remember reading in a New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg that Zuckerberg found concerns about privacy on Facebook laughable, because he didn't understand why anyone would use a social network with a self-filter.
There's an opposite side to this as well, which is that we can easily filter out anything we don't want to take in. When Cass Sunstein wrote about this idea in this article, he had a somewhat more cerebral point in mind - that being exposed to new viewpoints is vital to the democratic system - but the argument can be applied to people's personal lives as well. If our social networking profiles reflect only what we like about ourselves, and our entertainment and news feeds only tells us what we already want to hear, we're completely free of challenge or criticism.
If we build echo chambers for ourselves online, how are we supposed to mature?
Fascinating post, Andrew. I think all of us to some degree "self-filter" the information we share about ourselves through social media. In RE: your friend with the Last.fm account, was he concerned that his actual tastes were too mainstream, too eclectic or incoherent, or too "out there"? I wonder where he'd fit into the typography drawn up by Liu, the author of the article we read on "taste performances:?
ReplyDeleteHe started letting it post all his Korean pop music, which as you can imagine looks rather unusual next to his usually "refined" taste. When I told him he shouldn't be ashamed of it he said "but I'm not the kind of person that listens to K-pop," contradicting the obvious evidence to the contrary.
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