Myopia

There's a fiction that if I know about it, if I'm aware of it, everybody is. Furthermore, if for some reason you're not, you're an out of it nerd who's got no knowledge of popular culture.

But it don't really happen that way at all.

I keep receiving e-mail that Ferguson was featured in the mailer's Twitter feed or on their Facebook page. The assumption is therefore everybody knows about it. But nothing could be further from the truth, which is we all see different stuff on our feeds, if we're paying attention at all.

Yes, despite all the Wall Street hype, most people don't pay attention to Twitter. Oh, they might have an account, they might have signed up when it was the rage, a few years back, but they never check it out. So not only are they unaware of what's going on there, everybody on Twitter follows different people, so they're subjected to different information. I was right on it with the Tony Stewart accident, I saw Nathan Hubbard's tweet about it. But the only tweets about Ferguson in my feed came from Michael Moore.

Yup, we all get different information from different people. We live in a Tower of Babel society, has been that way since the twenty first century, when the Internet took hold, but no one wants to admit it, because that would mean their reach is tiny and that they don't have their finger on the pulse.

But there is no pulse. That's the point. When there were three networks everybody knew about "Laugh-In," if you didn't watch, you were a social pariah.

Ditto with MTV. If you were unaware of Culture Club you had no eyes. That's what built the channel, everybody imploring their cable provider to add it so they wouldn't be left out.

And today we don't want to be left out on a grand scale, we want a broadband connection and a smartphone, but what appears on these devices...is usually completely different from what appears on someone else's.

This is a huge problem in music. Where people who follow the hits believe everybody does. Most of America is unaware of Jay Z's hits, never mind Iggy Azalea's. The world they live in is an echo chamber, which one can easily avoid.

As are the niches known as Americana and Active Rock... You think your favorite acts are impacting the general culture, that they matter, that most people give a damn, but they don't.

And tastemaker publications are operating on an old paradigm, that they're gatekeepers, and they anoint the hits. But if your album is reviewed in the "New York Times" be sure to show your mother, because almost no one else gives a damn. Same deal with a late night television appearance. Hell, check the ratings, and the statistics, that's DVR hour, most people with the set on are watching recordings, we save Fallon and Kimmel, et al, for highlights the next day online, if we bother to follow them all.

Sure, there are phenomena, like "Gangnam Style," but now more than any time in our lifetimes, we live in a society where we consume different culture, hell, we oftentimes even eat different food! That's been a recent story, the upper classes consume stuff the lower have never heard of.

So come down off your throne, and realize what is important to you is probably not to someone else. If you think you're better than someone else because you know something they don't, are aware of a record they aren't, then you're living in a twentieth century world, it's you who are out of it

But what is end game? A complete Balkanization of America? To the point where we all speak different languages?

That's possible. Hell, it's hard to go to dinner and find points of communication...

But the truth is we're all yearning for central repositories of information where we can find out what is not only important, but what is the consensus.

This is Twitter's number one problem...WHO DO I FOLLOW?

And they're not doing a good job of telling us, because Twitter is populated by techies, not liberal arts majors, they understand numbers, but not concepts.

And if Facebook showed everybody the same thing, they'd squeeze out the small advertisers. Meanwhile, isn't that the bitch, that you can't reach as many people on Facebook as you used to, without spending zillions of dollars?

And dollars are more important than information in today's society, that's what we all cotton to. Jay Z got five million dollars from Samsung, it doesn't matter whether anybody listened to the music he was promoting, never mind remember it.

It's like business is our national sport. Forget baseball, so antiquated and so slow that only oldsters truly care. But now the diamond fanatics will be e-mailing I'm wrong, that their ten year old is a diehard fan!

And there you've got the problem in a nutshell. Your anecdotal evidence cannot be spread to the masses, it just doesn't fly. Check baseball ratings, they're anemic.

As are most music sales.

Because most people are just not paying attention. And this is bad for society at large.

Yes, it's great we're disconnected from the old intermediaries, the old filters that decided what was a hit. And it's great that the only news that happens is not in the newspaper and on TV. But having destroyed the old model, what is the new, chaos?

If the music industry had a clue, which it doesn't, it'd post a weekly list of what America needs to check out, crossing all genres. Just like the old "Give The Gift Of Music" campaign. The key would be to build hits which benefited all of us. But no one in the industry can see this, that there's mayhem in the marketplace.

And the old news outlets are operating on old models, if they're operating at all.

And the Internet news outlets believe in clicks, because after all it's about money.

And I'm stuck here in the middle with you. With tons of information and little time, wondering where to start.


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