People have different tastes. Based on the movie “Pineapple Express, which I watched this weekend, you could make the argument they have no taste at all.
Let me give you an example of the kind of questionable taste to which I refer.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine threw a bachelor party in a downtown Manhattan hotel. It was standard bachelor party fare: strippers, cigars, alcohol and loud music. Three quarters of the way through the party, the door opens and in come seven dwarves, all wearing backpacks. They politely enquire as to where the changing rooms are and dutifully make their way there.
I have to tell you, at this point, I feared the worst. I was positive they were there for some kind of perverse, humiliating sexual exercise, aimed at providing us spoilt yuppies with a cheap laugh, but I couldn’t be sure what. All I knew was that it would be twisted and that I would come out of it feeling like I needed a long, hot shower.
The truth was, in fact, far worse.
When they emerged from the changing rooms, six of them were wearing a white PVC bodysuit that wrapped around their heads. The seventh dwarf was wearing a black PVC bodysuit with a handle on the back. They ambled toward the main hall, where the floors had now been coated with some kind of lubricant, and the six white PVC-clad dwarves began to scatter, while the seventh black PVC-clad dwarf began to do stretching exercises. Then it dawned on me.
Dwarf-bowling.
The six dwarves would run around the hall, while one of the guests would grab the seventh dwarf and slide him across the floor, trying to knock as many down as he could. There was a scoreboard and if you managed to knock down all six dwarves, you were in line for some kind of prize. I know it sounds awful and depraved, but you’ll have to take my word for it that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything funnier.
So the point of this story isn’t to cause you to choke in your coffee and count the number of different ways you can be outraged. The point is to illustrate that in the age of the internet, you can get anything you want, anytime you want it.
That’s what’s so amazing about the internet: it’s almost entirely user-driven. It’s customized for your satisfaction, exposing you only to the content you wish to be exposed to. If you’re not interested in it, you need never Google it and find out that dwarf-bowling can set you back a mere nine hundred dollars a night.
And therein lies the problem and the opportunity, with the World Wide Web.
Let me start with the opportunity. In a perfect world, when all information is freely available, people are free to examine different sides of any issue and make up their own minds. As opposed to the old days when governments controlled the flow of information and could therefore tailor the message to suit their questionable motives.
The democratization of information was supposed to set the world free. So what happened?
The problem is with democracy itself. Firstly, people are stupid and lazy. When you flood them with competing points of view, they either don’t have the mental tools to weigh out the different arguments or they don’t have the attention span to stay with it, until they do. In other words, they lose interest when the answer isn’t simple.
Secondly, as we established a couple of weeks ago, more choice makes people unhappy (it’s called the Paradox of Choice) and can lead some to a state known as Analysis Paralysis; literally, they freeze when they have to make complex decisions.
Thirdly, in the words of Farhad Manjoo, “we live in a post-fact society. This means that the truth has become almost irrelevant by token of the fact that people can’t (or won’t) agree on what it is. What matters isn’t the truth, it’s the number of people who believe it and the number of times they repeat it. Since very few things in the modern world are ‘beyond debate,’ everything else is reduced to a point of view. It then becomes a game of who is better at spreading their point of view.
Fourthly, people gravitate toward opinions that mirror their own. So if you’re a conservative, you’ll rarely challenge yourself with counter points of view, except to reinforce your own beliefs that the other side is nothing more than a lunatic fringe. Tradition, faith, groupthink, culture and prejudice play a greater part in people’s choices and views than rational, balanced thought.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, while people have more choices than they ever dreamed of, they’re also becoming more isolated. Simply because they don’t have to spend time with anyone else: they each have their own computers, their own DVD and MP3 players and they can even choose when to watch what, on TV. The world has suddenly become customized to cater to their individual tastes no matter how obscure or bizarre these tastes might be.
Dwarf bowling anyone? I have to warn you, I’m getting really good at it.
Mohammed Nassarwas kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble upon his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him. Feel free to email him at [email protected].
