Closed Systems and Crowdsourced Culture
I can now fund any movie I want made through Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. I can also set up screenings for any movie I want to see, by using OpenIndie, Gathr and Tugg. I can aggregate the news I want using gazillions of apps and plug-ins. I can in fact, live in a cultural world entirely decided upon by me. Or not just me, but me and the people who think and act like I do.
This is a pretty nice gated community. It means that until Anthony Kaufman wrote an article about it, I had no idea that some anti-abortion film was number 8 at the box office last week. I missed it altogether, because I don’t run with that crowd or listen to what they do, unless it accidentally intrudes into my world, such as when my friends start tweeting about something going on with #Komen.
I’m no anti-technology, anti-social network, can’t we have back the old system-kind-of-guy, but it seems to me this takes the whole losing of a common culture problem much further. You know – it used to be we could all gather ‘round the water cooler and talk Happy Days, or even Seinfeld, or heck…even Mad Men. This gave us some common culture to share, and arguably some commonness in our lives.
Now, however, I can do this just with my cultural-clones. I wouldn’t think this was such a bad thing, but then again….several years back, many churches started building mega-centers where they could all worship, buy coffee, shop, mingle and not be influenced by the outside world. I don’t think we’d argue that this is not exactly a mind-opening way to live. We see this with many conservative groups (from all religions), and I think we can generally agree it doesn’t make for the best situation for anyone. It’s a closed system – self-referential to the extreme, and this creates not just extremism but shitty culture.
It’s no better applied to other arenas – if I only get the liberal-minded films which I pay for on Kickstarter, Gathr to my hometown and spread to my network of like-minded individuals, all of culture will suffer as a result. In theory, all of these new tools are making things more open, but I worry about the self-referring loop syndrome of the closed system we’re building. Am I the only one?
Then again, I’m probably missing a lot of right-wing crazy shit I don’t need in my life….crowdsource on dudes.
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