The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste

The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of reality, of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvi... See more

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

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Hyperconnectivity in the cultural realm promises abundance, decommodification and democratization. Everyone has at their fingertips an infinitely rich and varieduniverse of cultural products. New cultural forms and innovative practices have proliferated. Much digital culture is freely shared rather than bought and sold. And ever-expanding circles o

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