As a part of my introduction to blogging, I purposely amped up the amount of ‘tracking’ applications I use on the Internet. I am now using Digg, Hype Machine, and Last.fm, and I have to say I feel even more out of it than when I started. Though I understand the purpose of these applications from a more removed perspective, I can’t help but feel that I am creating an artificial representation of my media consumption by using these sites.
Last.fm, for instance, is able to ‘scrobble’ the music that I listen to on my iTunes, on my computer. The application cannot scrobble my iPod tracks, what I play in my car, or how much I listen to NPR. Even iTunes’ ‘Most Recently Played’ application cannot log tracks I listen to multiple times, and so no one really knows how much I listened to “Drivin’ on 9” in the past 24 hours, that The Woods is in my car, and I listen to ‘Morning Edition’ for about 20 minutes each day.
Hype Machine has the uncanny ability to accurately reflect that I have specifically searched for and selected the ‘heart’ icon for specific tracks posted on blogs. This means I like the tracks. Isn’t that why I searched for them in the first place? While I can browse through the most popular blog posts and also view what my friends ‘heart,’ I’ve found that the site really just provides you answers to questions you already knew.
Digg allows me to share favorite news stories and web features with family, friends, and intimate strangers with whom I share the site. I have been digging articles aplenty these past few weeks, but mostly from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Salon.com, places everyone knows I visit anyway. Further, Digg is not able to distinguish from articles you ‘digg’ versus articles you ‘abhor’,’ but simply wish to highlight for the horror of it all. While I can expect my family and friends (none of whom who monitor my activities on Digg) to distinguish the two, unsuspecting strangers on the web have no clue that I really think that Huckabee talking to God is a load of horseshit. For the record, I do.
So what I can’t figure out about these sites is if they are intended to track the regression or your habits, or help you to expand by emulating what other peoples’ trends are indicating? Because if I am reading/listening/digging/scrobbling the same things everyday, and you start reading/listening to what I’m Digging/scrobbling, then as far as I can tell you’re just making my bad habits yours, and we really aren’t getting anywhere in the name of progress. If you find that I’ve selected 20 Sleater-Kinney songs on Hype Machine and already knew I liked Sleater-Kinney, that all you really get out of it as an observer is that I still have a swift trigger finger.
In my album cue this week was Ani Difranco’s Not So Soft, an album I played the heck out of in high school. Though it’s been on my iTunes since I bought this computer in 2005, I apparently haven’t played a track from this album since then. It just didn’t seem right to me that none of that history is reflected in any of the applications I use.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that these sites are completely useless, and I do enjoy seeing what my friends like. I just thought that the whole point of all of this was to expand our horizons. and reflect our tastes If anything, my introduction to these sites has limited my exposure to certain music/news/cultural events, if only because I feel inclined to ‘pad’ my early use to create a foundation composed of my interest. (Not to mention the duality of rejecting ‘Big Brother’ surveillance in favor of self-selected surveillance – I suppose it’s not evil so long as you can manipulate it to present a better version of yourself.)
And you know what? That’s exactly what I don’t like about the sites – it is so hard to project an accurate image of how I use the Internet/listen to music daily. While these tools are easy to manipulate, I find it incredibly frustrating that I can’t manipulate them to tell the truth. So why do you use these sites? What do you personally gain from digging articles and scrobbling your music? Who has turned you on to what based on these tracking sites, and have you found your tastes to change since tuning in to tracking?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Poor Lauren. She's plung strugged out. ;-)
As usual you pose some really interesting questions. And, as usual, I feel like you may be looking for some sort of authenticity or authentic experience that simply isn't there. And maybe can't even be represented online.
I love what you say about trading one type of surveillance for another, more carefully constructed, one. A sort of surveillance that isn't about being watched per se, but about performing an online identity. I think books could be written about this.
To answer your questions, I don't scrobb. I only Digg when I want to market my blog entries or a friend's. I recently stumbled across Hype Machine through Lifehacker.com and I have found it to be an effective way to communicate via music. I'm watching your hypelist and enjoy listening to music that I wouldn't otherwise hear. Plus, our hard drive with ALL our music on it just went kaput. So, it's a way for me to still listen to music while I'm at the computer.
Oh, and a service you didn't mention: I love del.icio.us! At least as much for its practical application of freeing my bookmarks from a single computer, as for it's "social" aspects.
I think you last question about whether my tastes have changed since tracking all this information strikes close to the heart of the matter. I would have to say no. And that's the curiosu thing. The opportunity to expand our tastes and our understanding of each other is stymied by our desire to gather more and more of what we already like.
Post a Comment