NP: Stereophonics, Language. Sex. Violence. Other?

There's a deeper point to the Grokster musing from the other day, one that's also broader than just the musical implications. On the one hand, there's the difference between the individual and the shared experience. With regard to entertainment business models, the important thing is to recognize that they need to be treated differently.

However, on the sociological scale, it gets trickier. As a culture, we seem to be swinging hard toward the individual experience and away from the shared. This is part of that larger trend of people tending to isolate themselves by choice, whether that's watching movies at home or building bigger houses that naturally insulate us from actually talking to our neighbors.

What strikes me as a bit more sinister is a tendency toward a middle state that could be described as social factionalization. More and more, people seem to be surrounding themselves with a core group of the like-minded, and then not venturing outside that circle. Think gated communities. Or neo-conservatives. Or the Daily Kos community.

All of this, to me, makes Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0 and it's notion of limiting your search results to sites bookmarked by a "trusted community of contacts" more than a little troubling. While there are certainly noble goals behind this sort of networking, it seems like it would be too easily perverted into yet another way to filter out anything that might actually challenge our beliefs as individuals.

At this point, I don't know if this is just rampant pessimism, or some real sort of Spidey-sense tingling, but I look at this techie announcement and see a lot of potential for bad things. I might just be hypersensitive to the onesidedness of nearly everything these days.