6/18/17
Sunday
Noon
Too Hot
Generally speaking, one can determine the taste of a generation. Things like "Top XX Charts" for music or Academy Awards for TV shows and movies exist to help people understand the general consensus of the likes and dislikes in media of a certain group of people at a certain time.
Regarding this is the growing accessibility to creating new media. Platforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, and smaller electronic devices like the GoPro* and iPhone make picture-taking, video-shooting, and music-recording available almost literally at the push of a button. Because of this, there seems to be a surge in how much media is being created, as though the flood gates of creation have been swung open by the hands of technology. Even the stereotype of the Soundcloud rapper--a young teen trying to rap about his upper-middle class lifestyle through the medium of Garageband and Soundcloud--has formed from this generation of new creation.
One problem that can stem from this flood of new media is how it affects consumption. How could taste possibly be defined for a generation with this much new music in the clouds? Moreover, since new music is being created, genres are sonically propelling themselves further and further away from one another, thereby partitioning the music-listening population into more niche genres of music. In this way, there is no unifying "pop" sound.
One answer to this question is to say that there never was. Perhaps music was always this different, and people stuck to each other based on their taste, and there are different lineages of influence in genres that have persisted to today. Then, the explanation for the Balkanization of genre nowadays can be explained in the same way as how people have different tastes.
Another answer can be found, though. Consider the career of Herman Melville, American author famous for writing the seminal Moby Dick. Throughout his life, Melville only saw mild success; his writings did not sell very well. Even before his death in 1891, Melville witnessed the printing of his own books being halted in 1876 because of their disastrous sales. Despite all this, Melville is now considered one of the greatest authors of all time, having enormous influence on modern literature. What this means is that somebody (or some group of people) found Melville's Moby Dick somewhere along the way and decided that it was a good book. This person decided to read this book (which is not a trivial task) and decided to tell people about it. It is this kind of person that is the subject of this post.
The unsung hero of media is the finder, the active consumer. Especially in an age so saturated with media and information, we need these people to find the gems among the piles. The active consumer is what forms trends and tastes, independent of the influence of advertisement or radio endorsements. The band Neutral Milk Hotel, for instance, did not reach such critical acclaim until many years after the release of their sophomore album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Needless to say, there was no advertising uprising for the album or the band. Instead, it was the work of active consumers and critics actively listening to the forgotten, thus leaving us with an album that was definitive in the indie genre.
In media, we give much credit to the creator, and rightly so. The creators are the ones employing their knowledge and skill to produce something to enjoy, or at least something to think about. However, we mustn't forget the active consumer who shares and filters through the waves of new media. I end with this: if an amazing song is released in the woods, but there are no people around to hear it, is the song amazing?
Note: As music is the form of media with which I am the most familiar, I will mostly discuss the state of the music industry (if it can be even called such). I am fairly certain many of the topics I will touch upon apply to other forms of media, such as film, photography, even writing. Hell, I'm writing an amateur blog on a Google-endorsed, free platform.
*The GoPro can almost be considered obsolete at this point, but that should only further illustrate the acceleration of technology.
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