What's lost when everything's curated
With our playlists on our phones and Sirius in the car, what joys do we never encounter? Credit: Getty Images / kelly bowden
It was the summer of 1981. We were in the middle of a cross-country camping and hiking road trip, somewhere in the Southwest in one of its vast expanses of beautiful desolation, and there was nothing on the radio.
And by nothing I mean nothing. The antenna on our little Mazda was not the best, for sure, but no matter how carefully we turned the dial all we heard was static. The miles passed, and then, a voice.
It was kind of folksy and indisputably friendly, the voice of a man of indeterminate age, and he was reading a list of items that someone in some town somewhere was selling at a yard sale. With the prices. The items were as you would expect — used kitchenware, old tools, some clothes, a lot of miscellaneous this and that — and they cost a dollar, a quarter, 50 cents. I remember something going for a dime. It was serious and hilarious, utterly banal and totally enthralling.
We listened as he recited the contents of several yard sales, half-joking that we should stop at one while wondering what the rest of the station's programming was like. And the miles flew by.
This summer, we made a similar road trip with different contours, out to Utah and back, making a large oval across our country, and we encountered similar areas devoid of radio signals. Or so we surmised. We didn't actually know because now we have playlists on our phones and Sirius in the car. We can listen to whatever kind of music we want whenever we want it. And it was bliss. The Boss. Cool jazz. Indie rock. Broadway tunes.
For all the delight that brought, it also left a pang. It's great to have this kind of custom comfort at our fingertips, but when we have such a level of control are we losing some of the precious serendipity of life?
Are our lives poorer when we don't give ourselves an opportunity to feel the frisson of finding a flea market on the airwaves? Or the thrill of hunkering down in a motel in Montrose, Colorado, and locating a station in Dallas broadcasting baseball's All-Star Game? Or, as my younger self put it in my diary of that 1981 trip after a day spent crossing Kansas with its paucity of radio stations, the joy of discovering "a real good rock station outside Oklahoma City." Many was the trip we kept fiddling with the dial before happily stumbling on Paul Harvey telling us the rest of the story.
But this isn't just an exercise in nostalgia, or a lament for memories we'll never form. And it's not just about the music.
The playlists we curate and the radio stations and satellite channels to which we gravitate are yet another troubling symptom of the time in which we live, a time in which we prefer to hear only what we want to hear, and can guarantee that happens.
That's true of the music we enjoy and the news we digest, the entertainment we consume and the analysis we absorb. It's all capable of being curated, so that's what we do. And in much the same way with much the same level of organization, we consciously choose with whom we congregate — electronically and in real life.
Perhaps those proclivities are natural in confusing times like these. But having and exercising that level of choice increasingly seems to be to our disadvantage. It walls us off from real experiences, from the unexpected, from the surprising, from something that might force us to rethink our positions and recalibrate our tendencies.
Modern life can be like a wall of static. We should listen carefully for all the signals that break through.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
