The Internet — Enabler of Guilty Pleasures

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "'Sure, the Internet has revolutionized the spread of information and all that high-minded stuff, but its combination of reach and anonymity also makes it the greatest enabler of guilty pleasures ever invented,' Jason Fry writes in the Wall Street Journal. 'Indulgence is just a click away, and nobody needs to know, except you and some server somewhere.' For example: Fry, a rock snob, has a double secret life as a pop-music fan (secret no more, of course). From the article: 'If your secret love of "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)" has caused it to creep into your iTunes list of 25 most-played songs, a simple right-click will let you reset the play count. If you want to hear Fall Out Boy, but would rather do so in secret, you can command Last.fm to ignore that the song was played — or delete it from your charts if you forget. Viewed from the standpoint of cool logic, this behavior is at least mildly insane. But who needs things that remind us of who we really are, as opposed to how we want others to see us — or how we'd like to see ourselves?'"

Comments

Wasn't it easier to do these things decades ago?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

How does any of the write-up make sense? If I wanted to listen to New Kids on the Block without letting my Metallica friends know, I'd just go out and buy the tape and hide it in a different place than my regular tapes. The only person who'd know is me and the record store guy, and he cares less than some server somewhere since he probably doesn't keep records of every customer and every tape they bought. Whereas now, who cares if you could reset the play counter? Your friends are still gonna know if you have an N'Sync album on your iTunes because it's all there on the list.

Not just "mildly" insane

[blueZ3]

First off, people who care that much about what others think about their taste in music (or food, clothes, whatever) are in need of serious psychological help. If you don't have the self-confidence to like what you like, and the hell with the rest of the world, you are (in my book) suffering the deepest kind of herd mentality that deserves disdain at every level.

But more to the point, who in the world has other people looking at their iTunes playlist? If someone is looking at my PC and browsing my iTunes library, I suspect that they probably know me well enough to know of my love of 50's car songs (Jan and Dean & The Beach Boys) and penchant for listening to Weird Al's Starwars songs.

I have to ask what type of paranoid thinks that the whole world is trying to ferret out their listening habits...

Re:Not just "mildly" insane

[AndersOSU]

Bullshit

Everyone cares what there friends think, it's just that there is a recent trend to cultivate the image that you don't care what people think - but it is still an image, and you are still trying.

Think about it this way, what are the odds that the emo kid shows up to his friends party wearing abercrombie, or the comp sci geek gets a Ryan Seacrest style suit?

The whole world doesn't care (I know I don't), but your friends might raise an eyebrow if they found Justin Timberlake's entire audio career (or something else uncharacteristic) right next to Jan and Dean.

Re:Not just "mildly" insane

[FooAtWFU]

First off, people who care that much about what others think about their taste in music (or food, clothes, whatever) are in need of serious psychological help. If you don't have the self-confidence to like what you like, and the hell with the rest of the world, you are (in my book) suffering the deepest kind of herd mentality that deserves disdain at every level.

Slow down, tiger. To some extent, this sort of behaviour (especially at, say, the high-school-ish age level) is part of a search for belonging, and (some people more so than others) are unfortunate enough to be surrounded by a shallow sort of a society where the price of belonging is to maintain certain superficial things - tastes in music, for instance. Some people, if they were found out to like certain things, would be soundly ridiculed, and possibly alienated. Not everyone has the strength to stand up in the face of social isolation. Some people might already be somewhat ostracized. Do they "deserve disdain at every level" for seeking the approval - or even the begrudging acceptance - of peers? I don't think so. The search for belonging, approval, acceptance... that's a basic human impulse.

I'm not saying that it's spectacularly noble, or healthy, or The Thing To Do, but just... something as vehement as "disdain at every level" is too much.

Now, excuse me Slashdot, pop psychology mode off as I return to listening to Enya...

Re:Not just "mildly" insane

[aussersterne]

The respect of others creates real economic and political benefits that can't simply be written off with a sweep of the "if they don't like me, damn them, I'm me!"

The "herd mentality" doesn't arise from simple moral weakness and the desire to be loved, it arises becuase we are social beings in a social world. You can build rapport with people and get better service, a better chance of being hired for the job, a better deal on your new car, a more beautiful wife...

That rapport consists in large part of sharing likes and dislikes or at the very least not radically contradicting the personal prejudices and preferences of those whose favor you hope to gain.

I'm not saying you should kiss ass always and pretend to love everything the boss loves in order to get a raise. Far from it, I'm more the type to speak my mind and suffer for it later, while watching someone else climb the ladder in my place, sometimes with regret, sometimes not. I don't make a value judgment about that or try to wear it like a badge of honor, my point is to say that the construction of personal cool isn't simply a neurosis that happens in a vacuum, it's a deliberate strategy based on the specific network of social relationships and interaction that surrounds a person, and each person would do better to consider it as such rather than to simply take a position in the "Either you're a member of the herd or you're a rebel!" dichotomy and stake it out like dogma, though of course your position on the "herd mentality" is also another such social marker that will endear you to some and not to others as well.

Re:Not just "mildly" insane

[greg_barton]

He was saying like what you like without shame.

Sure, he said that. He also said that if you don't do that you, "deserve disdain at every level." The purpose of disdain is to apply social pressure to conform to a desired behavior. In other words, "If you don't like what you like without shame, you should be ashamed of yourself." :)

Re:how pop?

[Frymaster]

Given such freedom, hipsters can let their inner dork out for a romp, extolling the virtues of the Arcade Fire by night and retreating to their headphones by day for a Hanson or Boston fix.

and the internet is necessary for this how? waaay back in the days when the bbs ruled the earth you could still listen to dorky music in the privacy of your own home, away from the judgemental eyes of your peers. if anything, the internet makes this sort of clandestine pleasure harder. last.fm, filesharing &c make the music you have and are actually listening to visible (and audible) by a way larger audience.

add to that the semi-permanace of an online life and things get worse. in the internet age, your tastes can leave a near-indellible electronic trail -- poorly thought out blog posts, last.fm entries &c. you used to be able to say that you were into such-and-such band 'before they sold out' or whatever and people would just have to take your word. nowadays you have to have a suitably-dated myspace post to back it up!

pr0n

[Tx]

pr0n, and flaming people as an Anonymous Coward - chief guilty pleasures of most slashdotters (of course I'd never do the latter). In all seriousness though, I'm not sure what the point of that article is. As the author hints at, the "social" aspects of sites like last.fm actually make it harder to keep your musical tastes secret, and we regularly discuss here how all these "social networking" sites in general make information about people more public.

So actually it seems to me that the opposite is true, the internet makes it harder to keep your guilty pleasures secret. Reductio ad absurdum, before the net, sure the guy in the shop might know you bought a Britney album, but the rest of the world would have no chance of finding out. With the net, however, you have to try to hide it.

Fear not upright moral citizen!!!

[Churla]

Our brave US Attorney General is trying to get congress to make ISP's track every website you visit so you can go back to avoiding things you don't want others to know about.

In other news...

[PHAEDRU5]

Your guilty pleasures are a subpoena away from being public knowledge.

The internet lets the stupid out

[rabtech]

The internet also allows people with insane viewpoints to find like-minded nutjobs, with which they can circle jerk about their common opinions all day long and never need to expose themselves to an alternate viewpoint or way of life.

Do you believe we never landed on the moon? Do you think horse-fucking is A-OK? Would you like to find someone to kill (with mutual consent) via erotic asphyxiation?... or worse, do you think sexually abusing little kids is acceptable behavior? No problem! The Internet has a message board or newsgroup just for you, that way you never need to think about your thoughts, actions, or obsessions.

There is no such thing as deviant behavior on the internet!

Welcome to the real world

[Moraelin]

Actually, read some books on anthropology and you'll discover that it's more common and pervasive than you'd think. It's, in fact, so pervasive, that any poll asking people anything about themselves will basically get a bunch of more socially-acceptable lies, rather than the truth.

Actually, let me rephrase that: it's also not about consciously deciding to tell a lie, or actually being paranoid that someone will rummage through your computer. It's that humans have their own ideal of "what I _should_ be like", and from there use selective confirmation to "filter" the real "I" into fitting that ideal. It's not even as much for the benefit of others, as for one's own benefit. People need to believe that they're, basically, better than they really are.

If you will, it's sorta how every good Christian believes that someone else will go to Hell, but noone believes that he'll personally go there. If someone defines himself as a good Christian, he will distort his perception and memories to see himself actually fitting that ideal. He'll remember the time when he did something good and in line with God's commandments, but conveniently forget the times when he did nasty stuff that goes right against those commandments.

And I'm not just picking on Christians there, as the same applies to everyone and everything else. Good citizen, upstanding pillar of the community, patriot, charitable, top-notch computer expert, l33t h4xxx0r, teen rebel, good parent, whatever. If you define yourself as X, you'll distort your perception and memory to see yourself fitting the X ideal more than you actually do.

And, just for your entertainment or enlightenment (whichever you choose), here are some RL examples picked by anthropologists:

E.g., when asked to define themeselves, most members of a tribal community all claimed to be hunters and warriors. In reality, they had in the meantime turned mostly into peaceful agricultors. (Civilization can creep up on someone like that.) Extremely had actually used a weapon in years, or even owned one any more. But their culture was so biased towards hunters/warriors, that everyone basically kept viewing themselves as one even long past the point where it had become a lie.

E.g., a community defined itself as a shiny-happy model of cooperation where people help each other all the time, even help each other build a house and work together in the fields and everything. And everyone would cheefully tell you that they're still like that, and help each other all the time. The only problem is that the last time anyone helped another build a house was IIRC in the 50's, and they weren't helping each other work the fields any more either. But somehow kept believing that they do.

E.g., during a crisis where meat prices went up, they polled the people in some communities about what will they do. And everyone said basically "screw this, I'm not paying this much. I'll eat less meat until prices come back down to normal." The problem? According to both the sales data _and_ sifting through people's thrash to see what packaging they're throwing away (yes, they actually did that), people were buying _more_ meat than before. Go figure.

It may seem illogical to you (and maybe even is), but that's what humans do and how human society functions. In other words, welcome to the real world.

Re:There's a bigger discussion to be had here

[Kadin2048]

I was surprised as well that they declined to mention those ... baser ... guilty pleasures, which we all know the Internet is just so accomadating of.

As to the "dirty porn" question, my personal feeling is that the cost to society of censoring certain types of content are greater than the questionable benefits of not having it out there. I've never seen any really good analysis showing (with some proof of causation, not just corellation) that the availiability of internet porn has caused more real-world crime; lacking that proof I think that there's no legitimate mandate for censorship of any kind.

Personally, if I was the one in charge of regulating smut, I'd probably start by looking at pornography that promotes or exemplifies unsafe sex practices in terms of STD risk, since I have to believe that the effects of that are probably greater than the small number of individuals who are actually driven to commit crime because of porn (and wouldn't have done something anyway in its absence).

I think deviant individuals will probably always seek out whatever is taboo in their society; if it was one where porn wasn't allowed, they'd be ogling the Sears catalog. I see no reason why limiting access to particular media really changes an individual's tendency towards antisocial behavior.

Re:There's a bigger discussion to be had here

[radtea]

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the title of this article was pornography, of the general and more dubious types.

The biggest effect of the 'Net hasn't been as an enabler of guilty pleasures, but as a means for the rest of us to know just how weird we all are.

There were a number of mid-20th-century artistic movements, like the Dadaists, that claimed to be exposing the absurdity, hypocrisy, and perversity of the bourgois, but none of them came close to the sort of thing you can find apparently ordinary people doing on the 'Net. The imagination of the writers and artists fell far, far short of the reality.

For example, type "* fetish" into Google, where * is any word, and you'll find the most remarkable array of strangeness. Presumably all of this has been going on since time immemorial, but now anyone can find out about it. I just tried it for "slashdot fetish" and got a hit on a site that defined it as "the desire to be publicly flogged for multiple posts of a news item." How guilty a pleasure is that?

Re:There's a bigger discussion to be had here

[Anonymous Coward]

is there a danger in making stuff like child pornography and beastiality readily available to anyone who knows where to look?

Of course! But that's not the real issue - Where do you put the limit of censorship in a world where different cultures have vastly different opinions of what's cosher. US: Basically anything, so long as it's not underage (18 years). In Denmark that limit is 15 years, and I'll bet there's somewhere else where the limit is lower. Or how about all the countries where homosexuality, BDSM, or other sexual practices have been outlawed for hundreds, or even thousands of years? How can you solve something like that? Least common denominator? Sorry, that'll just create an underground market where the limits are even more blurred.

Consider also the illogical way sex vs. violence is treated. So maybe you don't like your kids walking in on you f*ing your wife's brains out, but you sure as hell don't want them seeing another person getting blown up, run over, shot, stabbed, or anything similar. So could someone please explain why even boobs, which everyone has seen from age 0, knock the rating up to 18 years, while Tom and Jerry are legal for all ages, and drive-by shootings are OK at 13? WTF is wrong here?

(Posting as AC to avoid visits from paranoid "think of the children" delusionals. This is one topic where one cannot possibly have a rational discussion nowadays, and that probably hurts more than it helps.)