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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?'"
I caught myself watching MTV's "Wanna come in" few minutes ago and gave myself a slap.
Res publica non dominetur
FRom TFA:
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.
I think that Boston and Hanson are two totally separate things. Boston can be filed quickly under Classic Rock, but any god fearing man who listens to hanson even behind closed doors, in my book, might need a psychiatric evalutation.
If by "guilty pleasures" you mean jacking it to man-on-man pornos while refreshing slashdot in another tab, well ALL ABOARD THE SLASHDOT EXPRESS!
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.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
yes, it's revolutionized the spread of information, BUT
BUT! it's become the greatest enabler of pleasures ever invented.
horrible.
everybody get back to your miserable farmwork!
True enough..... I caught myself tapping my toes to Nickleback's "Savin' Me" until I saw....
BSG Season 3 promo
Some blogger far more witty than I commented that "The only show that could make them sound -good-". That's now my excuse. Yes, that's it.
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...
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I think they put it best in Clerks 2:
"What's the point of having an internet connection if you're not using it to look up weird fucked up pictures of dirty sex you'd never have yourself?"
Summation 2
'Indulgence is just a click away, and nobody needs to know, except you and some server somewhere.'
;)
Tell that to those AOL users.
Argh.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the title of this article was pornography, of the general and more dubious types. I was surprised to find no mention in the article. Under the same context as the music references in the article, is there a danger in making stuff like child pornography and beastiality readily available to anyone who knows where to look? Or does that fall into the "they were fucked up to begin with" category that we already apply to subjects such as violence in videogames?
A B A C A B B
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.
Oh no... it's the future.
(Family Guy reference in case you didn't know)
Peter Griffin - If you could have any woman in the world, who would it be?
Quagmire - Taylor Hanson.
Joe Swanson - Taylor Hanson is a guy.
[Pause]
Quagmire - [Laughs] You guys are yankin' me. "Hey, let's put one over on old Quagmire."
Peter - No, he's actually a guy, Quagmire.
Quagmire - What? That's insane. That's impossible.
[Pause]
Quagmire - Oh god. Oh my god. I've got all these magazines. Oh god.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You wouldn't want anyone to know if you're into this.
Now excuse me while I wipe my cache of slashdot pages and cookies, don't want my friends finding out...
*cries*
Now that doesn't mean that I haven't let a friend of mine live down that he once said he really liked Hanson.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Your guilty pleasures are a subpoena away from being public knowledge.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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!
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The new defense for the evils of all mankind:
"The internet made me do it."
Guess this means the devil can resume his duties as President of the United States now.
8==8 Bones 8==8
The internet is for porn!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eMs_OjoBRcY
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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.
What is this "tape" you speak of?
He's posting from 1986.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The article is about how the internet enables "guilty pleasures". I believe the author is using the term "pop music" as a euphemism for porn.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Seriously, how much of a wuss are you that you can't fess up to what you listen to, or silly sites you go to? My iTunes top 25 is probably embarassing as hell, but I don't care.
Now, if TFA was focused on ministers that surf hotjapanesetenticlerape.co.jp every night, that would be a different story.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
Why should we always have to be so fake? It's insane. If we can't even admit to our friends what music we listen to, I think there's something wrong that has nothing to do with the internet being involved or not.
Example from my own life: Most of my friends listen to metal, some of them to old-school hip hop, with random bits of jazz, world music and electronica thrown in in some cases. Basically things which don't get in the mainstream charts all that much (or only in watered down form), and carry certain associations of snobbism with them. Now, although I enjoy most of these styles of music myself and listen to them once in a while, I also listen to lots of stuff a lot of people would automatically turn their nose up at because they'd consider it so extremely mainstream. For example, I'm a reasonably big fan of Phil Collins.
But tell me - why should I be hiding that? When I like something, I like something. Why should I be having hour-long conversations about the virtues of metal and jazz when I'm among people and only be listening to my copy of Face Value secretly?
All my friends are roughly aware of what music I listen to, the bits they approve of as well as the bits they don't. And you know what? Although they largely detest Phil Collins, I still get respect from them, just for being the person I am, doing the things I do, saying the things I say, treating people the way I do. MY FRIENDS JUDGE ME ON THE BASIS OF WHAT SORT OF PERSON I AM, AND NOT ON THE BASIS OF HOW HIP I AM AND HOW ALTERNATIVE THE MUSIC I LISTEN TO IS.
That doesn't just go for friends - I don't try to hide myself before people I've only just met, either. Because frankly, people that would only be interested in me as a person if I listened to The Mars Volta but not if I listen to Genesis are not the sort of people I want to be around.
End of rant.
Basilisk Digital
I show off my guilty pleasures. There's nothing funner than driving down around the mall looking for a parking space blasting "Mmmmm Bop" or "Safety Dance" as loud as possible. All the lil "I'm so emo. I'm going to go buy some black clothes" teenagers just look at you like WTF? It's hilarious.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
If that's the most disturbing thing that happens in your local theater's men's room, then things have really changed since I last went to the movies.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I don't care who knows. That was incredible. Camp, yes, but beautiful for what it was. I loved those dancing icons in the background. Stil, it was missing something, or it was too long. It started off good, but it needs to turn it up to 11 to give it that extra kick. Let me know if you find any more of those.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.