Last.fm and the Fear of Accidental Exposure

I enjoy Last.fm a great deal. That’s less, I think, for its admittedly rather limited utility to me at this point, and more for its set-it-up-and-forget-about-it aspect. There’s a silent promise that it is taking note of what I’m listening to, and that at some point in the future this information may be of some use to me. In the meantime it’s all going into the communal pot to help other people.

If you can make your peace with companies storing a great deal of information about you in this way (and if you can’t, I’m afraid that you may not enjoy the rest of your life very much), there is a definite social good that can come of it. By telling Last.fm what I listen to — what the pathways of my taste are — I am contributing to someone else’s enjoyment. Indeed, the more people like me share their listening tastes with Last.fm, the higher the chance that it will allow me to discover something genuinely new which thrills and excites.

(There is also, of course, the danger that we travel in packs and never discover anything new outside our particular cultural envelope, a trend which Oliver Burkeman discusses in his latest Guardian column.)

There is at least one more immediate benefit to society, however, and it’s one that at first blush seems horrifying. It dispenses with the guilty pleasure — the ability to listen to a track, watch a movie, or enjoy a book without the knowledge of others.

The guilty pleasure allows you to maintain a distance between your carefully constructed public identity (perhaps the face you show to friends alone; perhaps the profile you showcase in front of some wider public) and the things you enjoy by ’slumming it’. I’m certain that much of the work of cultural discovery — finding unknown artists or writers, chancing upon sounds that refresh popular music — happens by accident or by exposure to works under the liberating cover of anonymity.

But it’s also an inhibitor of cultural development, building walls around blocks of content believed to be discreet and in some way — usually unrelated to their artistic merits — antagonistic to one another. One doesn’t listen to Tosca and Tosca side-by-side.

When I picked up Kylie’s Fever a few years ago and listened to it obsessively for a weekend, a friend emailed to make the observation, with a great deal of mockery, that it didn’t exactly fit with the avant-garde jazz and austere IDM that I had been listening to for the preceding few weeks. Had my critical faculties been replaced by those of a thirteen year-old?

Well, it’s no good being ashamed about these things any more. Shame requires the ability to hide, and Last.fm doesn’t let you do that at all. The exercise of snobbery as a substitute for critical faculty is going to become very much harder, because everybody’s cultural preferences — their true preferences — are that much more visible. We’re one step closer to the democratization of taste.

So here’s a challenge: if you’re a music critic, why not make your Last.fm profile public for all to see?

The Social Web’s Evolving Social Contract

When tech companies handed their keys to their creditors at the end of the boom in 2000, some left behind heaps of customer records in filing cabinets and on harddrives . The accountants turned out the lights. The keepers of those files, network and account managers, had long been fired. That data went to the dumpsters or was scavenged by furniture trolls.

Fast forward to the current recession. Sure companies will go bankrupt. Some may be equally negligent guarding your personal information, but more likely your credit card number, address, and content will be hoovered-up by some larger acquiring company. The content created at Pownce is now Six Apart’s responsibility. The info at Napster is being sucked into the databases of Best Buy — yes the Napster! Elsewhere, Google Notebooks are going dark.

The powerless, to compensate for their condition, often feel the need to strike out. That is not what this is. It’s not alarmist. It’s not a call for an internet user’s bill-of-rights. It is just an observation that on the second go-around with web-company closures, the implied social contract that exists in cities — where it is OK to have cars drive by you at highspeed and have you not fear for your life — is now in effect with data and personal information on the net.