I find these words extremely thought-provoking:
“i don’t want recommendations. i want abstract adventures. (and making friends is a by-product of being on the same mission.)”
They come from Martin Lindner’s fine post on two Web-enabled music services, Pandora and LastFM. My immediate reaction is that the divide between recommendations and abstract adventures may define certain essential cognitive differences I’ve run across (and experienced) in my own Life With People. Lindner’s words also heighten my awareness of two ways of trying to ignite curiosity and intellectual passion in students. I’ve never taught a class that didn’t have students on both sides of that desire dichotomy.
Bryan Alexander’s frame for considering these issues not only alerted me to Lindner’s original blog, but puts many facets of this absorbing thought-experiment on glittering display, with even more links to delight the mind’s eye. As is his wont. He’s absolutely right about the fine post from Steve Krause, for example. The whole nature vs. nurture paradigm, which I once altered into creature vs. culture (riffing on Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” q.v.), has tremendous ramifications for the entire social software enterprise, not to mention education (is there a more powerful form of social software?), and I admire Krause for the particularity and fairness of his observation, matched with his wisdom that nature and nurture each has its role to play.
Music’s Duell, indeed.
Last.FM and Pandora both have their attractions– Pandora’s intrinsic downside is precisely what makes it different– it relies on an abstraction of what the music in question is. So: want more of the same? Use a music engine like Pandora. Want juxtapositions and associations that make me suspect, for instance, that many Tom Waits fans will also appreciate early Crash Test Dummies and Aimee Mann (something that Pandora will never be able to predict), use Last.FM. Sometimes we want predictability and intrinsic similarity, sometimes we want unpredictability and conceptual (or other) associations…
Heck, it’s the web. Why not use both? Seems a shame to choose but one. Why apply the reductionist labels to ourselves?
I want both for sure, but I wonder if people don’t have a preference, something like handedness … a way we most eagerly await the world’s yielding to our cognition of it. (Tip of the hat to Philip Sidney here.)