When I was growing up, from 2nd grade to 4th grade, I attended a private school in Addison. We lived in Allen, my dad worked in Downtown Dallas at the time, and he would drive me to school every day on his way to work. We had a lot of time in the car.
Dad had some CDs in the 6-loader, but we mostly listened to the radio. This was before podcasts and before audiobooks. Well, they had audiobooks, but they were on CDs or cassette tape. How cumbersome.
To this day many say it’s a bit of a miracle that Radio has survived. That it’s still going. It was pegged dead decades ago. If I can listen to any talk-show (podcast), any book (Audible), or any song in history (streaming) any time I want, then what do I need the radio for?
Yet the radio is still hitting our car antennae. How? I’ll tell you how: Randomness. The good kind of randomness, mind you. Even today I often prefer the radio over my smartphone, certainly when it comes to music. Call me a Luddite, but the randomness of the radio still appeals to me.
Now I’m not naïve enough to think that what is played to me on the radio is not also curated, like a Spotify playlist, by studio execs who think I might like such-and-such song or artist.
But here’s the main difference: Spotify is tracking me. The radio, so far, is not. At least not me personally. It is not feeding me recommendations, like Spotify might. “Here,” the Spotify A.I. says, “because you liked ‘Song in My Head’ by Madison Cunningham, you might also like ‘Bones’ by Soccer Mommy.” (Yes and yes, by the way.)
The “here’s a song you might like, because you liked X” is not the same as turning the dial, without being tracked, to happen upon a beautiful song that never in a thousand years would have been recommended to me in that moment. There’s still a thrill, however small, in that randomness.
A chance to track without being tracked.
Let me give you another example of this pleasant Luddite randomness: reading a newspaper. Accent on the paper, the actual printed black and white paper, crisp but it won’t cut you, surrounding 50 pages of slick-gloss ads from the grocery stores.
When I pick up a newspaper and hold it in my hand, there is no A.I. behind the paper tracking me, eyeing what I click on. I can flip to the comics, to the arts section, to the book reviews, and then cut out a recipe on page E14.
The folded paper does not know I’m a 30-something male from Texas, nor does it care. It’s just glad to have arrived on my doorstep and be perused. It doesn’t know my gender, my horoscope, my fear of heights, and it has no idea what I’ve just read.
With the newspaper in hand, I can meander, how I want, with no suggestions like “here’s an article we think you might be interested in.” It’s like (another example) being in a library or a bookstore and browsing the books. There’s curation there to some degree, by the store employees, but for the most part, I can be looking for one book, see the spine of another sticking out, pull it off the shelf, open it, and fall in love. You can’t engineer that.
To browse without the help of a browser.
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