Imagine you're a well-fed consumer of the future. You spend a third of your day working, a third of the day sleeping, and you have another eight hours a day to spend on grooming, shopping, eating and other basic chores -- which leaves you with about three or four hours a day to play. Imagine that you also have advanced technology that enables you to access all existing human digital culture: all books, all images, all music, all television and film programming. The lot. How do you choose what's worth your time?
The idea of a global cultural cafe at which every possible dish and combination of dishes is served has been a mainstay of science-fiction for a very long time. It's a fantasy in which mankind samples the exotic delights of a huge and expanding universe: yet another amusing planet in Star Trek; the cantina in Star Wars; the guilty pleasures of the Culture's worlds in the novels of Iain M. Banks; or the mashed-up Asian fusion of William Gibson's cyberpunk.
Now look at the existing technologies we can use to access digital culture. There's a torrent of text-based information on the Net, along with podcasts, video podcasts and Internet radio. Broadcasters offer on-demand video services, cable, satellite and Freeview television. There are online bookshops that can find you any book published, DVD libraries that can get you any film. There are even photo-sharing services like Flickr that can show you images of almost anything. We've taken our seat in the global culture-cafe -- and the noise is deafening.
How do you cope with all this choice? One strategy is a movement to the safe and familiar. Sure, you can surf the long-tail for small gems, but big mainstream cultural products --the huge sure-fire hits -- reduce our anxiety and give us a feeling of shared culture. I have a friend who doesn't watch his Sky television except every now and then when he sits down and watches five episodes of The Simpsons. He can't be bothered with anything else.
Another popular strategy is tribalism: retreating down into your particular underground tunnel and closing the lid tightly behind you, as a gamer, salsa dancer, free runner, Trekkie or mountain-biker. This has the advantage that you know exactly what to wear, read, buy and listen to, but the disadvantage is that it cuts you off from everyone who isn't in the club.
I have certain friends I use as pathfinders: people I can ring up or email and say, "What should I be reading/listening to/watching?" This is the service that online stores are so keen to get right with their 'people-who-bought-this-also-bought' recommendation features, or the celebrity playlists on iTunes. They know we're paralysed with choice and hang by the edge of the swimming pool, scared to explore their vast virtual warehouses without someone to hold our hand. We can expect more and more of these cultural sign-posts as cool-hunting gets harder and harder to do.
What fascinates me are the strategies children will use to negotiate this post-modern cultural terrain. When I was ten years old I grew up in a house that had perhaps 500 paperback books, 50 records, a television set that had three channels and a radio that received a handful of stations. Many children are now growing up in homes that have slightly fewer books, as their limited shelf space has to accomodate hundreds of CDs, DVDs and videos. They have digital radios, PCs and laptops that contain peer-to-peer film collections, and huge quantities of music, digital photos and home movies. They also have access to everything else conceivable on the Net, often via high-speed connections.
Their house has got the resources of a decent university library -- and many will no doubt use these libraries, as I used mine, mainly for sleeping and skiving. Yet it's startling to think about the range and scale of the stuff they have access to. I could flick through my dad's record collection in five minutes; my brother's collection of LPs took a little longer. My ten-year-old nephew now grazes his father's iPod and can hold a huge collection of music in the palm of his small hand.
There's a gag you often see writers do in which they try to suggest that someone's tastes are so diverse they can't be taken seriously. The joke comes from finding the most ludicrous juxtaposition of divergent cultural moments: German witchcraft and Italian science-fiction; Andean nose-flutes and Algerian farce; Swedish crime-fiction and the Northumbrian rapper sword dance.
The joke rests on the assumption that there are people with sensible, well-mapped, familiar cultural identities who can laugh at the gadabouts running around and dipping a finger into every pie. This joke doesn't work any more, now that we're all a click away from a preposterous digital diversity: in words, in sounds, in pictures, in moving images. We are the well-fed consumers of the future and this is one of the problems of a modern, digital life. In a connected, digital world, the joke's on us.
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