Finding Recommendations
On discovering music, films, and books through beloved authors, and why algorithmic and click-bait lists are a poorer substitute for curiosity.
What I realized here is that before the internet, well not even just the internet, but the era when almost all information started flowing mainly from it, and even for some time after that began, I used to discover new things in this kind of intricate way I privately called “by recommendations from fascinating authors.” For example, music or straight-up musicians, films or entire directors, books, writers, artists — I would often find them through already loved compositions, books and films, or from various stories and interviews of the authors themselves.
I started doing this a very long time ago. One moment stuck with me: when I was a teenager, I was listening to the band Alisa on a vinyl record, and there’s a song called Meloman where the lyrics list a bunch of different bands. I liked Alisa a lot at that moment, so of course I immediately went looking for those bands. And it went like that for many years, until the internet revolution happened — and it didn’t just happen, it gradually changed the world, and specifically the “smart” recommendations and algorithms. On the one hand they’re great, of course. But it’s a lazy approach that replaces real searching by feeding you a generally not-bad option. And that generally not-bad option then leads somewhere other than where my curiosity used to rush.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t use anything the internet recommends. No, you can actually find things there that work the same way it used to work for me. But it’s important to avoid the soullessness made just for content success in the age of algorithms. I noticed this a long time ago with blogs, when I saw that if a blog post title has numbers in it — it’s usually filler, meaning it’s made like the music in a shopping mall or an elevator. Somebody makes money off it because it’s not terrible, and sometimes it’s convenient for us to entertain ourselves that way. But all these “3 best ways to something,” “5 best of those people,” or “7 main mistakes you need to avoid” — that’s most likely crap, optimized for clicks and view counts.
You yourselves have probably noticed all this a long time ago. But somehow it hit me hard when I was watching one little YouTube video. I love cinema, not any cinema — I have my own rather well-formed own taste in it. And somehow a very long time ago I found the channel Every Frame a Painting, where this guy Tony talks about interesting aspects of cinematography. I really liked his channel, but at some point he left YouTube. And then many, many years later he came back and is delighting us again. So I was watching one of his videos where films aren’t presented as some kind of list, but the material itself is the foundation of the story. And there, like in the best dream of a recommendation seeker, the things mentioned fall into two categories: the ones you already know and like, and the ones you don’t know but that intrigue you. That’s what the best recommendations are — that’s how I love discovering new things. Maybe you too.
