Noah Berlatsky considers what it’s like to discover a new musician or artist in the age of endless, easily accessible info:
Music used to be a secret, hidden by the barriers of nation and region and history, and you could prove that you could feel a sense of knowledge or at least discovery by finding out what was on the other side of that (not necessarily large) hillock over there. Now all the hillocks are leveled, or at least the internet elevates us so that we can look over them anytime we want. In some sense that makes us more cosmopolitan. We can listen to more content from more places. But when you can see over every hillock, the grass there stops looking greener and starts looking just like your grass.
Sure, the old-style sense of exoticism–feeling like you have special access to another culture because you picked up a bargain CD–is creepy. But the modern sense of media where every culture is spread out in an instantly accessible smorgasbord for consumption has its disturbing aspects as well. The cultural imperialism of appropriating someone else’s cultural realness has transformed into a cultural imperialism where there is no other culture to appropriate — just a single, flat, internet-mediated mono-world. You don’t need to condescendingly anthropologize Robert Johnson any more; he’s always already been blandly digitized.
The Dish 