Playlistism
Wired News: ITunes Undermines Social SecurityOn college campuses, for example, a new form of bigotry called 'playlistism' is emerging.
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Students are starting to realize they must manage their music collections, or at least prune them, to maintain their image, Aubrey said. He confessed to deleting a lot of stuff himself.
"I had a lot of show tunes I had to get rid of," he said. "And a lot of punk pop from my earlier days like Green Day and Blink-182."
As well as trimming their music collections, some students are enhancing them, but not always subtly. Aubrey said the campus' resident jazz expert complains that any jazz he talks about instantly shows up on his fellow students' playlists.
"He tells them about something he just heard and then all the pseudo jazz kids have it," Aubrey said. "A lot of people try to be cooler than they are through their playlist. I think people are trying to figure out what is trendy and popular by looking at what's on playlists of people who are cool, and then emulate that."
Now I feel old. Not long will it be before I say something like, "Back when
I was a kid, we used to
listen to the music we thought made us look cool."
* Ray, 11/12/2003 09:43:10 PM
