Here’s an interesting example of a specific group of people targeting a specific thing.
If you want to find a group of people to perform a narrow activity – you can. If you want to organize a niche thing – you can. Before the internet came along, costs of finding people were prohibitively expensive.
Now one person (or group) just has to be a seed and act as a hub that niche people search for and flock to. There’s a natural congregation of people along lines of special or rare interests.
Collaboration among specialized groups means that specialization can grow deeper. It also means that people can be divided to a greater degree.
It’s not that people can talk more, but they can narrow the range of their discussion. They can talk the same amount in different places. They don’t have to talk to people around them any more….
We call an extremely specialized person a nerd. A geek. They’ve gained a degree of excellence in a particular domain – to the detriment of generalized knowledge and skills. That’s why they’re a nerd.
What has happened is that a choice has been made easier – the choice to only listen and talk to people who are like you – people who validate you and your interests.
It could be that the web makes everyone neighbors also ends up making everyone enemies.
What do I know about Peruvian fashion? Nothing. But I’m not ignorant about Peruvian fashion because of a lack of information.
Point – it’s easier to find something you’re familar with. You know the language and the search terms. The connectedness given by the internet is disproportionately skewed towards connecting you to things you already know and like.
It’s always harder to connect with the unknown and with the foreign.
The flip-side to this, of course, is that there will be even more value to be had from doing so. Fewer people will be doing it, and so people who do it will be a rare thing and will have a unique perspective.
Challenge – find three places on the internet where you don’t belong and where you don’t know anything about the thing going on.
This “find something you don’t know about” sounds like a task set by the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.” If you don’t know about it, how can you even begin to look for it?
Or, as a family saying goes, “Bring me the symograsser off the portaseal.”
Trust me. Just start looking, and… you won’t know it when you see it.
It’s true that there always is a frontier to the unknown – a fringe of partial knowledge, one step beyond which lurks the unfamiliar. It’s close enough that we can reach it, but far enough to feel rough and foreign.
When we arrive there, a new frontier appears. The frontier is the distance from us; not a single, rooted place.
I should mention that Yaco Monti belongs to a world I don’t subscribe to – his name came up in a search auto-complete box. He seems quite popular in his own world.
A step beyond him (a YouTube Link away) is Camilo Sesto – a spanish singer big in the 1970s.
A google search on Sesto gives a page that is truly a world (if only just one click) away from mine:
http://www.camilosestoweb.com/primero/index.html