Rich Serendipity through Sharing Narrative, Emotion and Music

This week’s Fast Company magazine has an intriguing article on the latest social sharing trend sweeping internet space. It’s a variant on rich serendipity, but it works to bind emotion, narrative and music into one powerful package. The phenomenon is spreading through the capacity on Apple’s iTunes to mix tracks into your own playlist. Originally, just like social tagging, these playlists were put together and stored for the enjoyment of their creators. But you can publish your playlist too back into the store for others to see and buy, together with the personal story that lies behind it: whether it’s a breakup, a romance or a bereavement.

In the post Titanic social soul searching of Edwardian England, you could buy the sheet music for the music the orchestra played as that doomed ship sank into the icy Atlantic. It came with the songsheets so that you too could sing what the passengers sang, those who were stranded without access to lifeboats as the Titanic tipped them to certain death. It was a strange kind of participative mourning peculiar to that time, one that has been overtaken by an avalanche of words in our own text-heavy time.

So I find it interesting that in the midst of our tagging enthusiasms, we are starting to use our own personal life narratives to string music together into expressive vehicles for sharing meaning – where words take second place.

0 Comment so far

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (<strong>, <em>, <a>) Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. URLs are automatically converted into links.