I hate ballroom dancing. I would never want to do it. Dancing in general isn’t that interesting to me and doing it slowly to bad music with a bunch of people in stuffy clothing even less so. Also those people probably like ballroom dancing… but so do I. I love it in fact. I love a lot of things that I don’t like but have absolutely no effect on my life.
I want the whole world to be full of things that I don’t do. Variety is the spice of life some say. I don’t say it but others do and I agree with them in principle. Life would be less interesting if we all did and thought the same things. At the very least the lines for those things would be longer.
I’m not sure what the internet is doing to underground culture but it is certainly making it more accessible. It used to be if you wanted to do something a little non standard you had to really look to find info about it. For me it was radio controlled cars or paintball. You would find a magazine or go to some little shop and talk to people there. Now all you have to do is google (v. to google, also see yahoo).
I had a Western Civ professor in college who claimed pop culture began with the Sears Catalog. One big piece of mass marketing that everyone got so we could all know what to buy. I don’t know if he was the first to think of that but it makes sense. Suddenly everyone had the same options as what to buy. Given the same limited options do we all tend to gravitate to the best options? I don’t know, I’m just making all this up but the internet is both consolidating certain experiences such as shopping with amazon.com or giving us seemingly infinite options for in-depth info on any edge case hobby we want.
What does it all mean? I don’t know but I love the fact that there is a whole world full of stuff I don’t like and know nothing about. It means there are plenty of options of new things to do and others that I don’t need to worry about.