“The problem with surfing he web as a way to find music, books or movies is on the web you find what you’re looking for, but rarely anything else.”
I don’t at all agree with this, but I’ll stipulate that, yes, you pick up less along the way than you would had your taste been informed by connoisseurship at the local record or used book store. My point, though, again, is that the internet is merely a tool of efficient commerce, and as such is vastly superior to specialty shops. If you’re looking to inform your taste, there are bibliographies and liner notes and so forth, but more important actual human beings out in the world that don’t have to be met at the point of purchase. Allow them to influence you.
“The web creates tunnel vision where the indie stores create buffets.”
Here is where your argument completely breaks down for me. Before this point I might take your word for it that the sort of community found in record stores is legitimate enough, and in any case vastly superior to online ones. But never can I ignore the fact that’s as plane as the nose on their faces. Alternative record shops and used book stores do not contain all the colors of the rainbow. Those people are pretty narrow-minded on their own, as well parodied in the movie “High Fidelity.”
There’s a reason “nerd” has a bad connotation. That sort of connoisseurship tends toward snobbism and obscurity. You’ll never find people more standardize than in cult communities.
More than that, though, my point all along has been that communities based on commerce are poor substitutes for traditional ones. That is, granting that trade has influenced society across the millenia in countless ways, but that commercial society in the age of the Athenian agora (which I take to be the conventional apex of the link between commerce and high culture) and the age of the head shop are vastly different.
Sorry but you’re just plain wrong, pretty much across the board. Or maybe you just had crappy stores to chose from. Here’s the #1 used place Tucsonans get to chose from: http://www.bookmans.com/ , if you can’t find all the colors of the rainbow there it’s because you’ve deliberately closed your eyes.
Liner notes only tell you more about THAT music, again the tunnel vision. You’re not going to meet actual human beings playing tunnel vision on the web.
And the reason “nerd” has a bad connotation is some people just can’t handle not being the smartest person in the room.
Nobody is saying anything about commerce based communities replacing “traditional” communities. That’s your own strawman. And nobody is talking about headshops either. You do a lot of strawman erecting, a lot of silly dismissing, and not much listening. Which goes a long way to explain why your experience in indie shops is so negative. And it’s all you, not the shops. You don’t want to listen to other people. Which is your prerogative, but let’s not pretend it’s the other people’s fault. You want to be the smartest guy in the room and you’ve found the easiest way to guarantee that is by being the only guy in the room.