I read the book on a visit to Lisbon and applied some of the ideas in the book to what I experienced. Most of the restaurants served the same five dishes. The same narrative about the 1755 earthquake was repeated time and again in information about the city. Tiles were for sale everywhere, some authentically produced, some facsimiles.
Chayka says, “a place’s uniqueness only attracts more tourists, which gradually grind it into dust with the increasing flow of travelers, who arrive to consume its character as a product and leave it ever more degraded. Difference just gets in the way; it creates friction in a world that is increasingly frictionless, whether in its cities or in its music.”
“Difference gets in the way.” What a shattering statement, which can be extrapolated further if you a person who seeks difference and celebrates it and who knows being exposed to differences makes us more openminded.
I also found his statement “Popularity alone often gets confused for meaning or significance” to be thought-provoking. He goes on to say, “The difference today is that in Filterworld, the metrics—the number of likes, the preexisting attention—tend to speak louder than the piece of culture itself. Not only do they act as a measure of success, but they create success, because they dictate what is recommended to and seen by audiences in the first place.”
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