I don’t usually post
songs on Facebook, but recently I felt like it. I wanted to post a link to the
ballad “More than Words” by the American rock band Extreme. I don’t know what
suddenly motivated me to do this. I guess it’s because the song did something magical
to me. It brought me back to my late twenties, with new love and friendship in
the air and the thrill of a brand new future to throw myself at. It was as if I
could start all over again. I wanted others to enjoy this wonderful feeling too.
So I searched the
track on YouTube. It turned up along with a list of other hits on the right
side of the screen, you know this list of “other videos that you may like too”.
When I looked at the list, my mouth fell open. I liked every single song on the
list about as much as “More than Words”! It felt horrible. Because the
intense personal and warm feeling about this song suddenly looked like a superficial, cold internet statistic. The song turned out to be just a
dot in a YouTube algorithm that told me exactly what people like me, who are
born in 1973, usually like on a melancholic Sunday afternoon in early 2016. So posting
the song made no longer sense. It felt like connecting a YouTube algorithm to a
Facebook algorithm and let those two do the job of talking about me. It felt like
an “empty” gesture and I felt not needed for that at all.
Don’t get me wrong: of course it’s
not an empty or bad thing to post a song on Facebook. Because it’s still you who posts it and not YouTube, Facebook,
Deezer, Google or whatever. And whatever you post, say or do, it’s always both a
unique, personal initiative and an impersonal statistic at the
same time.
So maybe I should have posted “More than Words” anyway. I could have offered a unique moment of nostalgia to friends from the 70s or the opportunity to discover a ‘cool old song’ to people from the 90s. I think I will actually. But I’ll add a comment about what the song does to me to differentiate it from a search engine hit. Just to make it more personal. Because YouTube and Facebook can’t do that. At least not in early 2016.
So maybe I should have posted “More than Words” anyway. I could have offered a unique moment of nostalgia to friends from the 70s or the opportunity to discover a ‘cool old song’ to people from the 90s. I think I will actually. But I’ll add a comment about what the song does to me to differentiate it from a search engine hit. Just to make it more personal. Because YouTube and Facebook can’t do that. At least not in early 2016.
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