A recent arti­cle in Slate by Jan Swaf­ford got me think­ing about one of the major dis­tinc­tions between infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net and off the Inter­net. As I’ve been argu­ing for years, the way we inter­act with art has fun­da­men­tally changed. Swaf­ford looks at this from the per­spec­tive of a writer to argue “Why e-books will never replace real books”.

Basi­cally, it comes down to directed or active activ­ity ver­sus non-directed or pas­sive activ­ity. When you turn on the radio, the selec­tion is pas­sive. You can choose the sta­tion, but you can’t choose the pro­gram­ming. When you search for music on YouTube, how­ever, the selec­tion is always active.

Both approaches have their mer­its, but they lead to dif­fer­ent kinds of expe­ri­ence. Pas­sive inter­ac­tion with art, in my expe­ri­ence, is more likely to lead to serendip­ity: We are more likely to have tran­scen­dent “ah-ha!” moments, as if the uni­verse were in tune with our feel­ings at the moment. That’s why when the per­fect song comes on the radio, it’s so great. If you had cho­sen the song from your iPod, you would not have the same satisfaction.

On the other hand, directed expe­ri­ences that require a lot of effort also tend to be reward­ing. This is one of the main rea­sons I enjoy com­pos­ing more than doing the dishes. This is also prob­a­bly why any artis­tic or ath­letic activ­ity is enjoyable.

The Inter­net gives us an easy directed expe­ri­ence most of the time, and I’m not so sure that’s good for art. Or at least, it might change the kinds of art we use. Back before recorded music, peo­ple were much more recep­tive to any kind of musi­cal sound, because it was rel­a­tively hard to hear music—basic eco­nom­ics at work. But peo­ple also rarely had a choice of what to lis­ten to, which affected their rela­tion­ship to the music. Once peo­ple have choice, they become more picky.

Hav­ing instant access to any­thing, as we now have de facto, is incred­i­bly pow­er­ful. But it also imposes lim­i­ta­tions on us. It degrades the qual­ity of our expe­ri­ences with the things we do choose, because we know there’s so much more avail­able. In order to really enjoy art—which is the point, after all—we occa­sion­ally need to pur­pose­fully let go of purpose.

For me as an artist, this is tricky. I imag­ine it’s even harder for peo­ple who don’t think about the arts all day long. I hope that as our rela­tion­ship with “every­thing all the time” matures, enough peo­ple will real­ize the need for pur­pose­less­ness to make it eas­ily acces­si­ble for everyone.