changing the channel

On a previous post, I had a comment left by 4sb:

When you have no choice, you experience things that you would otherwise never encounter . I wonder whether with all the richness of the web, that we might be letting go of that avenue of growth. Is it possible that there are more people of closed minds than open minds?

He used the example of the contrast between our ability to almost infinitely tune the content of the internet that we see, compared to when you used to watch TV and there were only 3 channels – so you’d end up watching something you wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in and possibly being inspired by it to go in a whole new direction. What happens when we’re funneling all of our inspiration through a filter of what we already know we like? Does that have an effect of ‘distilling’ that taste to be something very strong (and possibly narrow in scope)?

I think there’s something to be said for coming into contact with that which you’d not originally have thought you’d be interested in, which wouldn’t be rocket science to most people. But maybe not just in the way described in the last paragraph, where you find something you like unexpectedly. What if you”’re exposed to something and even though you don’t end up ‘liking’ it as such, it still teaches you something? Most of what I feel I’ve learned about photography over the last couple of years hasn’t come from looking at photographs I admire. It’s come from looking at photographs I wouldn’t have sought out under my own steam, and listening to the thoughts of the photographers that are approaching things in a different way than me. Or even, it’s come from talking to people who aren’t even photographers, or reading books that aren’t about photography. Sometimes even seeing something and deciding you don’t like it, or reading/hearing something and deciding you don’t agree with it, can be better than not having seen/heard it at all, in that it may have strengthened your original opinion, or even made you realise you have an opinion on the subject, in the first place.