Like most people, I like to imagine that I am utterly unique. A true original. An anti-sheep, a lone wolf; a blazer of trails rather than a treader of pre-worn paths; a sternly individual savant whose cultural decisions spring from a peerless inner well of aesthetic instinct rather than being blown from one shiny object to the other by the whimsical winds of common opinion.
I am, of course, totally deluded. As I write this I am wearing an apparently underivative outfit of skinny indigo jeans and silky camel T-shirt; but of course, skinnies have been a ubiquitous emblem of unimaginative fashion slavery since 2005 and the T-shirt is a high street attempt to channel last year’s Chloe catwalk. I am surrounded by Apple technology; I am eating porridge. I am a sitting cliché.
But surely, I protest, my literary choices are less predictable? I am no three-for-two ho or top ten slave. I am currently reading a dog-eared old copy of Anne Enwright’s 2007 novel The Gathering, pilfered from the shelf of a relocating friend. It’s successor, waiting on my desk, will be Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delaney, an 80s sci-fi cult classic pressed upon me by a colleague. Most of my reading recommendations come from word of mouth, and I will purposefully make random selections in bookshops because I like a cover or a title. However, I have a sinking feeling that randomness doesn’t come into it at all. Am I always simply consuming whatever has been deemed ‘it lit’ by some marketing wonk, albeit several years late?
It easy to blame publishers for homogenising our reading. Seasonal trends have never been more noticeable – in summer we are served a glut of sunny chick lit and airport thrillers, in winter crackling-fire history tomes and stocking-friendly celeb auto(ish)biographies. Nowadays, from misery memoirs to sprawling urban epics, it-books seem to move in it-genre shoals, invading the bestseller lists en mass. But can we really blame greedy or unimaginative publishers? Publishers publish what sells; if anyone is to blame for trend-led reading, it’s probably us. We want more tales of self-discovery through continental villa renovation. Who are they to deny us?
And surely this is no longer a problem, when we can sidestep mainstream suppliers and browse a whole web of alternative writers, publishers and specialist bookshops with the click of a mouse? ‘The wisdom of crowds’ has become the lauded leitmotif of the social media generation, represented as our way to bypass the dictates of commercial conglomerates in favour of homespun hidden gems. Theoretically, this has never been a better time to be an adventurous reader: we have unprecedented access to, well, whatever the hell we like.
Or do we? As many people have been pointing out recently, not least Adam Curtis in his brilliant BBC documentary series ‘All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace’, the wisdom of crowds is a clever fiction; even the ‘self-regulating’ spaces of social media are closely directed and filtered by commercial forces determining exactly what we ‘find’. “Personalization is a core strategy for the top five sites on the Internet – Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft Live – as well as countless others,” says Eli Pariser in his new book The Filter Bubble. “The more personally relevant their information offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy the products they’re offering.” He claims that we are thus forced into a ‘filter bubble’ where our serendipitous discoveries are really carefully controlled commercial prompts.
So on the face of it, Amazon’s ‘if you’ll like that, you’ll like this’ looks like a benign or even positive force; real life bookshops, including Waterstones, are now regularly employing this tactic in-store. We feel sure of finding something different when we scan Facebook for book tips from our friends. But as algorithms decide which recommendations we are served, are we in fact getting locked into a literary echo-chamber, where our reading becomes more narrow and less challenging to our self-professed world view?
Self-publishing should represent an ideal opportunity for readers to surface books outside mainstream tastes and trends. But what does Amanda Hocking, one of the best-selling e-authors on Amazon who has grossed around $2million and been dubbed by the New York Times ‘the star of self-publishing’, write? Paranormal romance, the current it-genre that has been infecting households from Twilight to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Perhaps this is proof that I should stop ranting like a conspiracy theorist and accept that certain topics do represent a sort of instinctive cultural zeitgeist. But I can’t help but wonder if, in reality, they only represent the concerns of a profitable minority – and the rest of us blindly wade in with our money and our word of mouth.
But why am I so eager to feel that my reading is not wholly dictated by either the tyranny of popular trends or the web-led confinement of what Pariser calls ‘The You Loop’? I don’t seem to have the same problem with fashion or film. Perhaps it is because reading is such an intimate act, making the knowledge that my brain food is being shaped by others’ agendas feel particularly raw. Perhaps it is because when I throw out a call for what to read next I am increasingly getting the same answer back from very different people indeed. Perhaps it is because when I sit in front of my screen, trying to make a random selection, I feel paralysed.
Perhaps I’m just not looking hard enough, or in the right places. But does anyone else, in this new world of literary choice, feel like they’re being squeezed into a closet?
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