Does choice trump Discovery?

So have you heard about the Playlist Generation?
These are the folks who only know listening to music on ipods and mp3 players.
They don’t look at 78 rpm albums as a way of listening to music. They see them as cute scratchy relics that DJ’s use at concerts or shows.
Back in the day of albums, if you wanted to buy a song, you had to buy the whole album. Warps, scratches and all. You couldn’t just buy the one song.
The Playlist Generation gets to buy (or more likely, steal) that one song they’ve got to have.
Playlists are awesome.
But like many time-shortening devices, they may hamper Discovery.
And that’s too bad. Because discovery is the fount of new ideas.
A playlist to today’s teenager is kind of like a remote control for teenagers when I was one. A way of skipping over all of the options you don’t want and choosing only the one(s) you love, be it music or tv stations.
Each preceding generation decries the lazy-fication of our youth. Not having to stand up to change the damn channel. Not having to patiently (and sometimes painfully) listen to each song on the album just to get to the one really good single.
The similarity is, in each case, discovery is affected.
Tune in tomorrow to see why.