Hip websterism. Music and identity.
- At work we've finally reached consensus that we shouldn't try to build a slick Web 2.0 web app without using a slick modern web framework. So suddenly all hell has broken loose and we've been allowed to futz around with Django in an officially sanctioned way. In a coup, we've taken the opportunity to try out distributed versioning control as well. So our futzing-with-Django project is in a Mercurial repository and is hosted on BitBucket.
The discovery is: all of this stuff is awesome. Django is totally slick and it's a joy to get shit done in it. Mercurial is sweet and is a joy to work with. All the hype is right.
My secret plan for a long time has been to actually apply some of the things I've learned how to do to actually accomplish something I care deeply about (so far my follow-through on this sort of thing has not been great). Django seems like an especially effective way to do that, so I'm glad to be tilting that way. - Hey, just now I realized that listening to cool music makes you think you are cool. It's a strange thing, because music is on the one hand external to you, and also often social. So the "feeling cool" part may just be smugness about ones own curatorial taste. I associated myself with music X; I think it's a nice choice. Maybe I think that other people will value that taste in me. So when I listen to it I am proud of being the sort of person who listens to X.
Some people take this to an extreme where they describe some of their music preferences as "guilty pleasures."* Why "guilty"? I guess to distance themselves from something they believe to be beneath them (socially? in some objective aesthetic sense?)? Very confusing.
But I think you could argue that it infects your experience in such a way that it ends up being internal as well. So, if I am listening to wimpily absurdist, resiliently detached music on my iPod in the subway, I will experience things around me in a wimpily absurdist, resiliently detached way.** Throw in some handwavy assumptions about neural plasticity, and all of a sudden you're a wimpily absurdist, etc. person! On the other hand, if I am blasting energetic, aggressive, and perhaps crude music from the highway***, then I will experience things in an energetic, aggressive, and perhaps crude way and... you get the idea.
So maybe music has more to do with identity formation than just endlessly reflected social anxieties!
Thoughts welcome.
** N.B. I don't do this either.
*** N.B. Or this.