I’m not going to try to name it (ahem), but I do want to highlight its existence while it’s still young: a new web genre in which one person recommends one thing (often for one day). It’s another manifestation of modern web minimalism, akin to what is happening in web design. We are sick of the rococo web: the endless, illustrated, hyperlinked streams of social media, the ornate playlists, the overabundant recommendations in every corner of our screen. Too many things to look at and read.
The solution has occurred to several people at once: vastly reduce the choices for the recommender and the recommendee, the better to focus their attention. (Were I a staff writer for the New Yorker I would insert a pithy reference to Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less here.)
In music, there’s This is My Jam: one person, one song. For writing, The Listserve: one person, one message to a global audience via email. Perhaps most intriguing was the short-lived project Last Great Thing, which asked one person a day to name the most interesting, compelling work they had encountered recently. Recommendations included many websites but also novels, videos, music, and plays. As editors Jake Levine and Justin Van Slembrouck put it:
Last Great Thing was designed to take our mission to its extreme: from the endless stream of great content on the web, how would we go about creating an experience around a single compelling thing?
It’s worth reading their entire justification for the project, and what they learned. I suspect the model could be helpfully extended to other areas. The genre recaptures the advantages of scarcity that print had, in the same way that Readability and Instapaper recapture the advantages of distraction-free legibility for reading.
So, out with the rococo aesthetic, in with the Shaker aesthetic.
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