“Originality is dying: how social media is hindering self-expression,” blared the headline from The Drum, and it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Granted, it’s Monday morning as I write this, and stopping me dead in my tracks is not the feat that it will be come Tuesday afternoon, after the Diet Mountain Dew concentration in my bloodstream has ramped up to functional levels, but whoa: I gotta read this.

So I did, and it turned out to be a story about people remodeling their houses who go on Instagram for inspiration and find scads of pictures of the very same sort of houses remodeled the selfsame way.

Well, of course they do.

The central conceit of any social network is that once you navigate outside of the hard circle of your close friends, you’re going to be presented with what’s popular and/or what fits that channel’s algorithmic impression of you, and that’s nothing if not unoriginal.

And in the case of something like your house, that’s worse than useless.

As I pointed out in another post, social media imitates and follows, and it’s up to you to be your mom and say what she used to say when a friend convinced you to do something stupid: “If your friend jumped off the Grand Canyon, would you? Huh?”

It’s really that. If your favorite influencer smeared roadkill innards on his walls in an abstract fashion strongly suggestive of non-objective expressionism, would you? Huh? Or would you stick to your guns and still be a cubist?

Create the next what?

I do have to disagree with The Drum on a key point: Social media does not kill all self-expression; instead, it picks up on and amplifies one person’s self-expression to the point where no one else can be heard or seen.

Over on Twitter, accounts like We Rate Dogs and Super ‘70s Sports were original manifestations of self-expression, and they’ve resonated with people, and become successful.

However, instead of creating the next We Rate Dogs, people have tried to create the next We Rate Dogs.

You know what I mean: Instead of figuring out what made that account popular and creating something similarly passionate in an unrelated area, people have gone for the flat imitation and tried to create a similar-but-different account for dog lovers, because they’ve been made to feel that the only way they can be heard or seen is to look like someone else who’s being heard and seen.

I know there’s some crazy and wonderful self-expression going on in social media. I see it flit across my feed and I like it and share it in an attempt to reward the creator, but it’s not enough.

Unless my behavior can somehow scale, that self-expression is going to be drowned out by the popular ones, the ones who have scale, the ones that send mass tastes down a funnel of ever-narrowing proportions until there’s just one created work and one creator, and a slew of imitators and clones.

What changed?

I’m often asked what’s changed in writing and publishing from when I first entered the business as a high-schooler in 1976. It’s this: When I started the challenge was getting past the gatekeepers. Get past them and you’re guaranteed an audience.

Now there are no gatekeepers, and no guarantee of an audience. Ninety percent of the time your work is like a message in a bottle or a Tibetan prayer wheel, and you’re throwing words to the skies or the waves in fond hope someone might stumble across them.

Gatekeepers may be arbitrary and idiosyncratic, but their idiosyncrasies ensured that many voices and styles were presented. Life magazine looked and sounded nothing like The New Yorker, because Henry Luce was not Harold Ross, and vice versa. Same with The New York Times and the Herald-Tribune.

In the absence of strong gatekeepers molding voices and controlling access, of course everything is going to degenerate into same-sounding babble. It’s to the eternal credit of the unique voices that they stick to their path.

The future?

This is the part where I’m supposed to outline hope for the future, but I’m not sure there is any.

Social channels’ steadfast insistence that they are not a publisher means they are going to let a thousand flowers bloom, with the caveat that 999 of them look alike.

Actual print publishing is a mess, with only the faintest glimmers of a renaissance.

You have an idea for saving the local newspaper? I’d love to hear it. (My current fave is local journalism as sponsored newsletters, but I have many doubts.)

Discovering Discover

If I have hope anywhere, it’s in my Discover Weekly feed.

For the uninitiated, Discover Weekly is a Spotify feature that suggests music for you based on what you’ve listened to in the past.

Previously, Discover Weekly has been useless, mainly because I listen to music for so many reasons.

I play along with jazz and bop to improve my skills as a guitarist – hence, Barney Kessel and Billy Bauer.

I listen to praise-and-worship music because I lead a praise band at church. That’s led me to Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Aubrey Ghent.

Because I’m a songwriter, I listen to greats like Roger Miller and the Beatles. I listen to Fairport Convention because I toured the U.K. with Richard Thompson.

I listened to “Que Sera, Sera” the day Doris Day died. I listen to Nico, Rochereau and Roger because it’s otherworldly. And so on.

I like to say people couldn’t last five songs with my playlist, and Spotify couldn’t keep up. But I’m pleased to say Spotify is getting closer.

Okay, I’m not going to listen to Wayne Newton cheek-to-jowl with Hem, or Fountains of Wayne right after Paul Robeson. But Spotify has come a long way to suggest that I might want to.

The next step is for Spotify to really take some chances, to identify me as a true eclectic and throw some genuinely left-field stuff my way.

I can’t even tell you who that might be or where it might come from, because on one level I don’t want to know. I want to be genuinely surprised.

If Spotify can do that, and if that can spread to Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook, we might be on to something.

In the meantime, if you’re remodeling your house, invite yourself over to other people’s houses and see what moves you. Cover the spectrum. Be sure to include one ‘70s special with purple-and-orange carpeting.

Soon you’ll come to a very important realization: Originality is not dead. It just has Harvest Gold appliances.

Originality Is Dead. Long Live Originality?