What’s So Good About Good Taste?
An primer to taste on the Internet
But first, some exciting updates
Hi everyone!
Thank you so much for subscribing and reading Zero Percent Sugar. It means sooo much to me and I value your thoughts on this small project of mine. After some thinking and soul-searching, I decided to make a few changes to the newsletter:
Instead of writing one-off articles about a single topic, I’ll write around 3-5 articles back-to-back centered on a single theme. I’ll follow a volume (theme) and chapter (article) format.
More visual candy! For the first few posts, I wanted to focus on the prose itself and adhering to a specific writing schedule. Now, that I have a hold on things (sort of), I want to play around with visuals to improve your reading experience.
The first theme will be: Taste 🥐🍮✨
I can’t wait to explore this relevant and contentious topic with you all in the coming weeks.
What’s So Good About Good Taste?
Poet and critic Edith Sitwell proclaimed, “Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.” While the late Sitwell was known for her eccentric attire during the first half of the twentieth century, her words couldn’t ring truer in today’s wired world.
We scroll through our feeds at 2am, completely unaware that the buffet of tweets and reels and videos all conspire together to show us different iterations of the same ad promoting that new movie/handbag/video game. If we don’t like the ad, then we click the dislike button. The algorithm, the Internet’s maître d’, understands that we don’t like something and ensures us that it won’t ever resurface on our feed. Consumption creates contentment. Contentment empowers us to broadcast our opinions online and appoint ourselves arbiters of good taste.
What happens when one prides oneself with having good taste? After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Our culture acknowledges that taste is subjective and contextual. Yet, we still aspire towards good taste, whatever that means.
Sitwell’s labeling of “good taste” as a “vice” perhaps alludes to how we indulge in the idea of possessing taste to begin with. So, what’s so good about having good taste?
The Philosophy Behind Good Taste
Ancient Greek philosophers began explorations on beauty (not taste per se), by connecting beauty with virtues and ideals. In a nutshell, Aristotle argues in Metaphysics that beauty is in the “order and symmetry and definiteness” of an object. On the other hand, Plato asserted that beauty exists in a perfect, metaphysical plain detached from the material world. Despite these nuances, these philosophers hold beauty as an aspirational and measurable value found in an object’s essence.
A few millennia later, medieval Christian philosophers also put forward an objective definition of beauty, but, unlike their Classical predecessors, attributed beauty to the divine – God. Augustine believed that beauty and perfection lived in God, rather than an object’s form or a formal, metaphysical plane. Thomas Aquinas said beauty is “that which, when seen, pleases.” Unlike the Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas asserts that beautiful objects cannot be determined empirically, but must elicit a positive emotional response. Beauty not only denotes something or someone’s physical qualities, but also reveals character and spirituality. But, how does ancient value-based criteria for beauty relate to twenty-first century humans?
Intentional Interdependence
In the last few thousand years, we’ve moved away from being mostly insular, close-knit communities to cross-continental networks. Most of our ancestors often farmed their own food. Now, most of us go to the supermarket and pick out a plastic box full of leaves packed in a warehouse far, far away. Or we tap our screens to order pizza from Uber, an app built and managed by thousands of strangers oceans away. Technological developments and the rise of labor specialization made us more interdependent on one another. We needed to adapt and find quick signals that point to shared identities.
Taste is the twenty first century’s vehicle of choice for finding commonalities amid the Internet’s sprawl. Acclaimed writer and executive Seth Godin champions the concept of psychographics, an individual’s likes, dislikes, and identity somewhat independent of demographic markers such as age, gender, and place of birth. The Internet allows us to connect quickly with other people who share the same taste for clothes, entertainment, and food. Bumble’s dating profiles allow people to link their Spotify accounts to showcase their taste in music and find someone with similar tastes. Just look at all the Barbie and Oppenheimer reviews on Letterboxd. Relishing in what we love ad developing our tastes affords us the opportunity to connect with like-minded folks.
Against Homogeneity
Yet, there is a dark side to the taste-based connection that Edith Sitwell foreshadowed. Conglomerating exclusively with those who share psychographics could lead to social media echo chambers, which prevents alternative viewpoints from emerging and encourages confirmation bias.
While similar interests initially bring people together, USC professor Kristine Lerman, as featured in WIRED, maintains that these echo chambers create socio-cultural divisions and polarizations in the long-term. A study by Tokita et. al initially hypothesized that partisan news sources contribute to political polarization in the US. However, Tokita et. al concluded that social media “reorganizes” our networks through unfollowing, which creates unvaried social groups. By digging our heels deeper and deeper in our own predilections, we close ourselves off to other realities. Sitwell’s assertion that good taste is our species’ greatest “vice” alludes to how we could use “taste” to only look at what we want to see.
Having good taste isn’t so good after all. Good taste, which often means shared taste, catalyzes connections. However, we miss out on opportunities to learn and empathize when taste and preferences prevent us from enjoying new experiences.
Moving Forward
So, now what? In her viral TED talk The Danger Of A Single Story, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sheds light on how singular points of view nurtures stereotypes that prove infuriating and even fatal. Adichie advises to open ourselves up to different narratives and realities that challenge our preconceptions. We could apply this ethos to taste in our minute, daily interactions.
Let someone politely disagree with you about a movie review. Read a book from a genre you abhor and ask yourself why you don’t like it. Make a list of all the things you find cringe and give them a second chance. Be bold enough to change your mind.
*I couldn’t have written this essay without The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy!