I cheer the (relative) death of rarity. (As pointed out by @Neil_in_Chicago there now exists Uploaded and Not Uploaded.) My deep geek knowledge of some things has always been dependent on a rather suspect OS.
Now, can we do something about the artificial scarcity of essentials in meat-space? We need an internet of food, clothing and shelter (oh FFS, I’ve gone off the rails…)
The value came in being a gatekeeper to the rarer media, either by sharing (“here, you can read my copy”/“I’ll make you a tape of this record”) or by advertising that you had experienced it (“I was over at Doug’s house, and we watched this really cool, rare movie!”). This sort of value changes, and now instead of becoming valued for being a source of less known works, you gain worth by being a valued curator of things other curators do not mention.
Rare is also shifting in meaning, as rarity has less to do with scarcity, and more to do with being higher quality: sticking out from the crowd, and such.
So is contemporary rarity the idea that a particular set of choices is rare, making a particular group of people “rare”? So this illuminates the hipster phenomenon, where rarity is pursued as an identity. Other people find it annoying but the community sustains itself, and the more annoying, the more rare. This also makes sense in showing how reactionary extremism continues to exist online. The tearrists/wingnuts self-select for compatible personal rarity.
Music lovers have it easy and it is only getting easier, though for a few more years quality remains a factor in determining the rarity of a song. An amateur rip of a rare vinyl 45 on YouTube (where audio fidelity is an afterthought) is just a placeholder for the day when someone with expertise in digitizing vinyl will make another attempt at bringing that rare single to the masses in perfect quality. The outcome of this waiting game is inevitable - experts at transferring vinyl are drawn to rare singles, and there’s a finite amount of rare singles.
Of course, the BBC did what they could to ensure the rarity of many Doctor Who episodes…
I like that idea.
This in an interesting corollary, to the idea that nothing in terms of information is rare anymore. The actual rarity of physical things before the internet was much harder to determine, as was their value, in the early days of EBAY one could score big at garage sales and estate sales, then market some of those “rare” and valuable items on EBAY and make a nice markup, now it’s much more likely that whoever is getting rid of this stuff has hopped on and checked to see if there’s a market for those items before sticking twenty-five cents on them and putting them on the table.
Um, they started in the late 20th century.
Oooo, you got me to look for “Alive from Off Center” – I see that there are many clips on youtube/etc. It was a showcase for avant garde visual/musical artists back in the mid/late 80’s that was shown on PBS. I guess I know what I will be watching this weekend.
Boingers are rarebits? Boing!
I’m mostly just bummed that the collection of hard-to-find CD singles and imports that I amassed at rather great expense (for a grad student anyway) during the late 90s likely has little or no value now. There’s a bin sitting in my closet that could have easily fetched me a few hundred bucks if I’d had the time and energy to put the content on eBay 8 or 10 years ago, and I imagine it’s now nearly worthless.
Nah, there are still record collectors. Always.
CDs though? Last time I looked (which was a few years ago), the market for NIN and Tori Amos rarities was pretty nil, at least on eBay. Le sigh.
Hmmm. You may be right there…
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