Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity. I had to stop myself from constantly scrolling down on facebook when I was bored (I realized I don't even actually read what people post most of the time because I'm looking for something interesting, but I still subconsciously notice what people are doing somehow.) I'm not against this by any means, so don't take this as me complaining. I don't know what's popular right now, I don't know what is trending on twitter. What's left is my little bubble where I have what I need to explore what I'm interested in. I can find interesting articles, I can find new music, and I can talk to people who actually are interesting to talk to. I've completely cut off any noise and am completely left with pure signal.
I'm completely out of touch with most everybody, and I've never felt better. I guess this goes hand in hand with being super introverted, I couldn't imagine actually holding a conversation with anybody around me with the information I know that wasn't super technical or completely shallow. I've lived with this obvious gap between me and other people my entire life though so it doesn't even feel lonely anymore when I can just find whatever I need to keep myself occupied when I'm bored.
The beauty of the internet.
What does this mean?
I'm approaching half a century old. Comes a point where you realize you have heard it all, and are not interested in anything "new" because it isn't. I'm this -><- close to shutting it all off and going seriously minimalistic. The tipping point would be a news service which presents only actual need-to-know news, and a stream of new music.
Address, enumerate, and centralize your core axioms. Build from there. Stop letting others dump $#!^ in your head.
The interesting question is whether you have built a good or a bad one, and what exactly "good" and "bad" even mean in this context. But there is no "not in a chamber" option.
The challenge is to maintain the right mix of echoes in your chamber.
That's just not good enough. Whenever your taste isn't bound to certain genres, yet still very specific and hard to put into a score, it gets difficult. Actually I think this is a problem better solved by a small round of enthusiasts, real humans instead of algorithms or crowdsourced data. The latter always seem to fail when your taste ranges from, let's say James Holden (electronic, weird, yet carefully crafted), to Miles Davis, each for very different reasons.
While I buy my music, I enjoy the community over at what.cd which is just as enthusiastic about music as I am. Another community that helps can be found on rdio, which I use for previewing and discovering music - I only follow people with taste I can absolutely agree on there, and I'm really not a social network guy, but the community on rdio is great and knowing what those guys are listening to is very rewarding, and sometimes a good tastemaker.
Yet, I can't say that I'm completely satisfied with those options - there have to be some better places out there.
On the one hand, the average result is disappointment, but every once in a while you get something you like, and then from there what you get is a new seed for exploration, which from there I get to do a new local hill-climbing exploration of. The rate at which new music is currently coming out exceeds the rate at which I can explore in this manner.
I really like good curators in this regard - labels for instance, there are a lot of those that don't fit into the evil, greedy corporation narrative. Numero Group for instance - a fantastic re-issue label that digs out forgotten, rare or unreleased material and puts it into the spotlight, often for the very first time. Their track record is quite impressing.
However I get your general idea, I use it with my own collection - I actually have one of those smart playlists that picks an album for me I haven't listened to for quite a while. Sometimes you re-discover things you almost forgot about.
It's worse than that; people will actively look down upon those who consciously "limit" despite the reasons. Hell, just the other day we had that pithy programming quotes article with one nearly equating preference with stagnation, ignoring nuances such as choosing the best tool for the job.
So sure, it's good to try out new things and "taste test" on a fairly regular basis, but if you don't filter almost all the rest of the time, it's unlikely you'll ever accomplish anything.
I was getting bored with music a while back, so I did an experiment: I limited the music on my phone to nothing older than five years. To do this I had to remove hundreds of albums.
At first there wasn't much left, so I went looking... for nothing released more than five years ago.
I found quite a bit of new stuff.
Eventually I re-added old stuff I loved, but my musical repertoire had broadened quite a bit.
Part of the problem today is that the amount of signal around us has increased so much that it's overwhelming, and people haven't yet learned that it's okay to tune out a significantly larger amount of chatter than what they had to tune out in previous eras. It feels like ignorance, or being "out of the loop," but it's essential.
I plan on repeating the music experiment regularly. I should probably purge some of my "feeds" too.