If you have the music service Spotify and you want to listen to the Jason Derulo song featuring Snoop Dogg called “Wiggle,” all you have to do is type “Wiggle” into the search box, and when it comes up, you press play, and that’s all there is to it.
I fully recognize that I’m making a rather large assumption about your musical tastes, but stay with me.
The song “Wiggle” will start playing, complete with semi-risque lyrics, including, “You know what to do with that big fat butt/Wiggle wiggle wiggle.” And this one: “Patty cake patty cake with no hands, got me in this club making wedding plans,” which manages to be both pro-twerking and old-fashioned at the same time. But you can’t really complain because you’re the one who asked to hear it in the first place.
That’s basically the way all media work now. If you want to hear something or watch something, all you do is type in the most distinctive word — in this case, it’s probably “wiggle” — and then the automatic atomic-age electronic computing machines at Spotify or Apple Music (or YouTube or TikTok or wherever) find what you’re looking for and serve it up.
That simple request, though, will create a cascade of activity behind the scenes. The auto-brains at whatever service you’re using will assemble a list of more things, including songs, shows, videos, and products, that someone like you might be interested in. Often these related items will begin to play right after whatever it is that you searched for is over.
And if you buy something online, you’ll be served an endless series of “You May Also Like” messages.
We’ve all had the experience of ordering something from, say, Amazon, maybe something of a personal nature, maybe something psychologically easier to order anonymously than to carry up to the cashier at the CVS, and be reminded, each time we click over to that site, that there are lots of other personal, mortifying things we might be interested in.
Last week, for instance, I was writing a scene for a new project I’m working on in which one of the characters goes into labor. I have been pretty scrupulously ignorant of the exact process that ensues when a woman gives birth — not sure exactly what happens, and not sure I want to know — but in order to give the scene some specific authenticity, I went to Google and entered the following words into the text box: “giving birth process labor female body key moments phases.”
I got the information I needed, but I also triggered an avalanche of advertising.
My online experience for the past seven days has been an unremitting series of explicit, graphic, and context-less advertisements for pregnancy and birth-related products. Often, they are with photographs that take several minutes to decipher. But it’s my fault because I was the one who signaled with my search terms that I am a pregnant woman with questions about the process.
We’re just trying to be helpful, Google or Amazon or Spotify will say. We’re just trying to serve up relevant content.
If you enter “Wiggle” into a music search box, with the first click, you’ll probably start to hear Jason Derulo featuring Snoop Dogg, singing, “Hot damn it/Your booty like two planets/Go head, and go ham sammich/Whoa, I can’t stand it.”
The problem is that when it’s over, you get to hear another song called “Wiggle.” That’s how these things work. You’ve been identified as someone who likes songs called “Wiggle.”
The first “Wiggle” will end, and another song called “Wiggle” will immediately begin, although this time it’s “Wiggle!” with an exclamation point from a children’s album called Music Together. The lyrics are quite different. Mostly it’s just someone singing in a classic, cheerful children’s music voice, “Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wig-wig-gle.”
I mean, it’s not bad. But it’s not exactly what you’re searching for. And it’s yet another example of very smart machines making very dumb mistakes.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
