The World Isn't Small

With 8 billion of us, new approaches are needed to keep folks connected. Curated media playlists can help.

Today humanity hit a new milestone, with the UN projecting a population size of eight billion people. Many are reflecting on what this means for resources on the earth, and these questions are valid and intereting. Personally, I’ve been more concerned about what this means for our abilities to care for each other.

We’re taught the world is small, but I’m not sure this was ever true. I’ve spent the past couple years visiting hundreds of cities in dozens of countries across several continents, and smallness is only there for those who deliberately seek it. The world I’ve seen is vast and diverse and complex, and even then I’ve seen only a small slice. The “small world” model led me to underestimate the size of my own blindspots, and I fear it may not prepare the people of our planet for the big challenges we will have ahead of us.

A Media Diet for a Complex World

For a decade of my life, I was fortunate to conduct research with leading global media companies (television networks, movie studios, gaming companies, video and audio streaming services), and across hundreds of experimental studies, I witnessed the power of media to shape attitudes and ideas. That experience made me curious about how my own media choices could help me add sophistication and granularity to my own mental model of the world.

Over the past few years I’ve been experimenting with my own media consumption, and one goal I set for myself was making the music I consume more representative of the world population. I set an endgoal to create a playlist with one song for every 100 million people on the planet. The concept was that such a playlist could help me cultivate a more broad-based species-consciousness. Hits for humanists. Jams from other lands. Tunes from other terrains. Verses from other vantage points, choruses from other cultures, bops beyond borders. A more populist pop list. You get it.

The first playlist is live today. I still may tweak the sequence of songs to improve broader flow, but I wanted to at least make the music available to recognize our latest unlocked population achievement. It’s a place to start, and I’ll share more about how and why I picked these songs in the coming weeks.

Where We Go From Here

There’s much more still to do! The playlist I’ve created is really just a proof of concept with much room for improvement and expansion. Over the next year or so, I hope to explore the following with subscribers.

• More Playlists: This first playlist was a proof concept, and I plan to share monthly playlists that take different approaches with the same global connectivity goal. Sometimes playlists will be organized around a specific musical genre or theme. I would also like to try playlists from different media forms.

• Liner Notes: Consuming media from new environments can be challenging, and I want to provide context for playlists. In some cases this may be my personal experience of the media and what I appreciate, but where possible I will provide primary sources from relevant local voices. I’d like to get to a point where this newsletter raises funds for supplemental research like interviews and surveys that I can share with the community.

• Theory & Methodology: There’s a lot that goes into trying summarize . I currently am using a set of nested segmentations I call Billionishes, 亿gions and करोड़munities, which I’d like to articulate and get more feedback on. I’d also like to transparently investigate some of the challenges in crafting globally representative media canon across a variety of dimensions of identity.

This is a journey that I expect will be fulfilling even if I venture alone, and a publication schedule can provide a structure and accountability system that is useful to me. That said, if this project seems interesting to you, please subscribe to join me! I’d love to see how others might apply this framework to create their own playlists and further their own development, and any feedback through this would enhance my perspective.

I look forward to sharing new songs and old stories. Thanks for your consideration.

Happy Listening,

~H