"The Paradox Of Choice"

Recently, I have been reading “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less), a book that asks the question of whether the astounding amount of choice today’s world offers is truly helping us. I am only several chapters in, but I can already make several complaints about his writing and claims.

The first section of this book is dedicated to outlining ways that choice has expanded exponentially in our lives. It’s not exactly an exciting start, but I’ll get into that more later. One claim he made really stuck out to me. He mentioned TV shows and how the amount of them has simply exploded since the TV was introduced, eventually mentioning TiVo as another way that our choice has expanded. After all that, he claims that with all the choice available, “American TV viewers will be struggling to find a shared TV experience.” I found this statement to be highly objectionable. The most popular TV shows get millions of viewers. Finding someone at school who doesn’t at least know about the Big Bang Theory is quickly becoming impossible. Also, with the popularity of Facebook, being able to share in a show is exponentially easier. He made a similar claim with college too, saying that the lack of core courses was leading to a lack of a shared experience among young adults. Well, I thought, some colleges have upwards of 8,000 students. For each graduating class, that’s 2,000 students. No matter how many core classes you share, no one can really bond with 2,000 people. Psychologically, the average person can only form deep relationships with about 150 people.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Mr. Schwartz probably has a valid point about choice, it just seems that it fits better for consumer choices rather than cultural or educational.

My second complaint involves the structure of the book. As I mentioned above, the book starts off simply listing ways that modern America has too many choices. Unfortunately, this gets rather tedious pretty quickly. He seems to be saying basically the same thing over and over, simply replacing what exactly he’s talking about without really altering the point of each section. Not only is it boring, it seems like kind of a waste being put here. It would make much more sense to me to save all of these statistics and claims to use in a more anecdotal way later on in the book. Used that way, it seems like it could add some validity and variety to a section that is perhaps more theoretical or psychological. As is, it’s just kind of boring.