How Taste is Developed in the New Age of the Internet: What screens can’t capture
Cover by Lauren Dorman
Taste isn't just liking what you like. It's understanding why you like it, recognizing its context, and being able to place it within a larger cultural conversation.
Throughout my life, I've noticed how taste functions both as personal expression and social dialogue. Growing up between different cultural spaces taught me that taste is rarely just about aesthetics—it's about literacy in a specific cultural language. Historically, taste was a fairly straightforward marker of class—a way to signal social position through consumption and appreciation. The ability to recognize and value certain objects, art, or experiences was deliberately cultivated to maintain social boundaries. Cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu called this "cultural capital," the accumulated knowledge that confers power and status.
But taste now functions in more complex ways. It's still about distinction, but the boundaries have blurred. The democratizing effect of the internet has created new pathways to developing taste that don't necessarily run through traditional institutions. You no longer need to attend certain schools or move in certain circles to develop sophisticated taste. What you need instead is time, attention, and intention.
Depth as the last true scarcity
What's becoming clear is that developed taste still matters, perhaps more than ever. In a landscape where surface-level aesthetics are easily reproduced, depth becomes the foundation that template-driven taste lacks.
I remember spending months researching Issey Miyake—not just his runway collections, but diving into his textile innovations, understanding his philosophical approach to form, and the historical context of his work in post-war Japan. The difference wasn't just learning what was considered "good design," but understanding why his approach to material represented a fundamental shift in how clothing could relate to the human body. That kind of context—historical, technical, philosophical—can't be algorithmically recommended or distilled into a single image.
Intentional taste development—the willingness to spend time with things, to study their details, to understand their origins—serves as a form of resistance to algorithmic filtering. It's about asserting human discernment in a system increasingly designed to predict and shape preferences.
When algorithms flatten cultural context
Technology, particularly social platforms like Instagram, has fundamentally altered how taste operates. The immediate access to visual culture from around the world has created both opportunity and distortion.
On one hand, this access allows people to discover aesthetic traditions and objects they might never have encountered otherwise. Someone in a small town can develop a sophisticated understanding of New African textiles through careful research.
But there's a flattening that happens through the screen. Context collapses. Historical progression compresses into a grid, endlessly scrollable feed. The algorithm serves up what it thinks you'll like based on what you've liked before, creating taste bubbles that feel diverse but actually solidify existing preferences.
What's lost is the tactile, experiential dimension of taste development. The feeling of a perfectly weighted object in your hand. The impact of actually walking into a thoughtfully designed space. The social context of experiencing culture alongside others. These aspects of taste formation can't be digitized, yet they're essential to developing the kind of deep, intuitive understanding that constitutes true discernment.
The empty aesthetics of digital curation
USM Haller pictured in three homes, representing “AirSpace”
We now inhabit a cultural environment where taste acquisition has been decoupled from taste development. Follow the right accounts, save the right images, purchase from the right brands, and you can present a curated sensibility that approximates developed taste. But this copy/paste approach inevitably produces something that feels studied rather than integrated.
Working alongside emerging designers taught me how challenging this distinction can be. Many of us, myself included, went through phases where our work checked all the technical boxes but hadn't yet found its center. The journey from skillfully referencing influences to developing a coherent voice marks the difference between designers who know what's good and those who understand why it matters.
The compression of taste development transforms curation into a strange paradox. More people than ever have access to sophisticated visual and material cultures, yet there's a growing homogeneity in how that access manifests. Cultural critic Kyle Chayka calls this phenomenon "AirSpace"—that strange sameness of minimalist, Instagram-ready spaces from Brooklyn to Singapore. The same "carefully curated" aesthetics appear across continents. The same objects signal the same values to the same audiences. As Chayka notes, this isn't just aesthetic convergence but a flattening of cultural context that happens when visual styles circulate divorced from their origins.
There's a template quality to contemporary taste that reveals how shallow it has become. Without the years of obsession, the false starts, the evolution of preferences, neo-taste often feels like an assembled collection following a predictable formula—insert trendy designer, reference an obscure drop or release, finish with a carefully positioned statement piece. The result looks curated but lacks the soul that comes from genuine understanding.
Those who've developed taste through traditional means can usually spot the difference. There's a fluency that comes from lived experience that can't be copied. Real taste has contradictions and choices. It reflects personal history and individual perspective. It can sustain itself beyond surface-level appearances.
How taste became a new marketplace
As taste becomes increasingly visible and easily reproduced, its value as cultural capital shifts. Being able to identify quality or recognize significant objects isn't enough when that information is freely available. What becomes valuable instead is the ability to contextualize, to create frameworks, to develop a balanced point of view.
I've observed the emergence of a taste economy that operates alongside the creator economy. If the creator economy is about producing content, the taste economy is about determining what's worth consuming. Curators, critics, and tastemakers have always existed, but their role is evolving in the digital landscape.
Apps like Doji, an AI-powered clothing try-on platform, represent an interesting development in this space. By focusing on brands like Satoshi Nakamoto and Post Archive Faction, they're creating a bridge between specialized communities and broader audiences. There's a taste arbitrage happening—the app both validates existing taste hierarchies while making them more accessible.
This points to a critical tension in contemporary taste: distinction requires scarcity, yet digital platforms are built on abundance and accessibility. How do you maintain the value of discernment when everyone has access to the same information? The answer seems to lie in reintroducing forms of scarcity—limited drops, exclusive access, algorithmic obscurity that requires insider knowledge to navigate. I've watched this evolve since my early days in streetwear culture, where limited runs, insider knowledge, and community-based access created similar dynamics long before digital platforms. What we're witnessing now is the application of streetwear's scarcity model across the broader cultural landscape.
Resistance through intentional discernment
The relationship between physical objects and their digital representations will likely play a crucial role. As more of our consumption becomes virtual, will taste become more about information architecture than material culture? Or will there be a renewed emphasis on the physical as a form of resistance to digital flattening?
Community may be the antidote to algorithmic homogenization. Taste-led communities like Swang demonstrate how cultural connections can thrive—built around shared sensibilities but diverse enough to generate friction and evolution. These communities preserve the developmental aspect of taste that algorithms tend to bypass. These communities create their own criteria for value and quality that exist outside mainstream commercial frameworks.
The most interesting possibility is that new forms of taste development might emerge alongside AI rather than in opposition to it. While algorithms can help identify patterns and make connections I might otherwise miss, they still can't replicate the visceral feeling of physically encountering a perfectly executed design. Perhaps AI becomes a tool for accelerating certain phases of taste development while humans focus on the aspects that require embodied experience and social context.
The slow road to authentic taste
The future of taste isn't about holding onto outdated notions of highbrow culture or exclusionary boundaries. It's about preserving the depth and complexity that makes cultural engagement meaningful in the first place. It's about developing the ability to recognize quality, to understand context, and to place objects and aesthetics within larger cultural narratives.
Taste will always exist at the intersection of personal sensibility and social positioning. The challenge now is to develop forms of taste that acknowledge this duality without succumbing to empty signifiers or algorithmic determination. I've made it a practice to engage in daily acts of attention—noticing details, asking why certain taste markers circulate in particular ways—not to exclude others, but to see more deeply into what makes certain things resonate across time and circumstance.
I've found that developing meaningful taste requires commitment over time. What screens initially reveal, physical spaces ultimately explain—a pattern I've observed across every creative discipline I've explored. I've spent countless hours in libraries, galleries, and studios—each experience building upon the last. The journey from recognition to understanding requires showing up repeatedly, paying attention to subtle details, and being willing to see what others miss. In a world increasingly designed for skimming, the willingness to go deeper isn't just about aesthetics—it's about preserving a way of engaging with culture that recognizes its complexity and honors its depth.