On Pitchfork, Tom Ewing hits on an interesting question regarding the pop chart in the digital age in his Poptimist column. It is a very long article, and the type size on Pitchfork these days is idiotically small, but far as I can work out by squinting, the article weighs up two things about which Ewing is passionate: the pop charts and the internet.

On the one hand, he says, the British pop charts at their golden, Eighties best were compelling because they provided a national forum for all the trends in popular culture to rub up against each other. The question the chart asked was not '"What's good?" but rather "What gets to be pop?"'. You weren't supposed to like all the music in them, but through the chart, you might discover stuff you never would have otherwise.

On the other hand, the internet is compelling because it allows you to fashion your own little forum for all your interests to rub up against each other - your homepage, your bookmarks list; the likelihood of your coming up against something you wouldn't have otherwise is diminished. So where now can you find that old 'serendipity'?

Ewing also compares the charts to a newspaper - another institution which now struggles for significance in the digital age. In a newspaper, you also find an unruly jumble of surprising things as you turn the pages: crime, fashion show, political scandal, air disaster, banking - just as the chart throws up hip hop, manufactured pop, indie rock, reggae, etc. The question a newspaper ask is simply: "What gets to be news?" If you were to filter your news intake so you only received things you imagined you wanted, you would miss out on a lot of the world. Likewise with pop.

Ewing finds solace in the randomness of Twitter and shared playlists on Spotify - lots of small forums, replacing the one big one we all used to share in the days of Top of the Pops and Smash Hits. But I would say these are still private forums - we miss out on something bigger, that might connect us to stranger strangers.

I think those writers who emerged from the web like Ewing are too taken with the internet as a message in itself. The influential blogger Seth Godin, for example, gleefully predicts a future of free content and the demise of newspapers, replaced by a vast amateur army of people like himself.

What this overlooks, though, is our desire for a communal, national, even global narrative - something that, even as newspaper circulations decline, we are more hungry for than ever.

(As regards newspapers, my friend Seb and I came up with this: imagine if newspapers did not exist, only the internet. And someone (someone bright spark like Godin, perhaps) said: "Why don't we take a cross section of the most interesting stories from this crude soup of stuff on the internet, get some decent writers, you know, ones with knowledge and craft and expertise, to pursue and research them - and package them up in an attractive, easy to use format. No screens - we're sick of screens. We'll print it on something old school, like paper. Nothing obsolete in there. It'll be a premium product. We'll charge less than a pound for it". What a business idea! Well, it beats bottled water - the classic example of making people pay for something should be free - and look how well that's done.)