I remember with stinging clarity the night I first made a Facebook profile. It was July and I was 18, getting ready to go away to college and feeling that exhilarating and terrifying freedom you feel the first time you're about to move to a place where nobody knows your name. This is the summer when you can create and fine-tune the sort of persona you couldn't have gotten away with in high school, when you get that asymmetrical haircut or become the guy who tells time with a pocket watch. You spend time in front of the mirror cultivating a look on your face that says: These things are integral to my identity; I have always been this person. It is as liberating as it is universal, this moment of self-creation. But things were a little different for me and other college-bound teens in the summer of 2005, because it was the first summer that Facebook existed.

In high school, I'd been a bit of a digital snob. I was suspicious of Myspace, with its emphasis on carefully selected photos and pouty self-portraiture-- someone who looked better in a profile picture than in real life was said to have "a case of the angles"-- but I had a Livejournal that I updated almost daily with long, flowery musings about my favorite bands. Of course, I see the irony now: My persona as amateur Livejournal music scribe was suffering a pretty severe case of the angles in its own right. But that July I approached Facebook with trepidation, because there seemed to be something weird and vain and uncomfortably false about describing who I was within the confines of a social media profile. I got excited, though, browsing my school's network of incoming freshmen and seeing how many of them liked the kind of music I liked. (At this point, to get on Facebook you needed an .edu address, which meant no dads, no stalkers, and best of all, no high school students.) As I checked out other people's profiles, I observed an unspoken, enduring rule about listing your musical interests on the internet: curate, don't index. Paint a picture of yourself in sparse, broad strokes. Listing one or two guilty pleasures makes you seem approachable; more than that makes it seem like you have bad taste. Do not be that person who lists every artist on their iPod in alphabetical order under "Favorite Music;" err on the side of omission and mystery. I took note.

I cropped a photo of myself and blotted the red out of my eyes in Photoshop and put a list of about a dozen bands and MCs I liked in the appropriate order. My profile was something that spoke simultaneous truth and illusion, it was both me and not-me. I was terrified of being alone in a new city, but with my "About Me" quote, I could reveal something about my interests while hiding behind Jay-Z's steely braggadocio: He who does not feel me is not real to me therefore he doesn't exist/ So poof, vamoose, sonofabitch.

That August, friend requests and messages from strangers started to pour in. A girl whose profile said we'd live in the same dorm declared that, since I liked Beat Happening and we had the same first name, "Clearly, we should hang out," her gently self-mocking tone making fun of a latent emotional truth while asserting its primacy at the same time. Someone else liked my Jay-Z quote. "That is also my personal motto," he said, in a message before we arrived at school. I said, "You should IM me sometime." He did. Somewhere along the line, this person became one of my best friends.

Years later, I was living in a group house with a couple of people I'd first known because we'd joined a pre-college Facebook group professing our love of Dischord Records. We were spending an evening in my friend's bright orange bedroom drinking cheap beer leftover from our college graduation party, listening to Fugazi records, howling about the fact that this was actually how we met. Facebook had just introduced a new feature that allowed you to view your entire message history with another person in one long, awkward dribble, so we did dramatic readings of the early notes we'd sent to each other that exhilarating summer of 2005, like Shakespearean soliloquies interrupted with nervous shrieks of laughter. We laughed so hard we cried-- because it was funny ("You should, uh, IM me sometime") but also to drown out the feeling of terror and faint shame that we'd been that predictable, that ordinary. That our rich and enduring friendships had begun in algorithms rather than spontaneity. That the broad strokes of our stupid Facebook profiles had revealed so much truth about our identities. This is the world the internet makes: a self-fulfilling, closed-off sphere where he who does not feel us, actually, does not exist.

It can feel like the information overload that defines digital life has taken some of the mystery out of our experiences with art, flicking on a fluorescent light in a world previously made up of shadow.

Perhaps it has something to do with the Mayan calendar, but you would not be hard pressed to find plenty of people who believe that 2012 marks the end of music as we know it. Commonly cited, semi-related reasons include downloading (both pirated and legal) and the widespread (but not absolute) decline of brick-and-mortar record stores; Spotify, Pandora, and the widespread (but not absolute) decline of the terrestrial DJ; Twitter, Facebook, GIFs, and the oatmeal-colored mush they are surely making of our synapses; Kickstarter; comments-section democracy; the fact that someone reportedly gave Kreayshawn $1 million to make a record; the fact that a whole bunch of people gave Amanda Palmer $1.2 million to make a record; the fact that there were seemingly more people who wrote think-pieces about Kreayshawn's $1 million record deal than people who bought it-- basically a whole amalgamation of phenomena that can be abbreviated as The Internet.

Every day, we read some study about how the internet is making us lonely, eroding our attention spans, and destroying our writing skills, along with our conceptions of morality, empathy, romance, mystery, creativity, and any number of other things that we once valued as a society. It can sometimes feel like the hyper-connectedness and perpetual information overload that define digital life have taken some of the mystery out of our experiences with art and the spontaneity of our encounters with other people, flicking on an overhead fluorescent light in a world previously made up of shadow.

I thought of this while watching Searching for Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul's new documentary about the cult folk singer Rodriguez. Sugar Man is also a story, implicitly, about the internet-- its simultaneous power to forge unlikely connections, uncover secrets, and snuff out fantasy in place of cold facts.

In 1997, a record store owner in Cape Town, South Africa, named Stephen "Sugar" Segerman set up a website called The Great Rodriguez Hunt. He was searching for information about Jesus Rodriguez, a mysterious psychedelic folk singer from Detroit, whose two early 1970s records, Cold Fact and Coming From Reality, had flopped spectacularly in the U.S. but became enormous cult hits in South Africa during the waning years of apartheid. In the late 70s, Rodriguez was rumored to have killed himself on stage at a sparsely-attended, heckler-ridden gig. Some fans claimed he shot himself in the head, others chose to believe the particularly gruesome tale that he'd doused himself in kerosene and struck a match. Nobody knew for sure-- it was too hard to find someone who'd actually been at the show.

So, after years of conjecture and private mythologizing, Segerman wanted the facts. "We are no longer satisfied with urban legend... With the aid of these pages, we hope to establish a 'Rodriguez hotline,' and find the whereabouts and life story of this mystical figure of urban folklore," he wrote on a starkly designed page, illustrated with an image he'd made of Rodriguez's face on a milk carton. "If you see the man in a 711 with Elvis somewhere in downtown Johannesburg, you know who to contact."

It worked. A little while later, a message appeared on the Rodriguez forum from a woman in the States: "Do you really want to know about my father? Sometimes a fantasy is better left alive."

Of course, he did really want to know. So she passed on some earth-shatteringly good news: Rodriguez was still breathing, and yes, he was interested in touring South Africa for the first time. So over the following year, Segerman helped set up a series of performances (documented in the aptly-titled film Dead Men Don't Tour) where he played a concert to thousands of people who, up until now, had identified with and loved his music fiercely despite knowing next to nothing about the man who made it.

The fantasy, of course, is no longer alive, but something new emerges in its place. Writing about Sugar Man, The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin observes, "While something important is invariably lost when the intriguing unknowable becomes known, something wonderful can also be gained as well. Rodriguez seemed happy to have been found and appreciated as the audience was grateful to have him back."

As I look at an archived version of Segerman's original Great Rodriguez Hunt website, now hosted on the singer's own official page, I too feel a gratitude for the connection that this modest destination forged between fan and forgotten folkie, and also a weird nostalgia for the way the internet looked in 1997; the site's somewhat crude design reminds me of the web pages I used to make back when I was teaching myself HTML as a pre-teen in the late 90s.

These mixed feelings lead me to a think: What if this isn't the end of music as we know it? And what if it is actually the opposite of the end? Hear me out.

Every generation has to deal with whines claiming "there are no new ideas left!" But looking at the internet-fueled changes happening in indie music, I find it hard to hop aboard that bandwagon.

I'm not an unequivocal cheerleader of digital life-- I know very few people who are. As I wrote in an essay about TLC's 1999 album Fanmail earlier this year, most of this music also grapples with "the loneliness of constant connectedness, and how the more time we spend in the digital world, the more we fetishize the real." But there's even something revolutionary about acknowledging those feelings as real-- an assertion we hear in the music of artists as disparate as Drake, Grimes, Elite Gymnastics, Kitty Pryde, Robyn, Kreayshawn, Maria Minerva, Chippy Nonstop, Charli XCX, Azaelia Banks, Frank Ocean, and so many more.

Every generation has to deal with whines of declinism and naysayers claiming "there are no new ideas left!" But looking at the monumental, internet-fueled changes happening in indie music, I find it hard to hop aboard that particular bandwagon. Right now, we are watching a ton of interesting dynamics play out: an unprecedented erosion of the divisions between mainstream and the underground, the decline of rockism, the formation of alternative canons (consider this recent quote from the Tumblr-savvy James Brooks from Elite Gymnastics: "I'm trying to rebuild my own canon where Joy Division or Radiohead doesn't matter but Tori Amos or Sarah McLachlan or the Spice Girls or George Michael or Des'ree or the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack do"), the rise of openly queer voices in subcultures where they'd not been welcome, major changes in the way we think of sexual identity, a new generation re-imagining feminism, the fine art of a well-placed GIF or an artist's magnificently curated Tumblr.

Up until very recently, I'd recount my online experiences with some degree of shame or sheepishness, but in this apocalyptic year of 2012, that embarrassment is beginning to fall by the wayside. I've been having more and more conversations with people grappling with what is gained and lost by how some of our most meaningful musical discoveries-- not to mention life experiences-- have happened in front of, or facilitated by, screens. We're starting to come to terms with the fact that modern life is a constant, awkward/elegant oscillation between the digital and physical, faces and FaceTime, and we're starting to hear music that reflects this reality, the beginnings of a new ordinary.