Comment by vouaobrasil
3 months ago
On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. In general, it's a good idea to consume less media anyway.
On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions. Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members. So for example: photo exhibitions, short film screenings, art galleries, all tailored to local productions.
Personally, I have no interest in the formulaic garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void.
> On an individual level, the way to solve it is to stop watching the popular stuff and go with indie-made things. On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
The reason this situation has come to be is because of the newsfeed algorithms (pick your app) that sanitize or destroy local and niche influence/barriers and create a deep downhill rut towards amalgamated culture.
If our feeds only showed us what our followers post, the way it used to be, as opposed to showing us not-so-random content from all across the country/world, we wouldn’t have this problem so severely
Sounds a bit pessimistic. It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic. Moreover, alternative ways of getting money have appeared: patreon, kickstarter, various donation websites, partnerships...
On top of that there are still countless communities, free of any monetized algorithm, thanks to forums and things like discord.
So I think that it's more "tenable" than ever, and I don't thing that the cultural situation is worse than it was before, actually I think it's way better. It's just so easy to find a new think to dive into, connect to other hobbyists, discuss it, and for the most motivated, create content.
> Sounds a bit pessimistic.
And legitimately so.
> It has never been that easy to create music, videogames, produce videos, comics, and distribute them. Nowadays basically anyone can do it, so the amount of content available is gigantic.
And they all compete in one giant global marketplace, which often undermines the viability of "local productions."
There's probably some counter-intuitive principle that infinite choice has a homogenizing effect. It's probably because people generally lazy, but historically have lived in environments with more barriers to that laziness that kept it in check (e.g. no one's becoming a solo game playing hikikomori in 1800, because they'd quickly become bored out of their minds). In the past local culture was unavoidable and required no special effort, because of travel and communication barriers. How the travel and communication barriers are gone, which means local culture requires special effort to maintain, and the lazy will hook into the homogenized culture that requires less effort.
> On top of that there are still countless communities, free or any monetized algorithms, thanks to forums and things like discord.
IIRC, forums have been dying off for a decade or more.
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The problem with discord is that there is no permanence or visibility to it on the open internet. This is both good and bad. You can't search for problems you are trying to solve unless you are part of that discord server. Communities can get deleted and that's that. On the other hand it is more private and there is a direct connection rather than waiting for people to respond to your post.
The problem is same as it has always been, getting old.
I have got old now and the medium of artistic expression that young people are into is not the same as when I was young.
In 40 years old people will complain no one makes crazy tiktok videos like they use to.
Of course in the moment, no one considers social media videos art. Just like at one point rap was noise, rock music was noise, the electric guitar was noise. William S Burroughs, jazz, blues, on and on back.
Same narrative over and over by old people. "My youth was filled with high art while kids these days like such trash."
> You’re not wrong, but these are mostly untenable solutions at present.
In the past, it was a lot worse. There was a lot more "shared culture" that seemingly everyone tuned in to, that you kind of had to grin and bear. If you didn't know what happened on Seinfeld last night (90s), or on the Simpsons (2000s), or Game of Thrones (2010s), then you really had nothing to talk about at the water cooler. Nowadays, there really isn't much popular stuff that -everyone- watches, so it's easier than ever to drop that popular stuff.
A sticky notable exception is still national sports. There's still so much shared pop culture in knowing what the local city's Sportsball team sportsed about during last night's game that you have to kind of put up with if you want to socialize at the water cooler.
It both was and wasn't back then. The large pop culture establishment was definitely more shared, TV, film and music for sure. But at the same time you also had more thriving regional culture. There were many musicians who became popular on a regional level and toured medium sized venues in the time before the internet. You don't see that anymore. Indie artists today have more diffused fan bases which makes profitable touring more difficult, among other things like the ticketmaster monopoly. Niche interests were also more localized and personal with small clubs instead of internet based forums like today. That's both a good and bad thing. I think the nature of things has changed but not in a way where you can say definitively everything is more homogenous or heterogeneous.
The way it used to be was that, if you wanted a newsfeed, you had to pay a curation company to print you off some stories and leave them on your doorstep in the morning. The era of non-algorithmic social media feeds was maybe 5 years long if I’m being generous, and I’m skeptical it could have become load bearing in that time.
Somebody should make content selection algorithm customizable by users.
There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore. I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived. That suggestion is entirely untenable.
Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either. The same old hero story with a black or gay protagonist is not suddenly more interesting, yet that's a large portion of what's coming out of the indie scene.
In the US, there is no solution. We are all shackled to the cultural carcass that is late modernity. Retelling the same stories we have for decades, just with different colors.
> There is no "local community," so there is no local production in any meaningful sense anymore.
This is absolutely not true everywhere in the US. In every place I've lived, there has been local community. More vibrant in some places than others, but always there.
I can't know if that's the case in all parts of the US, but I suspect it's true in the majority.
> I am nothing like my neighbors, never have been, and have never known very much about them in any of the places I've lived.
Perhaps you've been opting not to engage with the local communities you've been in?
Communities that are local =/= local community in a general sense. There are in some places participatory communities that (often older, middle class, family-oriented) people participate in, but I'm not sure those organizations can meaningfully be said to represent the localities they are present in.
When there's a loneliness epidemic that is especially pronounced with young people, it seems really silly to act like local community is a general institution that most people actively participate in. It might be true in your neck of the woods. It is certainly not in mine.
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>Many indie works suffer from the same formulaic failings as popular works, so that doesn't seem like a solution either
I think the indie scene for a lot of media is a lot less 'independent' than we might think. This became obvious to me when I noticed the absolutely insane fights that happened on Twitter surrounding young adult literature. (Eg https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...)
Science fiction and fantasy seem to be doing something a bit similar.
I think if you want more independent writers you'll have to go to places like Royalroad or /r/hfy or scribblehub.
Local community continues to exist even though you choose not to participate in it.
> Those will never get popular, but at least the local community will gain a better sense of connection through the artistic expressions of their community members.
I assume you're just spitballing here. Still: what you've proposed often produces an artistic process that is possibly worse than the oligopoly you're attempting to oppose.
Prioritizing "a better sense of connection" through artistic expression is a recipe for manipulating artists into giving away their time (and, perhaps, art) for free or close to it. Moreover, de-emphasizing popularity means the local production has less money coming in. Too few dollars chasing "a better sense of connection" essentially means you'll optimized for the most manipulative ego-maniacs to hound local artists to mentor and make art for less than what they are worth.
Worst of all, the artists who get manipulated and burned out by this process aren't the ones who would have produced "garbage coming from the pseudo-anonymous void." They're the ones who would have done local community productions that have enough money to pay a minimally decent amount of money to artists. Ironically, you end up with less enthusiasm for the kind of art you're wanting to produce.
Whoa, what a weird take. I'm talking about stuff like starting a local photo club/drawing club/etc and sharing your work with like-minded people and starting exhibitions in your local town. Voluntary.
You make it sound like some weird manipulation scheme. Sounds like you've never actually done anything like this in real life.
> On a cultural level, the key is to promote local productions.
If an important selling point for a media product is that it’s locally produced, then it’s probably bad (as local productions usually are).
The real solution imo is just to consume less media. If consuming media takes up a significant portion of your time, then to me that sounds like a fundamentally boring life. I’d recommend one should fix their boring life problem before they start worrying about their boring media problem.
Books are media too. I've been an avid reader from early childhood and I don't consider my life boring. I guess what a "boring life" is, is up to every individual.
That's a fair point about books. But even then, I simply can't relate to a life that revolves around consuming media. There's a lot of great movies and TV shows as well, but I don't know how you can spend so much time watching TV (or even reading books) that you run out of stuff to watch (or read), and still manage to lead a rewarding life.
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Have you ever bought or sought out to buy a "local book"?
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1) Was ZZ Top bad? Was Pantera bad?
I chose those two because they were fairly famous local acts in Texas long before they became nationally famous.
ZZ Top in particular used to open for a lot of bands who would tour Texas. They were noted for bringing along a set of local fans who would help sell tickets for your tour.
2) One must suck before one gets good
If you can't make a living while you notionally "suck", you lose the pipeline to "good". I would, in fact, argue that this is really what is dragging down a lot of our "pop culture" right now. We are finally seeing the results of that pipeline collapsing around Y2K.
We are on matrix or discord sharing art and performing for each other.