Comment by hammock
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. 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.
I have this occasional daydream of two internets, one global (the one we all know and love), and one local, where you can only see content from within a 10 mile radius.
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> no one's becoming a solo game playing hikikomori in 1800
John Bentinck, fifth Duke of Portland? He had England's biggest ballroom built, and a billiard room with multiple billiard tables, but never threw a party, hated meeting people, and lived underground. He had all the above ground rooms in Welbeck Abbey painted bright pink, with a toilet in the corner of each one. Any workman who acknowledged he existed was dismissed.
> IIRC, forums have been dying off for a decade or more.
And they'll keep "dying off" for many more decades.
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.