As long as the internet has Facebook, culture isn't being saved.
The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
71–80 of 129 posts
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we've got the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago, then the industrial revolution about 200 years ago. I can't think of any other separate event of equal impact. And you are suggesting that no only are we currently within a similar scale event (plausible, but hardly proven), and there will another two such magnitude events in the next 200 years? Or are you noting that we, and future generations, will al…
Yes, Ray Kurweil wrote about this. Technological progress increases at a logarithmic rate, so the time between major revolutions becomes smaller and smaller until it is continuous.
That would be exponential rate. Logarithmic means that the curve gets flatter over time, not steeper. :-)
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#73I made music as a hobby for a decade and without the internet no one would have heard any of my music. With the internet, my songs have been played hundreds of thousands of times.
So I'd agree with this. The internet is responsible for my bands success.
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#74Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent livi…
I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read…
With the internet we've also sort of fostered a society that expects some content (music, blog posts, etc) to be dirt-cheap if not free, especially if it does not meet ever-increasing standards. This again leads to a race-to-the-bottom style market where you have to outproduce others to gain a following that might be willing to pay you something.
Is this any different, or even less desirable, than the patronage style of old, where only a relative few obtained artist-in-residence-style support from from the limited market of nobles and moneyed interests (who may have been maintaining stables of artisans as a conspicuous display of wealth rather than a specific interest in the artist or their works)? Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history?
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're wrong. In the 19th century there was a much higher percentage of people who could play rudimentary musical forms. The quality of music and choice available to consumers has increased steadily. People would rather hear the best musicians in the world than the best musicians in their household or neighborhood. There is plenty of historical research on this topic beyond the common sense explanation I'm offering h…
Small towns are where music happens. I live in Western, MA - I can see music every night. If I drive out to a small town in upstate New York, I guarantee you there will be a bar with live music. Even a run down shithole like Poughkeepsie or Catskill has plenty of local bands. Some huge names in music have come from small towns in Georgia or in Ohio or in Michigan. One of the biggest indie record labels is based out o…
I'm a professional musician living in Austin, TX. We are very lucky here to be living in a city that actively subsidizes live music, but this place is exceptional.
At one time there was live music in every single pub in the country, if only just some drunk playing sing-a-longs on one of the ubiquitous pianos of the era. Nowadays the vast majority of restaurants, bars and private gatherings utilize recorded music instead of a live band.
I am most definitely in direct competition with DJs for wedding gigs, and they have less costs and a greater range of song materials to choose from.
Your posts read like someone who is convinced that technological "progress" never has any negative repercussions.
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with the whole notion of news itself. Thinking you can condense geopolitical, environmental, or scientific happenings into short, attention grabbing headlines and relay enough of the issues at play is crazy. Now journalism, I agree with. But it requires time and investment.
Right! We're still mostly locked into the newspaper model of "articles" for factual reporting, despite its complete arbitrariness on the web. I'd love to see journalists experiment with perhaps a more wiki-like model of reporting, where you have one page for a certain topic which gets updated (new stuff at the top or otherwise readily visible).
I would love that.
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#77Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent livi…
I feel like the economy as a whole has been hit by this pattern. Call it "disruption","creative destruction", or whatever, but the general pattern has been that supply has gone up (it's never been easier to create content) while demand has remained constant (only so many eyeballs and so much time). Back then you could grow smoothly since there were always new people to reach, and only so much content for them to read…
This is the whole point of the article - while artists likely had it better in the old situation, from an outside perspective, increased supply == more creation == cultural boom in quantity; ever-increasing standards + larger pool of candidates competing for attention == cultural boom in quality.
Saying that this is killing culture is like saying "nobody ever goes there, it's too crowded". Yes, the growth in supply is killing art as a job, but that's more a sign of a general transformation of all non-horrible jobs towards something that's not paid; as long as the planet has more than enough people who are willing and able to do that thing for free, it won't be a valid source of income except for rare exceptions.
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#78tldr; We've all become patrons of the arts through micro-transactions. Ten years ago, I donated regularly to charities that would enable micro-funding for people living in third-world countries. A $10 donation would buy some chickens for a woman in South America, who could turn a profit on the eggs and eventually pay the loan back. I thought it was a fantastic idea. Today, I find I'm funding everyone's projects. I pa…
But why pay for a book when you're entertaining yourself with streaming music and zombie shows? It is killing culture; just not the culture you care about.
Bet really, why pay for a book when people are choosing streaming music and zombie shows as their preferred medium of culture? If anything, that's an illustration of how culture in total is growing, even if it's killing parts of the culture that you care about.
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see news as a way to give them an introduction to the subject. Very little news actually does that. Watch a TV news program, or read a newspaper, and try to imagine what the call to action is on each story. For most stories, there isn't any, other than "Worry more!" or "Resent these people!" or "Get annoyed!". > Though, I agree it doesn't seem to work well in practice. I wonder what could change to make that happ…
> "if it doesn't have a specific call to action that people can act on if they care about it (and that in practice people do actually act on), it doesn't get published". Although I kind of agree with you, what about problems that don't have a clear, actionable response by most people? Although those are probably rare, I'd personally want to know about them and decide for myself.
Decide what for yourself?
There would be a point if there was a possible actionable response that most people wouldn't want to do, but that would be up to them to decide.
However, if it doesn't have an actionable response, then there's nothing to decide, except whether to experience useless and unproductive worrying or not.
There may be some problems that are not solvable by you but need an organized intervention from a government, but they generally have a clear, actionable response, i.e. act to get elected representatives that will try to solve the problem. However, something that truly doesn't have an actionable response - i.e. "someone slaughtered a dozen schoolkids halfway across the globe" is a viable headline, but not really a problem that can be solved nor (generally) even a useful source of information about risks, as the likely inferred knowledge from titles like these generally has no correlation with reality.
Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It
#80Call me a pessimist, but as a content creator this piece came off as extremely out of touch. Yes: NYT is booming in subscriptions, and Patreon has carved out a nice little niche for supporting podcasters and YouTubers. But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. Before, if you were a writer, you could write for the neighbourhood paper or magazine and carve out a decent livi…
Its comical that Mark Cuban is saying that things like writing will be the jobs of the future after AI automates most jobs away. Writing and music were rendered virtually worthless by 1999, the so called "liberal arts jobs" were actually the first to go.