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The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

nytimes.com

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Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#101

Post by [deleted] »

l33tbro wrote: post #84
PeterisP wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This what I find frightening about the landscape we're moving into. When the emphasis becomes on the volume of your content and how fast it can be produced, the overall artistic output of a culture suffers because there's no system to support artists doing 'deep work'. So it's difficult to agree with your point that increasing standards and a larger pool of candidates create more quality. In my experience, quality ar…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#102

Post by dinglejungle »

codexjourneys wrote: post #93
fluxic wrote: post #32

Call 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…

Was discussing this with a friend, why Patreon seems so much more difficult than Kickstarter. Kickstarter has as its premise, "Make this cool thing happen." It's a specific product (usually) with a specific outcome, and contributors may feel invested in achieving that outcome. Patreon has as its premise, "Support this artist" (in many cases). It's more abstract, not tied to a particular product necessarily, and contr…

https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606295-What...

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#103

Post by [deleted] »

fluxic wrote: post #32

Call 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…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#104

Post by visarga »

dasil003 wrote: post #51
fluxic wrote: post #32

Call 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…

The landscape is shifting yes, and it's harder to make money. But consider that the last 150 years of mass literacy and spare time to consume vast quantities of media is already a historical anomaly. If you look at the sheer quantity of culture produced and consumed, it's hard to see it as anything but a golden age. The fact that it's harder to make money in these conditions makes perfect economic sense. But on the p…

People can care for their own needs, or team up to care for the needs of their community. There is still work to do. Some communities could become self reliant, also making use of technologies such as 3d-printing, automation and solar panels. It would make people the creators of their own future, instead of passive recipients.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#105

Post by ska »

Kiro wrote: post #27
ska wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is the proposal OP was making. It isn't proven out yet but I did not it is plausible that the impact will be that large. Do you see two more such (distinct) events in the next 200 years? To me that is completely implausible, so was trying to determine if I had misread.

It's exponential. -10 000, -200, 0, 50, 55

Pretty strong claim :)

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#106

Post by timthelion »

Eridrus wrote: post #69
edmccard wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years. I was thinking about this in the context of the John Wanamaker quote -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". If online advertising becomes perfectly efficient, that might lead to a 50% (or more) reduction in the amount of funding available for ad-supported content.

I disagree. This would increase the value of the useful impressions and increase the demand for advertising from niche players who can now effectively target their market.

Totally agree with you. Right now, half the time and money that I invest in repairing the 100 year old house I'm living in is wasted due to poor quality workers. If the workers were higher quality, I'd probably spend more money not less (especially calculating in the fact that getting the reconstruction done faster could mean more rental income thus more money to spend). The same is with advertising.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#107

Post by erikpukinskis »

ska wrote: post #12
relics443 wrote: post #3

I feel like 200 years from now, our times will be viewed as something akin to the industrial revolution. Recency bias makes us feel as if we're more important in history, but 200 years is a long time. I'm sure there'll be another "revolution" or two in that time. And the people of that time will probably consider it to be the most pivotal revolution yet. History folks. It repeats itself.

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…

> 10000, 200, 20

You don't notice the pattern? The first big bump was 10,000 years go. The next one was 200 years ago. The third one was 20 years ago. It does seem like it takes less an less time for the world to work out what's unnecessary about social organizations. If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week.

Frankly, I think we're already in the once-a-year period it's just that profound social shifts aren't quite as newsworthy as they were in the nineties. And the adoption curves are still on the order of decades, so while there's a new game changing structures every year, it still takes 20 years for it to disseminate. But the successor to a structure is getting created almost faster than the original is getting disseminated.

This is why people talk about the singularity. If these trends continue, it means we're headed towards a moment of "max everything". Opinions differ on what max everything will look like. I don't think "AI superintelligence" will be a thing, others do. But it doesn't seem crazy to expect things will look very alien.

We're headed towards one, globally connected, mind. Some will opt in, and life will look very different for them. Some will opt out and things will more or less freeze in a vaguely 20th century form. So I guess in that sense "everything will be different" and "nothing will change" are both right, depending on what kinds of person you are.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#109

Post by ABCLAW »

patrickaljord wrote: post #81
randomgyatwork wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook, Twitter, Snap should be co-operatives of some sort, the users are creating the value, at least the popular ones, so they should be rewarded within the system for their continued support and audience development.

Why do you think users of these services create value for free? Maybe it's because the value created for free is less than the value they get out of using these services they create free value for. It is true that these services get money thanks to the aggregated value that is created by all their users but let's take facebook for example, they only make $48.76 per user per year as of 2015 [1]. If they were to pay th…

I believe you may have some fatal unstated assumptions in there.

The co-op concept doesn't require equal distribution of proceeds to participants. Nor does it require that the net distribution of proceeds equal the total value per user. Nor is incentivizing value creation on your platform a zero-sum game between facebook and content creators.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#110

Post by paganel »

fluxic wrote: post #32

Call 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…

> Literary magazine sales are non-existent.

"To every age its art", as they wrote on some building in Vienna in the early 1900s. That is to say that maybe the literature represented by novels (and the associated ecosystem, like literary magazines) is behind us, there's nothing wrong with other art forms (video games, memes, twitter messages, social media posts, vlogs) taking its place. The same as classical music is almost dead, the art of painting is being confined to museums, cinema as we used to know it having been replaced by comics-related marketing materials and some made-for-fancy-festivals movies that nobody watches (thank God for TV series that have replaced what cinema used to be) etc etc.

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