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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#251

Post by pier25 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #120
pier25 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same that has always happened. Human groups tend to become homogeneous because this helps survival. The difference is now the cultural bubble is global and of course it's completely irrelevant for survival.

No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way. Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today. I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just li…

> Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago

Precisely.

150 years ago, countries lived in their own cultural bubble because communication was much slower and mostly limited to local information. Or look at ancient societies which had their own homogenous culture compared to other cultures (eg: Ancient Greece vs Aztecs).

I think it's fair to say that today with globalization and the internet, we're really getting into what McLuhan denominated the global village. Instagram is a good example of this.

Re: The age of average

#252

Post by 411111111111111 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #237
crazygringo wrote: post #123

What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…

On the contrary! There is a key difference going from "convergence" to "conformity": circular reasoning. People who need to sell the thing they invent, tell themselves that "convergence" is the best way there. Customers like familiar traits. So they design for intentional convergence, and that is the essence of conformity. 99.99999% of keyboards are the same physical layout. This layout is a standard that conforms to…

They're only the same if you're taking an extremely reductive approach to them... And at that point you could also say that "99.99999%%" of Smartphones are the same, wherever they're iPhones, Androids or windows from a dacades ago. They're all rectangular devices with a large screen and touch input after all.

Re: The age of average

#253

Post by pier25 »

nonbirithm wrote: post #142
tsunamifury wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not and stop trying to be smarter by saying it’s always been this way. Go look at art of different societies from as near as 150 years ago. Spanish, French, English, and American fashion, architecture, and style are wildly different compared to the sea of homeginity of today. I am tired of hacker news for always having these shallow “smarter than you” sage comments that completely miss the point. It’s just li…

I think he means globalization. All those cultures were probably homogeneous to some extent in their own isolated bubbles. The thing that changed was near-instant global communication. When most people in each society had full visibility into the standards/cultures of other societies, their definitions of an ideal society converged based on the new information.

Yes this exactly.

Re: The age of average

#255

Post by burlesona »

One thing that a lot of people don’t notice is that this is the result of mass manufacturing replacing craft. People want good products that are cheap, and mass manufacturing creates them. Things made in a factory at scale are always cheaper and can even be better quality than low-scale goods. But once companies have sunk the capital into the factory that can churn this stuff out, they want to keep making the same stuff, not retooling and redesigning the factory. So minor changes occur but the basic template becomes very rigid. Once you start looking for it the factory-goods stubbornness to change is everywhere.

I think this is just the consequence of making things at scale. Society as a whole benefits: most people have more and better stuff relative to their wealth level than people in the past. But craftsmanship disappears or becomes substantially more expensive, and with it the diversity and range of design fades away.

Re: The age of average

#257

Post by JohnFen »

crazygringo wrote: post #123

What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…

> Can't we just enjoy having nice things? Even if those things have converged aesthetically? They've converged because we think they're nice.

But just because aesthetics have "converged" doesn't mean that everyone finds them pleasing. There's quite a lot of those converged aesthetics that I find unpleasant.

Surely, there's still room for variety.

Re: The age of average

#258

Post by majormajor »

crazygringo wrote: post #123

What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…

Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before - and so does a person with opposite tastes.

Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but art or more commodity products have fractured.

The people/media one is the author's biggest blind spot here: there is still a dominant mainstream that people are chasing, but it's audience is smaller than before. I think this is why they chase the same thing more aggressively. So your "bestsellers" look alike, but more people are reading random shit that would never crack that list in the past either. Selling to a niche is precisely the opposite of what gets you in the bestseller list, but the niches I like have SO MUCH STUFF available now. The non-mainstream has fractured, making the remaining mainstream look more similar to chase a narrower segment. The most watched TV shows now have a far lower percentage of the country watching, and also have more variety in what the cast as a whole looks like, whether that's hairstyle or tattoos or piercings or whatnot.

EDIT: here's an experiment to try to demonstrate. Tell me how many of those lookalike movie and book poster/cover images you've watched. And how many you'd watch more of.

Movies: I've seen 0 of those (I'm not a horror fan anyway, but I've seen a couple in the last five years, Hereditary and The Invisible Man, and they didn't look like those posters).

Self-help books: I've read 0.

I haven't been reading any Danielle Steele, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, or Stieg Larsson in the last 15 years either... but Grisham was much more common in my circle, and I read some, in the 90s. I had less fewer options! I read over 30 books last year, and none of them popped up in this article...

Re: The age of average

#259

Post by naijaboiler »

titzer wrote: post #221
crazygringo wrote: post #123

What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…

> Even if those things have converged aesthetically? But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than preferences have been absolutely overwritten , overridden , and overprinted by whatever is most easy to produce today. Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable than…

the push towards homogenous zeitgest has always existed. I think what's more accentuated in the modern times, is the world-wide convergence because we have made communication across vast geographical areas instantenous. with modern phones, and internet, everyone everywhere pretty much has visual access to the same things. Now convergence is not just local, it's global in scope.
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