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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#411

Post by pixl97 »

fullshark wrote: post #232
michaelt wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice. You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on thems…

Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same." One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streami…

Why would the services not stagnate?

When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots of access, people try lots of new things on it, some succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can find the 'different' thing that will become the new trend, and many more things that will die off.

Re: The age of average

#412

Post by grose »

Carles, of Hipster Runoff fame, wrote a series in 2015 (IIRC) about this aesthetic, which he calls contemporary conformism. https://tykoblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/the-contemporary-c...

I think about this article a lot, he was dead on. He deleted his blog but it’s floating around in the internet archives (carles.buzz).

Re: The age of average

#413

Post by eestrada »

majormajor wrote: post #258
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…

To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be over the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an album since 2010 has been Adele.

So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

Re: The age of average

#414

Post by munificent »

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…

The fallacy in your argument is the belief in the average human.

According to your argument, we should all buy the same shirt size, medium. Because that's the size that isn't too big or too small for the most people.

But people are different, and in a human-centered world, our products would be as unique and varied as we are, which is much more varied than you give us credit for.

> They've converged because we think they're nice.

There is no we when it comes to preference. I, and you, and everyone couldn't possibly care less about whether our toothbrush is a color or shape that pleases someone else. It's my toothbrush. The last thing in the world I want is it being used by any other human.

The idea of aggregate human desire does not exist in humans. We each only have our own personal desires, shared by no one. When I walk into Baskin-Robbins, I do not care what flavors of ice cream other people like.

Where aggregate demand exists is in corporations making products. Because they are trying to amortize their design and manufacturing costs across an ever larger number of consumers, they create the notion of average human preference as a target for their designs. But it's important to always remember that average preference is an invention of mass manufacturing.

It's soul-crushing to discredit your own desires simply because it's not cost effective for a company to cater to them.

The clear evidence against your argument is that products across the entire spectrum of human artifice used to be much more varied. I'm fairly certain Homo sapiens has not measurably evolved in the past hundred years or so. We are the same people we used to be, with the same passions and pecadillos.

What has changed is the economic and organizational structure of the groups creating the stuff we use. When you got your shirt for a local tailor who only made stuff for your city, it naturally sold shirts that made sense for your climate. The "average" it was targeting was a much smaller aggregate based on people whose lives are measurably more similar to yours.

But now that everything comes from a handful of transnational mega-corporations, shipping containers means any product can come from anywhere, and mobility means that everyone is from nowhere, products are trying to please all possible humans.

And the result is an alienating wash of forgettable products that tell us at every moment that we use them, "The people who made this only care 0.0000001% about you."

Re: The age of average

#415

Post by Arrath »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #376
groby_b wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You buy what you can afford. " The problem is, there is "almost everybody can afford this", and there is "completely bespoke". We have eliminated the middle ground.

Yeah. People still reupholster old furniture. I think the real problem is that many goods these days are either so cheap it's cheaper to replacement them entirely, or not built to last, so they never get to a rebuild stage.

I don't know how many times I watched my dad sit on the armrest of the couch.

I try that with my couch and I am rewarded with the sound of particle board splintering.

Re: The age of average

#418

Post by mint2 »

pixl97 wrote: post #398
mint2 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that there is a shared or converged sense of aesthetic or preference is really peculiar as it doesn’t match any of what I observe. Convergence really seems to happen solely due to economics, particularly mass production combined with marketing to drive demand for those uniform items.

Convergence occurs because of the paradox of choice. A market that successfully converges will have happier users and more sales because of it.

like the way the airline market converged on how they can charge people extra to be treated like humans. And charge extra to resolve arbitrary and clearly contrived annoying policies? That’s caused happier users?

Re: The age of average

#419

Post by pixl97 »

mint2 wrote: post #418
pixl97 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convergence occurs because of the paradox of choice. A market that successfully converges will have happier users and more sales because of it.

like the way the airline market converged on how they can charge people extra to be treated like humans. And charge extra to resolve arbitrary and clearly contrived annoying policies? That’s caused happier users?

You can pay more for first class, why aren't you?

Also calling an airline a market is kind of iffy in many ways. It's highly regulated to keep planes from falling out of the sky. I'm sure there are many airlines that would give you a lot more space if they got rid of the crews that ensured all the bolts weren't about to fall out of the plane.

Re: The age of average

#420

Post by the_af »

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…

> 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 many things and we've gotten better at zeroing in the precise aesthetics viewers and consumers want. We've converged.

Wow wow wow, stop right there. Consumers? Maybe. But viewers and the audience for art in general... that's stretching it.

Artists haven't zeroed in the precise aesthetics of anything. Sure, if your goal is to maximize sales, go for bland genericity; but if your goal is art, artists will be forever seeking because art is an eternal search.

This is not the "end of art", Fukuyama style, and this article proves nothing of the sort.

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