Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
asteriskmag.com
Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#2When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?"
There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things.
The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#3When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?" There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things. The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
Exactly: there's still great culture being created, somewhere out there; it's just unable to find its audience amongst the noise.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#4When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?" There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things. The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
The internet is making everyone feel like what most of us nerds used to feel like. Good riddance, I’d say
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#5When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?" There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things. The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
I dunno. I am on a discord server with a bunch of people who share theories and lament the cancellation of Raised By Wolves.
Expecting people in the office to be able to talk about that show is too much to expect. Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.
Things are different than say 20 years ago.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#6One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.
By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#7When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?" There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things. The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
Yeah, I sometimes miss the way we socialized in the 80s and 90s. I was an early adopter of the Internet myself, and it was really awesome for a while. But what it has turned into now ... I can't shake the feeling that it is definitely a net negative, we would be better off forgetting it ever existed.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#8When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?" There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things. The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
I don't even think it mattered WHAT we watched. The A-Team and Dallas were pretty awful, but at least we were watching the same things and had some common ground, could see the humanity in the people we see every day. Now it's just "I hate everyone, no one even likes my niche anime about feet and fungi". I mean someone does, but it's some tiny group on the internet and then the tribalism and us against the world starts. The feeling of loneliness just gets worse and worse because you need to see people in your real life that you enjoy.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#9When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?" There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things. The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
Exactly: there's still great culture being created, somewhere out there; it's just unable to find its audience amongst the noise.
I agree, there is plenty of good stuff still being created. But it has to compete with a firehose of sewage, so the ratio is way off.
Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
#10If this article resonates with you in even the smallest way, I urge you to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business".
I am currently re-reading this book and am amazed by the apparent accuracy of his analysis, which is that the mediums in which we communicate or express information (print vs. TV vs. TikTok) have a massively understated role in the quality and type of communication we participate in. That is, as print lends itself naturally to logical argument and less to emotional knee-jerk reactions, the type of conversations taken place in long-form print will by nature be more logical and intellectual. Compare this to TV or short term videos, which captivate us using more primal forms of distraction (bright lights with moving images, fast talking, "Gotcha" type rhetoric, cool dances, sexual/romantic behaviour, or background subway surfers), and it is obvious that the nature of what we see is inherently less based around logic and reason.
And as a consequence, if we are what we consume, it is only natural to surmise that the quality of the mind follows the quality (and qualia) of our media.