Overloaded: Is there simply too much culture?

Most, obviously, wont. Some, however, will. Seneca himself was one of them.

But this remains an interesting problem and question:

- How do we assess quality?

- How do we cope with a superfluity of new information?

- What are the costs of failed assessments and promotion (and there will be failures).

- How many 2nd chances should be afforded to those who've betrayed trust, and worse, attention?

- How do we cultivate new and good interpreters and fabricators of the universe we find ourselves in?

I often call this the vetting problem. There's an essay by Arthur C. Clarke in which he discussed "the servant problem, Sri Lankan style", of how to offer (and interpret) letters of recommendation for household help. (The post-script to the essay is both amusing and insightful.) This appeared in one of his essay collections, though I don't recall which one.

It's also a problem in any activity in which agents and agency exist: the principle-agent problem, regulatory capture, corruption, infidelity, betrayal, and the like. Initial assessments are useful but not definitive; ground truths may change and mistaken assessments may prove durable and even potentially valid. Some truths are self-generating ("if you want to have trust, give it", and rather similarly for distrust), some are self-defeating.

"High culture" is narrower, and of course there's the inevitable discussion of whether or not it is better. I'll note that one era's low or broad culture can become another's high (simple distance in space and time contributes heavily to this, with Shakespeare being a notable case). One of the strong functions of high culture is as a strong signaling / credible signaling device --- if you appreciate or participate in high culture, you're demonstrating that you've put in the time required to learn its nuances and backstory. This serves as an accessible indicator of attributes which are otherwise difficult to assess.

(This shows up in all kinds of cultural, faddish, or in-group behaviour, even in the name they go by, Shibboleths.)

Mass media has become a delivery system for advertising and propaganda (the latter has long been a function). Mass appeal means mass advertising markets, and explains much of the push for it. That said, "high culture" affords a cultural segmentation potentially identifying a more selective, and affluent, market segment --- one with stronger appeal to at least some advertisers.

The practice of adtech and interactively-targeted advertising ... somewhat subverts this relationship.

I'm somewhat hesitant to invest too deeply in a now-stale HN discussion (a site dynamic I ... dislike), but another element I use, and one that addresses TFA's focus, is what I've been calling "BOTI": Best of the interval.

That borrows from a 43 Folders / Ticker File model (or more generally, a round-robin database). The idea is that after a given interval (hour, day, week, month, year, decade ...), you review a list of possible candidates and select which you think are best. Ideally, there's some opportunity to revisit earlier potential candidates, and there should be an option for hidden gems to enter the pile as well --- items originally passed over but on consideration found deserving attention.

That's the basic idea.

In practice, review itself turns out to be difficult, though there are shortcuts. On HN (using Algolia), you can enter a blank time-limited search to return the top submissions of the previous day, week, month, or year. Or specific earlier periods can be constructed (I've posted a shell script that will generate the URLs for this using Algolia's seconds-since-the-epoch timestamps). HN's choices aren't always optimal, but they're OK, and are cheaply accessible.

I'd like to have a number of filters and systems I could tap similarly.

The other element I'd like to include is reputation-grading sources. That is, which consistently turn out high-quality content, and which either don't, are variable, or straight up contribute noise?[1] So sources (authors, editors, translators, other contributors, publishers) accrue a reputation over time, and can see that admusted.

What happens with repeated selection, filtering, and assessment tends to be quite high quality.

That said, there's still far more published in a year (or posted online in a day) than could be read in a lifetime. Roughly 1 million books/year, and 5 billion Facebook items/day.[2] A well-read person likely reads on the order of 10 books per year over the course of their life (some read more, many less).[3]

An interesting question in an age of abundant ... culture / entertainment / literature / drama / documentary ... becomes what constitutes a common cultural heritage or touchstone? Is it ... the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Star Wars? Shakespeare? The Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao Te Ching, or Upanishads? And how criticial is it that there is, or is not one? (I suspect that this was the bigger question that TFA was leaning at but never quite got 'round to.)

My own awareness of my limited capacity to assimilate culture occurred as I walked into my univerity library the first time. Its local phyisical collection then numbered about 5 million volumes (with 15--20 million or so across multiple affiliated campuses), and ... I was never going to access more than a small set of those. What I realised and discovered was that a mix of intentional seach and serendipitous sampling could prove quite rewarding. Some sections of that collection I came to know fairly well, most I utterly ignored.

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Notes:

1. Some noise is tolerable, and none probably means a source isn't trying. But an indifference or insensitivity to error also indicates a source is highly inconsistent, if not outright deceptive. I'm inclined to the view that intentional noise and deception are quite probably worse than no information (especially if the source is aware of how to mask that deception). Dante put liars in the penultimate circle of Hell for a reason.

2. Just for grins: if a typical FB post contains 120 characters of text (I'd found similar results on Google+ a couple of years ago, and Twitter-length posts seem ... frequent), and we have 6 characters per word, then 5 billion items -> 100 billion words. At 500 words/page, that's 200 million pages, and at 250 pages/book, about 800,000 books' worth of content posted to Facebook daily. (How much of that is original or nonduplicate content is another matter, and much of it, likely about 1/3, is predominantly visual w/ images or video). By comparison, "traditional" publishers in the English language were publishing about 300,000 books/year from the 1950s through the 2010s (Bowker, assignee of ISBNs, keeps statistics).

3. At a book a day, from age 10 to 85, or a reading career of 75 years, an ambitious reader might complete just under 28,000 books. Or less than one tenth of one year's traditional publishing output.