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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

#121

Post by milesrout »

oblio wrote: post #53
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…

> Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper. False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I think in 1910 it would have been like counting…

>False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page.

I hope you're kidding and don't genuinely think that most people close links before fully loading the page on average.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#122

Post by milesrout »

acchow wrote: post #97
WJW wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more likely that in 10,000 years we will see the "internet revolution" as part of the industrial revolution. It's only because we're in it that we can see it as separate things. For example, we now speak of a single "agricultural revolution", where in reality it would have spanned hundreds of years of had several different periods (discovering plants, discovering cattle, etc).

The industrial revolution was centered around the production of things , and machines' effect on that. We're now shifting to a knowledge economy, and the internet has been transforming that. I think of this transformation as distinct from the Industrial Revolution (either the first or the second).

Again this is recency bias. You think it's more significant because you're experiencing it.

'Knowledge economy' is a myth anyway. The 'knowledge economy' produces nothing of actual physical value to people and .com bubble 2.0 will burst within 5 years.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#123

Post by StreakyCobra »

ska wrote: post #25
StreakyCobra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_revolution

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.

For me it is possible that a big breakthrough would be changing our society in a close future, in even less than 200 years. I wouldn't know if 2 events may be happening, but at least one seems really probable. In ~20 years, we went from windows 95 to an overly connected world with small and powerful smartphones, the world is moving faster than ever.

CRISPR is an overview of what the revolution may look like. This technology may offers possibilities to hack DNA, this would be a huge revolution in term of health, but also totally change our world. Until now the medicine was trying to fix the body deficiencies by applying corrections afterwards. When we will reach DNA hacking capabilities, it would open the possibility to fix the real genetic cause of a disease even beforehand. It may be used to increase lifespan or boost human performance. Maybe it will be called the medical revolution?

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#124

Post by jhbadger »

milesrout wrote: post #119
paganel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all , let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time , then you're part of the problem. Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with block…

The fate of classical music certainly depends on where you live, but it's not been doing very well in the US for a while. Public Radio (which used to be most people's exposure to classical music) has been playing less and less of it over the past couple of decades, the death of music stores means it's not that easy to browse recordings, and the new streaming services are much more pop music focused. You can still be a classical music fan but it takes work.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#125

Post by taway_1212 »

paganel wrote: post #111
taway_1212 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have most artists and other creatives been surviving off income from their artistic endeavors for most of history? It was probably true for top fine artists, but at a price of working on commission (i.e. clients dictating the content). For writers, philosophers and composers, I think it was much tougher. For example Chopin, even when he was a celebrity, was living largely off piano lessons. Rousseau made a living c…

> Rousseau made a living copying piano sheets. As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his…

It was the same with Czeslaw Miłosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels, which for him was dreadful. He chose to be a Slavic literature professor at Berkeley instead, and wrote poetry in spare time.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#126

Post by oblio »

milesrout wrote: post #121
oblio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdatum: I wrote a series of Medium posts this month with a Patreon link at the bottom: 70k hits, $0 donations. It's hard for me to imagine reaching 70k people with my writing in 1910 and still being a pauper. False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I think in 1910 it would have been like counting…

>False equivalence. 70k hits means that 70k people somehow reached your page. Most of the probably closed the browser/tab before even fully loading the page. I hope you're kidding and don't genuinely think that most people close links before fully loading the page on average.

"Most" was an exaggeration, but I'm willing to bet that the funnel is narrower than we'd expect.

Going from the moment when someone sees a link on the page to the moment when they decided to actually click it, to them waiting for the page to load and to the moment where they actually bother to scroll till the end... where by scroll I don't mean "Page Down/Page Down/...", but scrolling at a "reading pace".

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#127

Post by milesrout »

jhbadger wrote: post #124
milesrout wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all , let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time , then you're part of the problem. Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with block…

The fate of classical music certainly depends on where you live, but it's not been doing very well in the US for a while. Public Radio (which used to be most people's exposure to classical music) has been playing less and less of it over the past couple of decades, the death of music stores means it's not that easy to browse recordings, and the new streaming services are much more pop music focused. You can still be…

I think Spotify's selection of classical music is actually pretty good. Much better than any local music store where I live has ever had in my memory. (City of 400k people in NZ.)

We still have Radio NZ: Classical along with Radio NZ: National. This is the benefit of public service broadcasters, you know.

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#128

Post by eldj-dc »

milesrout wrote: post #119
paganel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you genuinely think that video games, 'memes', twitter messages, social media posts or vlogs are art at all , let alone art on the level of the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all time , then you're part of the problem. Classical music isn't 'almost dead'. The art of painting has never not been confined to museums and art galleries. Cinema most certainly has not be replaced with block…

>>the fucking literary novel, literally the most artistic medium of all timeThis is a bold and probably controversial assertion. I for one find it questionable on its face. Even limiting consideration only to literary art forms, the novel is not necessarily "the most artistic medium". For example William Shakespeare, widely held to be among the top literary artists ever to have worked in the English Language, worked in poetry and plays. And plays were a popular medium, analogous to television today, a way for a poet to make money-- It seems plausible to me that elite critics and artists in Shakespeare's time may have asserted (as you do about vlogs and social media posts) that plays were not art at all.

Art is what artists make of some medium-- potential new media like memes, and twitter messages and social media posts may not yet have been pushed to the level of art (and certainly not yet the level of great art), but artists have not (yet) had time much time to work with these new media...

Re: The Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It

#129

Post by naravara »

fwn wrote: post #100
naravara wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be much more willing to sign on with subscription services if I could access and manage all of them with a single sign-on and payment scheme. (Basically like how a la carte cable service would work.) Right now I just don't want to be getting billed by a bajillion different people for all the content I consume. It's an administrative hassle.

Something like a big list of reoccurring payments? Like a checking account? Joke aside there is an overview page on Google play for subscriptions placed through apps from the play story. That's probably the closest to what you described.

Close, but you can't manage your subscriptions and payments through your bank, so you need to go and deal with your service provider for each thing. That's the frustrating part.
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