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The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

coryzue.com

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Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#231

Post by pixl97 »

photonthug wrote: post #174
bernardlunn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True except now AI robots create low quality content without any qualms

"True except now the printing press means trash novels devoid of real artistry can be pumped out without additional effort from the original author." Parents point is that the newness you highlight also isn't new either, strictly speaking. It's all a matter of scale as the effort approaches zero

Scale matters. "No single snowflake blames itself on the avalanche" is a saying for a reason. Little things that seemingly don't matter can built up to the point they become a deadly maelstrom.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#232

Post by passion__desire »

Exoristos wrote: post #212
passion__desire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are missing one important point. Communities acclaimatize to ground realities, though it takes time. In my early experience of social media, people were criticized for not writing correct English. That is almost gone. Infact, now people realize that people belonging to different backgrounds can't be expected to perform in one particular context. There is reverse sort of meme, where non-natives are celebrat…

*grammar

There was a question asked on Quora by a child to her mother, "Why haven't we used all the short words and gave them meaning before using all the long words?"

The simple answer, apart from historical origins of words is "error correction". It is far easier to error correct words which are far apart in spelling and audio space.

relevant : https://youtu.be/AZX6awZq5Z0?t=3107

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#233

Post by TeMPOraL »

monknomo wrote: post #182
TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the tiktok vague and shallow isn't the topic itself, but the awareness that there's already a hundred thousand identical tiktoks expressing the same or similar feelings in roughly the same way. What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks. A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just…

There are an awful lot of sculptures/paintings, etc. about the sixth sorrow of mary, and most are pretty interchangeable, imo. I wonder if the difference with tiktok is that there are thousands of videos about the same thing, everyone sees a few of those thousands, but they see a different few. So even though we're sharing the feeling, culturally, we're not sharing the same artifact. Like maybe the trouble is that ti…

Yeah, this shared artifact - aka "social object" - is the key. It's why the Internet culture is defined by things that "went viral" - because those are the ones everyone saw, and everyone can expect everyone else saw them too.

As for the sculptures and paintings of Mary, etc., I'd say they are all boring and entirely interchangeable, but that's because I have no connection to any of them. Each such work is meaningful to the community that had a personal connection. But I'd say none of them are culturally important, except those individual ones that for some reason (like being very old) become widely known among people outside artifact-adjacent community.

Side point: culture always has a scope. Something may be important cultural object for the city I live in, unremarkable for anyone else in my country, and entirely unknown the rest of the world. With the Internet enabling arts and entertainment on demand, there is little overlap between communities we live in and the entertainment choices of individual community members. We end up having communities with no culture.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#235

Post by deweywsu »

This article shoots itself in the foot right at the start. It reveals that the author is in fact just as wrapped up in Twitter as those he critiques. It shows a graph with a person on the left who has "nothing to say" being a mongrel, as if it's bad not to want to insert or even have a personal opinion about everything. There is completely nothing wrong with not getting wrapped up in the BS that is modern western society at large. In fact, it's quite healthy NOT to have an opinion about any of it because you're off doing much better, much healthier things.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#236

Post by huevosabio »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #207
huevosabio wrote: post #139

Some thoughts: > Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts... Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often. > The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following, by the way— Yea, just use the chrono-tab ("following"). Only usable version of Twitter. > love posting for engagement. Some of the…

> I block even people that don't share follows if I got to see a tweet I just don't like. What does “don’t share follows” mean?

Here I mean someone that I don't follow nor do they follow anyone that I follow.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#237

Post by chinchilla2020 »

pif wrote: post #81
Enginerrrd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ugly truth of it is, just like there's a noticeable difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart (because of the annual fee at costco), there's just some people that are going to have an undesirable influence on your community. The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator.…

> difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart Could someone please explain to me what is implied here? I've been to the USA only once, and I didn't visit neither a Costco nor a Walmart. The only difference I could point to between them, is that no "Costco people" phenomenon exists on YouTube. Sincere thanks in advance!

Walmart tends to be the lower class. Lots of weird people there.

Costco is typically middle class. It is a members-only.

They also have a famous hot dog and food court

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#238

Post by bee_rider »

bachmeier wrote: post #21

> Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me. It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. H…

This is sort of a tangential and random, but I enjoyed this post because of a quirk of the writing. It is really common to read,

> It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics.

Followed by some justification for his being annoying. To the point where I was just preparing for the silly justification.

> And that's perfectly valid.

What a twist, beautiful, haha.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#239

Post by pixl97 »

huevosabio wrote: post #122
kogus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100% with what you are saying, but I don't think you need a human connection to have good content. The encyclopedia Brittanica didn't establish a human connection, but it was a valuable resource. An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver. So we get clickbait headlines a…

I think this is true in the individual level, but less so in the ecosystem as a whole. I can see how a YouTube channel gets attention-optimized to hell, but then I am able to find content that is genuinely amazing that have survived the temptation to over-optimize for engagement.

At the end of the day I assume this comes down to means of monetization. If someone has some other means of making a living that is not directly tied into the social media platform itself, for example they are independently wealthy, then it's easy for them to create non-over-optimized content.

A common breaking point for creators is the ones where they have job X that makes a decent living, but their content starts getting popular and starts making a decent living. That's where the creator starts running into the 2 masters problem. Do they quit their job and make content only? If they do, will the platform decide to completely screw them over with an algorithm change?

Then you have a 3rd class that is just jumping into content for the purpose of making money by any means possible. All aboard the over-optimization train.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#240

Post by jihiggins »

robertlagrant wrote: post #128
jklinger410 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse. People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common. The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to w…

> Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it. Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they wa…

i would argue that capitalism implicitly values... capital?

just as socialism values... society

also, you're conflating markets with capitalism

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