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The age of average

alexmurrell.co.uk

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Re: The age of average

#291

Post by ssnistfajen »

Last5Digits wrote: post #135

I'm always wary of articles like this. The feeling of things becoming mediocre strongly resonates with me, but I am aware that there could be a great many different biases at play. When I was younger, entertainment media felt magical. The complexity and depth of experiences I could get from even a second-rate story was immense. I remember staying up late at night to process the last movie I watched, or feeling that r…

>Is it because the modern entertainment industry truly has become stale, or is it because I've lived long enough to see the simple patterns underlying most of our desires and fantasies?

Most likely the latter. There's so much content being created nowadays thanks to advancements in pretty much everything, making it easier to for anyone to create content. Patterns eventually emerge since creating truly original and unqiue ideas is not compatible with the current rate of content creation.

Re: The age of average

#292

Post by sacnoradhq »

psychoslave wrote: post #83

What can I say, criticism of mediocracy all look the same: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51961637 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/104973152110363... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12469 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1049731520974764 https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafa... http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S004727271500119X/pdf/S004727... http…

Even some elements of culturejamming approaches boring uniformity: Adbusters doesn't interest me because they're often a reaction to mass media and rarely present anything different or poetically-viral.

I wouldn't lump Banksy full-in on pure anti-corporate, anti-consumerist culturejamming because of the insightful socio-political commentary performance/works rather than trying to sell zines about how capitalism is bad.

Re: The age of average

#293

Post by jstummbillig »

What a strange article. Alternative title: "How to cherry pick your data to make any point"?

(By the way, I am not even concerned with the observation being more truthy than false. It's just so blatantly written to drive home the conclusion that they missed their chance to add anything of interest to answer the question).

Re: The age of average

#294

Post by mortenjorck »

titzer wrote: post #221
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…

> Even if those things have converged aesthetically? But they haven't converged aesthetically any more than preferences have been absolutely overwritten , overridden , and overprinted by whatever is most easy to produce today. Your comment somewhat assumes that where we are is the ultimate endpoint of some long process, when in reality fads come and go. Tastes change. What is out there now is no more inevitable than…

> What makes something pretty and cool and interesting is skill, thoughtfulness and some sense of composition, color, and togetherness.

This is key, yet it highlights an important aspect largely missing from these critiques of popular aesthetics: Any style popular enough to become hegemonic will itself contain examples spanning a wide range of quality and taste. There are beautiful expressions of the AirBnB interior, the NHTSA-approved car, even the five-over-one low-rise, just as there is also a sea of mediocre variations on them.

A style alone does not make a designed object or space high-taste or low-taste, good or bad; it is the values of good design and craftsmanship that make it thus.

Re: The age of average

#295

Post by ssnistfajen »

davemp wrote: post #11

This seems somewhat cherry picked, and lacking real insight. Sure we can agree on the obvious conclusions that mass production is going to try for mass appeal and thus “saminess”. But my house certainly isn’t white with wood tones. That’s because I’ve been putting in the work to select and restore beautiful furniture from decades past and gradually building towards a more unique aesthetic. Let me tell you it is expen…

The whole article is basically expanding a Twitter meme which stems entirely from cherry picking.

One of my favourite coffee table books is Designed in the USSR: 1950–1989. Pretty much everything in the book could easily rival or even triumph over Western designers of the same era, but the vast majority of the industrial designs shown never made it beyond the prototype stage. They looked like nightmares for mass production and it was hard to perceive a meaningful demand for them even in a market economy. These were made by Design Bureaus staffed with people whose sole job is to design things. It would be unfair to compare their work with products that have stood through the tests of user demand over time.

Re: The age of average

#296

Post by toss1 »

And now the convergence is going to be massively accelerated by LLMs and generative art/video and code tools.

Because these work best (actually only work at all) in the middle lane of the masses of text/images/code that they ingest, and from which they generate their output.

They generate the most likely output to result from the given input. This necessarily homogenizes out any surprise or highly valuable information. We get the most average output

(which, to be fair to their creators, is an average of the above-average human inputs, since they are training on the output of skilled humans in each field, and e.g., that grammar of GPT-4 is noticeably better than almost all current journalists, even when it is hallucinating an answer)

Re: The age of average

#297

Post by masswerk »

derbOac wrote: post #75
masswerk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is contrary to my experience: trends and fashion were short lived, trends lasting maybe half a year, and the fashion of the last season was definitely "out". Nowadays, there's a previously unknown stability and trends shift just minimally. Which enables this "everything looks the same" phenomenon as there is minimal variation over time and lots of room for aesthetics to spread and eventually engulf and embrace e…

There was a piece going around awhile ago about the haunted Victorian mansion that seems relevant to me. E.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/10/27/why-victorian... The idea was the world went through a drastic change with WWII and the Victorian mansion started seeming like a ghostly remnant of the earlier age. Antiques Roadshow had a similar podcast where they discussed the "brown is down" phenomenon. Did…

> Did the fast-changing fashions of the postwar era reflect something about normal trends, or was it a sort of equilibrating phenomenon, and now we've returned to some normal again, that we haven't seen in over 100 years?

I'm living in a city where most of the buildings are 100+ years old. (The house I'm living in was built in 1904.) You can usually date a building from that era by about +/- 2 years of accuracy, just by the looks, regardless, whether it's art nouveau or a more conservative expression of style. However, as you approach WWII, things considerably slowed down. (Mostly for economic reasons.)

I think, this idea of a mostly stable era is a product of the shift in paradigms, you mentioned before, where we put anything that happened before in a paradigmatic box. (E.g., like it has just recently happened with brutalism, where a wide variety and evolution of concepts and oppositions was subsumed into the same thing.)

Re: The age of average

#298

Post by unnamed76ri »

One area not discussed: the jokes are all the same.

It’s gotten to the point that I rarely use social media react buttons at all when I see friends sharing memes. I know they didn’t come up with it themselves and I grow tired of endless memes that cover nearly identical ground.

I enjoy making people laugh if I post something on Facebook but it will be something I experienced myself. Not some meme whose author I couldn’t credit if I tried.

Re: The age of average

#300

Post by carapace »

> all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.

How is that possibly surprising!? A sparsely populated coastline with abundant game? That's our evolutionary niche! Of course it's what we want!

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