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Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

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Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#41

Post by maerF0x0 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #15
supportengineer wrote: post #2

When 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 good: The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures. The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community. The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So cultu…

at least where it's active, i find meetup.com to be a good antidote to the "local" part of the situation. Meetup, in person, about the things that interest you :)

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#42

Post by quacked »

xp84 wrote: post #21
quacked wrote: post #6

One 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…

This is interesting, but can you expound on this thesis a little? What are the reasons you suspect and what are the implications of this shift?

I tried to in my initial comment draft, but I couldn't really come to a satisfactory answer so I thought I'd just post the observation.

I believe the average person today is far more apathetic about the parts of their own civilization that aren't explicitly political than ever before. Morality, cultural expression, architectural aesthetics, manners, fashion, product design, whatever. I think this slide into apathy predates the Internet and has something to do with copyright law, mega-corporate capture of the supply chain (and it's subsequent off shoring), excessive focus on cultural and behavioral neutrality in education, lawsuit culture, and endless video evidence of everything, but I can't spin that into a coherent narrative.

I'm not entirely sure what this implies, but I definitely don't think the introduction of LLMs is going to move the needle back toward widespread elitism and highly motivated creative industries. I wish I had a better answer to your question, which I appreciate you asking.

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#43

Post by embedding-shape »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #40
embedding-shape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another nerd who grew up on the rural side of my country, the internet was a huge blessing and once we first got our first modem in our house I finally got to experience how it felt to talk to people who cared about the same things as me. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

> I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. not even an in-person community of people with similar interests?

That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet. I've probably, since starting to use the internet, spoken with more people in my lifetime than my whole linage before me, by just conversing on internet forums and emailing lists for decades (not that it's a leaderboard or anything, just illustrating the point).

Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#44

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

FloorEgg wrote: post #15
supportengineer wrote: post #2

When 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 good: The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures. The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community. The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So cultu…

> The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting

Upsetting some people has been part of art at least since the épater le bourgeois attitude of early twentieth-century modernism. One of the reasons that culture feels stagnant, is that the attention economy optimizes only such such upsetting that is conducive to maximizing engagement and selling advertising. This has resulted in a lot of stoking of outrage about the social and political contexts around art, while there is much less discussion of anything upsetting in the actual content of the art (the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that a music uses, the linguistic resources used in fiction or drama, etc.)

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#45

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

embedding-shape wrote: post #43
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. not even an in-person community of people with similar interests?

That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet. I've probably, since starting to use the internet, spoken with more people in my lifetime than my whole linage before me, by just conversing on internet forums and emailing lists for decades (not that it's a leaderboard or anything, just illustrating the point). Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same…

> That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet

i mean, you did say "anything in the world" :) that could include a large community, if we decided to get offline more often.

> Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)

how is that different from being offline?

* i'm probably coming across more accusatory than i feel - i'm interrogating my own feelings on this subject and i've found that i tend to feel like being online has been a net negative for me in pretty much every aspect of my life.

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#47

Post by pseudalopex »

RajT88 wrote: post #5
supportengineer wrote: post #2

When 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.

> Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.

Did you consider if their observation could transfer to physical non work settings, non physical work settings, or non physical non work settings?

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#48

Post by RajT88 »

flatline wrote: post #26
RajT88 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is a salient counterpoint. While I value online interactions, I also don’t want them to be my predominant form of socialization. That works well for some people, less well for others, but it’s increasingly becoming the de facto mode of bonding with people over common interests. Because, you know, you can find that group of people really into the same thing you are. I also work from home full time and it…

I think there's a bit of a swing taking place, at least among my age group.

I finally found out there's a "Friends only feed" on Facebook which is newish. None of my friends hardly are posting - over the last 7 days, just 5 people had posts.

Seems like the engagement beast has really driven people away, is my take.

Re: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

#50

Post by hrimfaxi »

quacked wrote: post #42
xp84 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, but can you expound on this thesis a little? What are the reasons you suspect and what are the implications of this shift?

I tried to in my initial comment draft, but I couldn't really come to a satisfactory answer so I thought I'd just post the observation. I believe the average person today is far more apathetic about the parts of their own civilization that aren't explicitly political than ever before. Morality, cultural expression, architectural aesthetics, manners, fashion, product design, whatever. I think this slide into apathy pr…

I can't help but feel the shift to apathy is in part due to a cultural shift from a sense of building society together to a more exploitative view where people have to get what they can while they still can get it. The lack of motivation to produce Great Works feels related to the disconnect from a greater purpose/community.

It all feels related in some way to the dearth of great statesmen. At least the Rockefellers of the past contributed back in the form of great works dedicated to public use.

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