Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?

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.

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 displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.

By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.

If this article resonates with you in even the smallest way, I urge you to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business".

I am currently re-reading this book and am amazed by the apparent accuracy of his analysis, which is that the mediums in which we communicate or express information (print vs. TV vs. TikTok) have a massively understated role in the quality and type of communication we participate in. That is, as print lends itself naturally to logical argument and less to emotional knee-jerk reactions, the type of conversations taken place in long-form print will by nature be more logical and intellectual. Compare this to TV or short term videos, which captivate us using more primal forms of distraction (bright lights with moving images, fast talking, "Gotcha" type rhetoric, cool dances, sexual/romantic behaviour, or background subway surfers), and it is obvious that the nature of what we see is inherently less based around logic and reason.

And as a consequence, if we are what we consume, it is only natural to surmise that the quality of the mind follows the quality (and qualia) of our media.

Before the internet we mostly talked to friends. With the internet we mostly talk to strangers.

We used to have conversations. Now we have fights.

I was very idealistic when I first came to social media. Very kind. Since then I have picked up some bad habits.

It's something I'm passing through. I see an end.

This is probably a familiar story.

> The 20th century, apparently, was the last time we had great art, literature, or music.

this is totally absurd. I'm in middle age and the golden era of music for me is the late aughts, mostly bedroom recordings that never would have seen the light of day in the age of MTV.

I might agree with the thesis of the piece overall but it's hard to continue after such an obviously asinine statement

Culture isn't getting worse, it's getting further and further towards what the masses want. Throughout history very few people got a voice about what culture was created or offered.

In the 1700s, the culture that was created targeted the people who could pay for it: the aristocracy and the very richest of wealthy merchants (people who could afford to be patrons). Culture targeted them.

In the early 1900s, the people who paid for culture were the upper middle class, because they were the people that advertisers wanted to reach. Culture targeted them and appealed to people with college educations (the types who enjoy cultural criticism).

Today, the culture that gets clicks and views is the culture that appeals to the broad masses. The broad masses do not appreciate the cultural criticism of the (college educated) upper middle class. If you want to know what they enjoy, go browse reddit's /r/all. It's not the village voice.

The advertising/panopticon funding model is turning this timeline into a dystopia worthy of George Orwell. Because of algorithmic tuning to optimize "engagement", the promise of the internet has been turned into a dark pattern instead.

We can run our own servers, curate our own sources of information, and build reputation networks, in spite of the overall trends. The key difference is to do it for any reason other than profit.

Another weakness of the evolved systems is the whole "Up/Down" voting system that happens everywhere. When you force everything into that single dimension, you waste almost all information that can be gleaned from someone who has just spent their attention on something. I think that we need to have systems that can vote with vectors. Something can be funny, technically wrong, and insightful all at the same time... wouldn't it be nice to be able to learn those things?

Also, a pet peeve - HTML doesn't allow the Markup of Hypertext. It actively works against the idea of a Memex, a thing we still don't have 80 years later. 8(

I've observed a trend, both across my own life, and also seems to pattern match elsewhere. It's the idea that the dearer something is, the more carefully it's used, or inversely the cheaper something is the more we waste it. I've noticed it in the sense of money, "environmentalism" (green washed products get consumed more, despite using less being the better response), computing resources, publishing/printing books etc.

I am noticing that the internet makes discourse/arguments essentially "free" and seem to mostly contain garbage takes.

I also am wondering about this same trend with human lives as we break 8B and folks seem to be flippant even with lives.

I enjoyed this. I find it somewhat telling though that while the title is about "the internet", the actual discussion about what's changed focuses a lot on money. You can argue that the internet changed how money is made, but I think it's a mistake to conflate technology with our societal response to and management of it. As gun-control advocates love to point out, firearms have been around for centuries but that doesn't mean people everywhere are shooting each other constantly. We have things like laws to contain the effects of technology. I think a major component of the culutral changes described in the article is a lack of political will to ensure, by force if necessary, that the economic gains of technology are spread widely.

Another caveat to the title is that the article seems mostly to be talking about the "web 2.0" or post-social-media internet. I'd say that earlier stages of the internet, particularly what some people now see as the "golden age" from the late 1990s to around 2010, actually involved a remarkable flowering of culture. Blogs proliferated, traditional media started making websites with substantial content, and there were valuable achievements in new media like Flash games. The article says:

> The internet has made it easy to evaluate all content — including criticism — against three key metrics: views, likes, and shares.

And that's true, but it's not "the internet" that did that, it's the specific subset of the internet that we allowed to run amok. Blaming that on the internet is like looking at a street full of obnoxious advertising signs and saying that paint ruined this town; maybe that's a factor, but another one is a lack of signage laws.

The part of the internet that has destroyed and continues to destroy culture is the part that's built on pandering and profiteering, which, not coincidentally, is the same part of other industries that has destroyed beautiful and promising things in the past.

That said, the article makes a lot of good points. This one in particular:

> What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.

There's no denying that technology played in role in the creation of this dilemma. It's not just about journalism, of course. It has to do with the fact that computers enable the essentially resource-free copying of information, and that's affected many industries (perhaps most notably the artistic ones like movies and music that the article discusses in other contexts). But just because technology brings us new problems doesn't mean we can't address those problems by updating our expectations and standards of behavior.

The internet compresses culture from analog beginnings to symbolic interchange, whether voice image or text. Of course culture is worse, the internet renders it maladaptive in every dimension possible with only a few exceptions.

The worse thing about the Internet is that it enabled all the socially maladjusted & anti-establishment types to find each other since the cost of discoverability & distribution of information plummeted.

Yes. Considering you cannot even say write/speak things without vindictive people using various methods like down voting or abusive language to stifle conversation and discussion and that has metastasized into things like "moderator" censorship and evil like shadow banning, hiding conversations ... not from being said, but controlling what adult humans are allowed to see ... all of which are directly and inherently treasonous for Americans to engage in due to their responsibility to uphold and defend the Constitution and the universal human right to free speech; then yes, it seems clear the internet, as the replacement of the public square AND books/newspapers, etc, as well as simply just universal freedom of expression and communication has made not just culture, but humanity worse off.

The "positivity ration" claims it takes 3:1 good things to overcome a bad thing. I would argue though that the nature of the evil that the internet facilitates is not just many bad things, but they also taint all the other things. We are in effect moving into a dynamic that is related to the pre-printing press era, when the ruling class had total control over information and the dissemination of it.

If you interrogate that aspect of history, you will clearly see the thread of that impulse throughout especially European history, even after the advent of the printing press. It was the same before the internet when things like state radio/TV stations and rules controlled what could be said and how. The internet briefly breached that containment from about '90 to '10s, until the speech control and tone policing or even the constant change and shift of language to dominate people.

It is naive, childish, and underdeveloped to simply take all the positives of the internet and ignore that there are many turds floating in that punch bowl.

I would say culture warriors are making the internet worse :\

Yes, but that is either what the people want, OR, our bubbles are mini torture chambers. It's one of those two, I'm leaning towards the ladder right now.

A rare violation of Betteridge's law of headlines