[supersour]

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.

[leoc]

People in computing like Alan Kay and Ted Nelson were reading people like Postman and Marshall McLuhan and worrying about this kind of thing decades ago. Unfortunately, instead we've got to the point where the computer industry has created TV on the computer from the visionary post-war manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. And while it was probably always the case that most people would end up mostly taking the path of least resistance through their lives, the state of the technology is actively funneling them there, because it usually makes it so bloody painful, and sometimes quite isolating, to do things which are more thoughtful or effortful, or even just to do the same things in a more thoughtful way.

(Probably the single thing that most needs to get fixed immediately, right away, is to get content-addressable networking—IPFS, a better iteration of IPFS, your favourite alternative to IPFS, have your pick—up to an adequate level of practical usability, support and actual adoption. This is a blocker or near-blocker for many things, sometimes in unobvious ways.)

All that said, the fact that that Postman book is from 1985, still pretty solidly in the pre-Internet mass-media world, illustrates that the cultural-decline issue probably isn't really, or mostly, a computer or even a consumer-Internet problem. Revolution in the Head is another book of the same kind of cultural pessimism, also from (basically) the pre-Web era.

[jonway]

Yes!

There are related works: The Medium is the Message and the television program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFwVCHkL-JU

"A medium is not something neutral. It does something to people."

and The Society of the Spectacle. When I reread this, I was alarmed at how applicable it is today.

Problems: We don't really have any remedy. We can see if we look, but what to do?

[GuinansEyebrows]

> The Society of the Spectacle. When I reread this, I was alarmed at how applicable it is today.

i read this too young and it set me up for a lifetime of hopeless depression. highly recommended. i just started 'simulacra and simulation' and the development on the ideas covered in 'spectacle' is even less optimistic.

[seec]

That's nonsense. Funnily enough you are getting outraged by a nothing burger while complaining about emotional behavior.

The argument could be summed up as: "since there are fast food restaurants everywhere, quality restaurants do not exist anymore". This is demonstrably false and I wouldn't be surprised that they increase in supply at roughly the same rate.

You are confused because volume is dominated by the masses, but it has always been like that. The major difference is that back then things were much more siloed, and you wouldn't notice the masses mediocre content consumption habits. But it was always there, on TV, in terrible magazines, shitty books and poor journals, you didn't pay attention to them because those things were beneath you, but they already had many times the volume of the "good stuff".