Comment by terminado | Hacker News Reader

Comment by terminado | Hacker News Reader

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  It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's 
  Island on YouTube today, because the production 
  quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with 
  a YouTube webseries that a few college film students 
  could put together with iMovie today.

Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of)

Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.

Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.

There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.

You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.

Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/386

That's my point. Technology has advanced dramatically since the 60s and 70s. You used to need huge teams of highly-skilled technicians just to handle the mechanics of editing, lighting, sound-recording, special effects, etc. Now you need: iMovie and a cell phone. That's allowed small groups of college students to put out creative works on par with what a major studio could do 40 years ago.

Or to tie it back to the Facebook example that started this thread: I regularly have political discussions with my friends on Facebook (or with folks here on HN, for that matter). If I say something interesting, there's the chance for that to go viral through reshares. When I was a kid, my favorite part of the newspaper was the Op-Ed section, and I always wondered what you had to do to get featured in the Op-Eds. Now everybody has their own personal Op-Ed section, with their own audience, and the type of discourse that was previously reserved for institutionalized publications now happens routinely on the Internet.

It's just that standards have risen correspondingly, so instead of this seeming amazing, it just seems like everybody is shooting their mouth off. Which it is, of course, but people fail to realize just how huge an achievement everybody being able to shoot their mouth off is.

Ha ha, yes, or to put it another way, pretty much everyone can have their own personal Gilligan's Island.

I think GPS has progressed to the point that it would be difficult to stray far enough to get lost, or marooned for that matter, on a 3 hour cruise. That said, the likelihood you would not be able to communicate the boats location or be found by the massive influx in boat traffic would be low.

I think the point was that these days technology has made things so efficient and cheap that even college students can make a big production.

Of course it was harder and more expensive back in the day...but that also meant less competition and a smaller pool of talent.

What's interesting is that most (all?) do not. Everyone has the resources, for the most part, to produce high quality content, but most simply do not. We have all this potentially productive tech, and we waste it on mindless entertainment. Sadly, I think this is one of those moments which decide the winners and losers of tomorrow. If you, or your family, are sucked into entertainment, you (or they) are highly unlikely to discover or invent anything, or start a successful business.

All literate people are capable of writing books, too. But most do not.

The march of technology only changes the things that are not being created -- not the fact itself.

I mean, somebody has to consume all that entertainment (which you call "mindless")

We can't all be creators

This is a fallacy. Creation and consumption are not mutually exclusive. We can all be creators. We can't all be creators with global reach, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't all try. And the more people try, the higher the bar will raise.

Not to mention that all the "creators" I know also consume a way above average amount of 'entertainment'.

Well it still takes quite a lot of work and skill to produce high quality content. It's just more accessible now than it was. You have to write scripts, gather people, find the location, do makeup and costumes, have all the equipment(lights, cameras, audio, etc) and know how to use it, manage how you get paid through ads and sponsors, manage fans, and editing is huge time killer.

Entertainment can be mixed with education, and even the most successful people are not robots and do not work 24/7. How many times have you seen education gamified just here on HN? Did you see how popular the recent "Hidden Figures" historical drama got? There are countless books that have made huge changes on society, and it would have been hard to do that if they weren't at least somewhat entertaining.

I get that there's a lot of mindless media though. The Endless Scroll on Facebook is notorious for being a time suck.

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