Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta2162 | Hacker News Reader

>It's no longer as socially-acceptable to bully strangers for being “weirdos”. Is that it?

Not at all. People/children still bully each other, always have, always will. Now they can easily bully each other through social media, relentlessly.

>Have you not noticed what's replaced these? We have hundreds of subcultures: weebs, dank memers, bronies, demoscene, lifehackers, outside, Bitcoin, competitive Pokémon… What you're seeing is a change in who you're bullying, not a change in reality.

You may have missed the "etc." part of my original post. Weebs, bronies, Pokemon/gamers, etc. were all alive and well during the scene/emo/etc. times, they weren't "replaced", they live concurrently.

Something else is going on, but it's definitely not "bullying is no longer socially-acceptable". It hasn't been "socially-acceptable" for decades at this point.

View on HN

> Something else is going on

Scenes require supporting media. In the age of print and broadcast, access to media was comparably limited. Consequently, the number of scenes was comparably limited. The "something" that happened was the general public learning how the internet could be used to easily publish media for as many scenes as people could think of. It's now feasible for individuals to globally publish media regardless of how many other people are interested in it.

I've changed my mind in favour of this explanation. I knew “the internet” had something to do with it, but I thought it was about socialisation; the cultural artefacts explanation neatly explains internet memes, too, so it's probably more right.

>Scenes require supporting media. In the age of print and broadcast, access to media was comparably limited. Consequently, the number of scenes was comparably limited.

If anything, it's the complete reverse. Scenes were more localized and had many different variations and unique cultures.

> The "something" that happened was the general public learning how the internet could be used to easily publish media for as many scenes as people could think of.

Which lead to a great consolidation, something we see in other areas as well. Regional cultures become less and less stark as national TV/news came about.

>It's now feasible for individuals to globally publish media regardless of how many other people are interested in it.

Which means the other scenes die out, and a predominant one appears. That's why you see flags and pronouns all across Twitter, but nothing much else. It's also why American culture is being exported globally, destroying unique cultures in its wake.

> Something else is going on,

Large groups have broken into smaller groups because people are less required to be a part of a large group to be accepted.

>Large groups have broken into smaller groups because people are less required to be a part of a large group to be accepted.

I'd say the opposite: disparate groups have ceased to exist as they got consolidated into the larger group. You see this more often across all cultures as the information age has come around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com