Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

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Vonnegut wrote about this a few times. It seems to have been something that bugged him. The short version of his complaint is that mass media, generally, have wiped out the social value of all kinds of moderate artistic talent—for example, fewer people may learn to plink out some holiday tunes on the family upright for everyone to sing along with, because you can just put on the radio, or Spotify. Live storytelling, or being good at dramatically reading from books (yes, people used to sit around and do that for entertainment)? Small, local theater? All replaced by radio plays and TV. And so on.

Basically, recording and mass broadcast means moderate talents lose nearly everything (as far as social, or even monetary, value of their skills) and discourage people from developing those talents in the first place, because those technologies place them in competition with people who are at the top edge of human achievement in those areas—including dead ones. It's broadened how many people get to experience those top-tier talents, and how often, but practically obliterated a formerly-major component of how people related to one another, socially.

The Internet has changed this a bit. Some folks have responded to the problem by digging hard into a niche and taking their act online, because you can succeed in an really tiny niche while being only pretty-good at something, since there are so many people that a niche with nearly-zero audience can still reach a lot of people, considered over the entire globe—think filk, or steampunk-themed music, or doing furry art on commission, or something like that. But in person value among their actual social circle, and among family, remains low, because Spotify and TV and Netflix et c. exist.

> Some folks have responded to the problem by digging hard into a niche

Earlier today we had https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society , which I think ties into what you're saying here. And I think yours is a good observation. Day-to-day small scale entertainment has been reduced to zero or even negative value.

Yes, exactly that. Though the niches don't fully solve the problem of people being unable to fulfill any in-built need—assuming there is such—to express themselves artistically and be socially rewarded for that, because there still aren't enough "slots" near the tops of these various niches to let even 5% of the total population be fulfilled that way. Probably not even 1%.

Furry art in particular might be an exception since the larger events were pushing toward 10-15k pre-covid[0], and they had rooms full of people taking and sometimes doing commissions right there with you. It's always been a hybrid online/offline community, so the internet and social media were amplifiers for the offline experience rather than a detriment. Conventions exploded in growth and number with the rise of social media. People increasingly open it up to non-furry friends and family, so it's reached a point where even famous people (or people who worked on famous things) show up to conventions.

How to take lessons from that exception and bring it to other lived experiences is uncertain. Most other niches don't have the fluffy animal aspect to smooth over the difficulty of getting friends/family interested in what you're doing.

[0] https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/List_of_conventions_by_attendanc...

This resonates with me a lot as someone who gave up music and university for programming in my early 20s.

And yet, mediocre content abounds in the media. How should that be explained?

This is usually not because the artists involved are bad at what they do, but one or both of: deliberately catering to "bad" taste that is nonetheless popular, or making work worse than it could be to make the cost/demand curve line up better by saving some money on aspects that won't make more money if they're better (see: the MCU, which I actually like but which definitely avoids risks that might improve their films, and cuts corners in ways that don't matter much for the bottom line); or, organizational/managerial failure on projects that require large organizations to attempt in the first place (film is especially prone to this).

I think it’s because content by definition is mediocre, otherwise it would be called art.

Excellent point / mic drop : )

But one thought this thread is provoking is related to this well-intentioned but self-destructive (imho) 20th century cultural narrative that talent as a prerequisite for art creates a tyranny where certain people are allowed to express themselves with dignity while the vast majority are not.

Sometimes I like this narrative, sometimes I hate it. But regardless it undeniably had the effect of leveling the playing field while retaining the same old gilded-age toxic celebrity hierarchy, which simply seems to have had the effect of letting the wealthy and powerful silently dominate cultural / artistic production, which this thread already started to touch on a bit.

Ie, the now fairly ubiquitous experience of walking into an art museum, seeing a blank canvas propped on the floor next to a neon light. Thinking "Anyone could make that so whys this person rich and famous for it?" Shrugging, leaving and not going back to an art museum for another decade.

I enjoy that kind of art in the right context but it clearly has a destructive effect on peoples natural ability to care about art and have a healthy creative practice themselves.

>I think it’s because content by definition is mediocre, otherwise it would be called art.

Even if it's mediocre, it can still be art IMHO.

Rather, I think it's just that Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to most things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

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