Overloaded: Is there simply too much culture?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
My guess is it has shifted towards an older audience continually since the beginning. To that end what new things are "against the order of things" today.
I still open to new things I just more critical and skeptical - I want some evidence that the change will be positive.
> My guess is it has shifted towards an older audience continually since the beginning. To that end what new things are "against the order of things" today.
May be it has shifted but it seems to me NH audience on average still younger than me and more excited about new stuff.
There are downsides but personally I think it is pretty cool to read the expert opinion of people completely outside my body of knowledge, Farmers, Neurologists, Chemical Engineers, etc.
An engineer in their 20's keeps trying to get me to learn Lisp.
I think they meant the age you feel, not the amount of times the earth spun about the sun while you were around :)
The chain will drift from reality, in an uncorrectable way, reducing its usefulness over time.
This is the ultimate example of where you want a centralised database run by the state. Preferably properly "cadastral", so you can drop a coordinate pin anywhere and look up the owner.
If a Blockchain contract needs to be ratified by an external entity, is the Blockchain really worth it over a database owned by that external entity?
I know what I like, and the rest of it I just pay no attention to. Most popular culture I like is stuff from the last few decades of last century (showing my age I suppose), although occasionally something new comes along that appeals to me, but most new things I just ignore. If someone makes a reference to something I don't get, I'll Google the reference, read enough about it to get the point, then move on.
It isn't just popular culture. Humanity has multiple civilisations whose literatures go back thousands of years. There is just so much, whether books just published last week or ancient manuscripts, that nobody could ever possibly read it all, everybody has to pick out the parts that interest them and pass over the rest. I'm sure for many people there must be some hidden gems which they would have really enjoyed, except for the fact that they'll live their whole life and never once stumble upon them.
Ever since I read The Triumph of Time in high school, my favourite poet has always been Algernon Charles Swinburne. If I had lived in the second half of the 19th century, that would have been rather mainstream, hip and trendy even; in the 21st century, that makes me somewhat idiosyncratic. I don't care. (I also don't care what T. S. Eliot thought about Swinburne, in case anyone wants to bring that up.)
I _always_ miss some film, tv and music when it's current, but I easily catch up on it years later. Theater is the only cultural genre where you 'use it or lose it', and I accept that bargain.
I have learned that expounding on what you don't know makes you sound like an idiot and/or a snob. Boy, it can be very tempting though when people are talking about reality TV empires.
[quote]
Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing necessarily happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. [...]
'But I want to read different books at different times,' you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. So read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. This is what I do as well [...]
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Now, I've swung the other direction, and begun really dedicating my attention to a narrow set of things in just about every facet of my life.
It's... an interesting difference.
In general, I suggest to embrace "JOMO" (joy of missing out) — a killer feature that helps keep our resting heart-rate remarkably consistent and healthy.
Fear of missing out has been a struggle, but not as much of one as it used to be. Learning to accept that I won't have context for things others are talking about has been difficult, and sometimes I still feel left out when some friends are gushing about a show I have no interest in watching. On the other hand, being able to have really deep conversations about the specific shows/movies I devote time to is, in my opinion, worth the trade off. It just feels better.
Outside of pop culture it gets more nuanced, but a few things seem universal. I get more satisfaction out of the things I devote time to. I feel less rushed. I feel more confident talking about the subjects I'm familiar with.
Most, obviously, wont. Some, however, will. Seneca himself was one of them.
But this remains an interesting problem and question:
- How do we assess quality?
- How do we cope with a superfluity of new information?
- What are the costs of failed assessments and promotion (and there will be failures).
- How many 2nd chances should be afforded to those who've betrayed trust, and worse, attention?
- How do we cultivate new and good interpreters and fabricators of the universe we find ourselves in?
I often call this the vetting problem. There's an essay by Arthur C. Clarke in which he discussed "the servant problem, Sri Lankan style", of how to offer (and interpret) letters of recommendation for household help. (The post-script to the essay is both amusing and insightful.) This appeared in one of his essay collections, though I don't recall which one.
It's also a problem in any activity in which agents and agency exist: the principle-agent problem, regulatory capture, corruption, infidelity, betrayal, and the like. Initial assessments are useful but not definitive; ground truths may change and mistaken assessments may prove durable and even potentially valid. Some truths are self-generating ("if you want to have trust, give it", and rather similarly for distrust), some are self-defeating.
I don't have answers to all the nuanced questions you ask, but on evaluating quality: my approach is to research how involved and "invested" the author is on the topic they're talking about. Also, I'll simply read some articles and chunks of paragraphs from their book to get a sense of tone and competency. I realize these are all value judgments of some kind; but it is inescapable.
A journalist writing about "the benefits of neuroscience"? I'll skip it. I'd rather put the likes of Antonio Damasio, Robert Sapolsky, or Michael Gazzaniga—all of whom have spent decades studying cognitive science—under the rubric of "proven worth". Also, their writing is accessible for the non-specialist and specialist reader alike. Note though, this doesn't mean that the journalist's writing doesn't have any value. It simply doesn't meet my bar of quality (again, value judgement).
Another rough rule of thumb is, usually, books from academic presses have better value-to-noise ratio than popular presses. Even this is slowly degrading, with universities having heavy-duty marketing departments to drum up their books.
I'm somewhat hesitant to invest too deeply in a now-stale HN discussion (a site dynamic I ... dislike), but another element I use, and one that addresses TFA's focus, is what I've been calling "BOTI": Best of the interval.
That borrows from a 43 Folders / Ticker File model (or more generally, a round-robin database). The idea is that after a given interval (hour, day, week, month, year, decade ...), you review a list of possible candidates and select which you think are best. Ideally, there's some opportunity to revisit earlier potential candidates, and there should be an option for hidden gems to enter the pile as well --- items originally passed over but on consideration found deserving attention.
That's the basic idea.
In practice, review itself turns out to be difficult, though there are shortcuts. On HN (using Algolia), you can enter a blank time-limited search to return the top submissions of the previous day, week, month, or year. Or specific earlier periods can be constructed (I've posted a shell script that will generate the URLs for this using Algolia's seconds-since-the-epoch timestamps). HN's choices aren't always optimal, but they're OK, and are cheaply accessible.
I'd like to have a number of filters and systems I could tap similarly.
The other element I'd like to include is reputation-grading sources. That is, which consistently turn out high-quality content, and which either don't, are variable, or straight up contribute noise?[1] So sources (authors, editors, translators, other contributors, publishers) accrue a reputation over time, and can see that admusted.
What happens with repeated selection, filtering, and assessment tends to be quite high quality.
That said, there's still far more published in a year (or posted online in a day) than could be read in a lifetime. Roughly 1 million books/year, and 5 billion Facebook items/day.[2] A well-read person likely reads on the order of 10 books per year over the course of their life (some read more, many less).[3]
An interesting question in an age of abundant ... culture / entertainment / literature / drama / documentary ... becomes what constitutes a common cultural heritage or touchstone? Is it ... the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Star Wars? Shakespeare? The Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao Te Ching, or Upanishads? And how criticial is it that there is, or is not one? (I suspect that this was the bigger question that TFA was leaning at but never quite got 'round to.)
My own awareness of my limited capacity to assimilate culture occurred as I walked into my univerity library the first time. Its local phyisical collection then numbered about 5 million volumes (with 15--20 million or so across multiple affiliated campuses), and ... I was never going to access more than a small set of those. What I realised and discovered was that a mix of intentional seach and serendipitous sampling could prove quite rewarding. Some sections of that collection I came to know fairly well, most I utterly ignored.
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Notes:
1. Some noise is tolerable, and none probably means a source isn't trying. But an indifference or insensitivity to error also indicates a source is highly inconsistent, if not outright deceptive. I'm inclined to the view that intentional noise and deception are quite probably worse than no information (especially if the source is aware of how to mask that deception). Dante put liars in the penultimate circle of Hell for a reason.
2. Just for grins: if a typical FB post contains 120 characters of text (I'd found similar results on Google+ a couple of years ago, and Twitter-length posts seem ... frequent), and we have 6 characters per word, then 5 billion items -> 100 billion words. At 500 words/page, that's 200 million pages, and at 250 pages/book, about 800,000 books' worth of content posted to Facebook daily. (How much of that is original or nonduplicate content is another matter, and much of it, likely about 1/3, is predominantly visual w/ images or video). By comparison, "traditional" publishers in the English language were publishing about 300,000 books/year from the 1950s through the 2010s (Bowker, assignee of ISBNs, keeps statistics).
3. At a book a day, from age 10 to 85, or a reading career of 75 years, an ambitious reader might complete just under 28,000 books. Or less than one tenth of one year's traditional publishing output.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/454772/number-social-med...
I would also think, that trying to keep up is the overloading thing. It's like walking into t a library and thinking you have to read all the books.
And for those who haven’t heard of the Dawkinsian memes? Well I guess it wasn’t that succesfull of a meme after all.
The word "culture" always had two meanings, a. what people in some collective do and b. "high culture", the stuff that is somehow supposed to reflect on human condition.
"High culture" is first and foremost about marketing. Many people care more about things that are marketed as too good for the average man, and products marketed for that group is called "high culture", the name is a part of the marketing.
It is similar to the difference between cheap wine and fine wine, people don't notice a difference until you tell them one is more expensive than the other and then suddenly people start noticing a huge difference.
Of course it does but not literally and seen from a certain perspective. I'm thinking of the shallow aspect of fame and the meaninglessness that comes with it and the desperation to keep the spotlight pointing at them. Celebrities behaviors are an aspect of the human nature after all.
In my country, where the same phenomenon happened ('divertissement' is now labelled 'culture'), I would say it was less than 10 years ago, perhaps closer to 5 years ago for a systematisation of the use.
During Covid-related lockdowns and other limitations, it reached new highs: how dared we limit access to the vital need which 'culture' is, how dared we forbid 'culture' people ('culture' producers (!)) to work for some time, and so on.
The same thing happened in France, using the exact same wording.
Modern "culture" is almost entirely based on entertainment and pass time. How many times have I recommended a book and a movie to be told it's "too hard", "too serious", "not entertaining"... There is a reason why Marvel movies are always in the top of the charts, unplug your brain, grab you favorite sugary snacks and teleport yourself 3 hours in the future.
We call it "content" for a reason, shapeless and tasteless content to fill up the mere containers we became.
"High culture" is narrower, and of course there's the inevitable discussion of whether or not it is better. I'll note that one era's low or broad culture can become another's high (simple distance in space and time contributes heavily to this, with Shakespeare being a notable case). One of the strong functions of high culture is as a strong signaling / credible signaling device --- if you appreciate or participate in high culture, you're demonstrating that you've put in the time required to learn its nuances and backstory. This serves as an accessible indicator of attributes which are otherwise difficult to assess.
(This shows up in all kinds of cultural, faddish, or in-group behaviour, even in the name they go by, Shibboleths.)
Mass media has become a delivery system for advertising and propaganda (the latter has long been a function). Mass appeal means mass advertising markets, and explains much of the push for it. That said, "high culture" affords a cultural segmentation potentially identifying a more selective, and affluent, market segment --- one with stronger appeal to at least some advertisers.
The practice of adtech and interactively-targeted advertising ... somewhat subverts this relationship.
In the western society "entertainment" is "culture". It is very hard to find real culture. In some countries bookstores are full with thrash. On radio and tv you get the same selection of mediocre till thrash offers. It is like free speach. You are "free" to speak but your voice is lost in 1000000 more voices. And if you finally are able to be heard, police comes at your door.
Yes, media is now more accessible and a few key areas (TV in particular) have increased output 3 or 4 fold. But I think its likely that as the author's social circle has grown the author is aware of a greater variety of media that they weren't consuming. Additionally, most people have less time to consume things as they age. These are old problems.
The lack of shared culture[2] today means people have less in common. It seems to me that having less in common with people makes them more distant and that there could be negative effects of that. I’ve certainly heard the argument that this reduced shared culture can be connected with the larger political divisions we (feel we) see today. But then 100 years ago when there was no mass shared culture like tv (or maybe there was?) we seemed to not have the same problems, so maybe there is something else at play.
[1] I pick this example because the whole thing is referencing many earlier works in one way or another, and it is a concrete thing rather than a field like ‘literature’.
[2] I suppose one might claim that tv is not culture because it is too pedestrian. I don’t really think that’s true, but if you just pick your favourite kind of high culture (eg theatre/ballet/classical music/poetry/literary fiction), there would likely have been some tv shows about it and, as there were only a few channels, lots of people outside the small set of people who deeply care about the thing would see those shows. It seems a little more egalitarian to me than what we have today, though I suppose if you are interested in those things it is now very easy and cheap to seek them out online.
This is something that we need to adapt to, and I think it's quite possible to adapt to it.
For example, when I was a teenager, a good chunk of my friends and schoolmates listened to the same bands as I did, or at least there was a substantial overlap. I was much too young for the heyday of MTV, but the big names pushed by the record companies were still ones everyone knew and had opinions about, and only occasionally would we introduce each other to our personal discoveries.
Nowadays, with the friends I've made over the past few years, there's usually little or no overlap. So the inevitable 'what kind of music do you listen to?' has changed from 'oh, I like X too! / I don't like X because Y' to a different exercise where you need to communicate why you're really into a certain ukulele youtuber or a Chinese operetta or a Brazilian hip-hop subgenre, to someone who's never heard of them. And then listening and asking interesting questions when they do the same for their favourites.
The rare times you do find some overlaps become pleasant surprises - one of my best friends is into blackgaze and ambient, I'm a folk- and metal-head, and finding out that we had a few experimental/avantgarde bands like Unexpect and Deathspell Omega in both our playlists was delightful when we first met.
I would say 100 years ago shared culture came from religion, neighbors, and the national conversations one would read about in the news. Religion is increasingly not a part of people's lives be. We still have national conversations through the media, but there too there are so many outlets you can choose a specific narrative that appeals to you and only listen to that. Neighbors are not quite as close as they once were-- the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar from my neighbors sounds crazy in modern times.
All things are wearisome, more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
- Ecclesiastes 1,8-11
The world today lets us see cultures from across time and space much more than the past. Despite the large media companies and global platforms we aren't (or atleast the curious aren't) being fed what curators, journalists or advertisers feel are important.
A way around it is explicitly discussing the issue with mates. I keep some close friends who keep in close parity because we all understand that if we don't all play the same game we will end up playing nothing together. Rando internet friends are great but you don't always get that consistency of long term discussion and a deeper relationship.
We still reach outside of the group of course, I play other games too, but if X wants to play Sea of Thieves then we all jump in else they won't do the same for you when you want to play your game with them.
I think this kind of small scale community building helps a lot, and helps you get the benefits of the internet without the banality of the "all psuedo-anonymous hive mind"
One of the downsides is that we don't have to be a big part of those communities anymore, especially with the internet. This results in more fractured cultural diaspora, even amongst people from the same town. I've rarely watched, listened or enjoyed anything my co-workers have because we can select from the near infinite library of the internet. Previously this wasn't an issue even with individualism, because everyone had to watch the same few TV channels and listen to the same few radio stations.
I think it's amazing how diverse the world has become, how niche media can be, and how free we all are to explore what we want from life. But that's just one of the costs.
I think ultimately it says something good about the tremendous wealth of our society that we can afford to support huge industries employing millions to do nothing but create trivial content. Before mass production people would make textiles at home as piecework, but it was grueling, boring work that paid a pittance. In the current age people can make quite a comfortable living creating online content at home, all while themselves consuming podcasts or peeking at TikTok clips.
I blacklist websites that I feel are bad for me using /etc/hosts, but I still consume too much news. I was thinking about this today and how to alleviate it without hiding my head in the sand. Honestly a weekly news magazine like The Economist would probably be enough.
Ideally I'd have a tool that lets me react once to a given news item and then track it over time, filtering out repetitive or meta news (especially news about other people's reactions to the news), show me only substantive changes over time, and ideally with a weight that (geometrically) increases with proximity. What is humbling is to realize how easily led we are, how things that seem so important, so vital, end up just...forgotten when the news dies down. It's actually quite scary when you think about it, almost as if your reactions to things aren't quite your own! This tool would help recover that control.
In another time and place these would be the insane ramblings of a mad person.
Someone else quoted something from Seneca against reading too many book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29317420. I feel like the deeper I go into something, the more I get from it. Going deeper could be seeing/reading the thing multiple times, talking about it with friends, researching it. It transforms what can be a passive consumption into an active one. I see a lot of videos, explanations or memes that are based on taking way too seriously something. While this is often used as a joke, I feel like there is value in that. I think everything can be used as a lens through which you can perceive the world, if you spend enough time with it.
Edit: I think the coach John Wooden said like "The trouble with all the good new books, is they keep us from reading all the good old books." Value and newness are orthogonal. I wrote more about that too, at my web site about maturity models (in profile, then under "life lessons" etc. Nothing for sale.
We just live in an era where culture is more widely and easily available than ever before.
What's more, since there are many more folks who are able to access more stuff, there's more stuff being produced to capitalize on that as well.
And yes, crappy reality TV is culture. As is any creative or interactive endeavor.
But, as has been the case pretty much forever, Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to all that culture too.
For those of you who don't know (welcome to today's 10,000[1]!) and are too lazy to copy paste the link below, Sturgeon's Law states that:
90% of everything is crap.
While having too many options isn't a massive issue for relatively small purchases, if I have a meh lunch or get a car wash that felt lacking, it's no biggie, but for larger purchases it's a bit paralyzing.
My headphones broke recently, and it took me a good week and a half to figure out what I wanted to buy. Search filters help, narrowing it a price range, a type (earbuds were what I ended up deciding on), then gaining access to further filters for things like battery life, but even after all of that, I'm still left with 100s of options, and many of the things I care about are qualitative and can't be filtered for, things like sound quality or ear comfort.
I've been wanting a new laptop for a while and reaching a decision on that seems like an absolutely daunting task. I agree with the article, there really is too much stuff. We have reviewers and aggregators to help alleviate that, we hope that they can curate the best stuff and we don't have to do the work ourselves. But then, there's too many reviewers and aggregators, so now I feel we need an aggregator for aggregators, a reviewer for reviewers, just to figure out who's being paid off by marketing teams, who's churning out surface level reviews for clicks, and who's actually worth listening to.
Maybe the problem isn't that there is too much shit to stare at, but that we spend too much time staring at shit.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
No. There's not too much culture.
Michelangelo is definitely out of this world. My favorite of his works is Pietà. Every time I looked at it for half an hour and just could not believe the realism. However, while Renaissance was great foe find arts, there is a lot of mediocrity. We are looking at the best, the rest is forgotten or only enjoyed by narrow group of connoisseurs.
I understand their reasoning in that classical auteur style works can be more culturally powerful, especially if they are old enough to serve as an example for their time periods. However, it’d be better to compare Michelangelo to any of the millions of sculptors who lived in the 500 years after him. Shakespeare can be compared to Broadway playwrights or movie screenwriters.
But hold on, I thought race was just a social construct? I can't keep up these days.
For those people I'm sure it does feel like an enormous struggle.
If you watch for enjoyment rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
If you do not enjoy sharing experiences with others, whatever you see is good if you like it.
> rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
At least for me, I do not think that watching iZombie, Dune or Cowboy Bebop makes me look better, but it allows to share good moments with friends. To explain the complete plot of a movie or several episodes from a TV show just for a pun or a quick observations is not what we like.
I am ok with you watching just for yourself, but it seems that you do not approve that I or others like to share opinions and talk about media. Why is that?
UK class system stuff vs. being in a subculture on a forum. "The" culture, vs some shared interest.