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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily mean a problem as a matter of taste, more a destruction of shared cultural values, in particular those that are good for "society" like a belief in the value of work, family unit, deeper concerns than material wealth (e.g. god/spirituality) etc at least in the west / America.

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I will never understand how people can suggest a specific musical genre or a medium is responsible for ruining society or "destroying values like the value of work" with a straight face. When I ask for empirical proof of such things, there never is any, just anecdotal statements.

As if country music never touched upon these sorts of topics. Or books. Or ...

Moral panics come from old people who don't like anything that's different from their youth. "Kids these days!" And in America, especially so if that thing happens to be dominated by black people.

Moral panics also come from normal people who have felt the effect on their and their families' lives. For instance I am neither a prude nor a tea-totaler but I can see how many hours or my own life porn and alcohol have taken, hours that I sure enjoyed but that would have been better and as pleasantly invested in other activities. I know people that have sunk into porn addictions and lost their lives, including any ability to enjoy normal sex. And we all know what an alcoholic looks like. So is the ubiquitous availability of porn a good thing or a bad thing or something with nuance?

If you had a loved one disappear in world of Warcraft or a porn spiral you will start to question whether those are normal things that should remain so openly available without limits.

That has nothing to do with people erroneously blaming the "decay of society" or the "loss of traditional values" on things like rap music or videogames.

We can talk about how the internet has made things like porn ubiquitous, and how certain games are intensely addicting. But that is a wholly separate discussion.

How do I provide empirical proof? Survey data or something over a 30 year time span? Gallup has some interesting confidence in institutions data you can parse but doesn't really strengthen my point IRC in case you are interested.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...

I didn't get into porn even which I thought of after the fact, the lowest brow culture possible and it seems likely its pervasiveness and how future adolescents will learn about sex through consuming it will have profound impacts no?

The spread of low brow culture might potentially come at the expense of traditional local cultures, but any cultural expansion means the creation of a new shared culture, no? In which case the issue then becomes what the values does this culture valorize.

Yeah and it's not all bad for sure, I think the general acceptance of homosexuality has been a good thing and large cultural shifts certainly made it happen. I do wonder if these shifts are universally good or a mix of positive and negative developments, and the people warning us years ago had some good points.

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