And speaking of shared experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w has been watched 11 billion times.
However, I suspect 10 billion of those may be my kids ...
Im a broken record with how often I cite this article, but any chance I get where it is relevant it is worth exposing people to. And this thread is that moment. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
The other thing algorithmic feeds, and even some sites like buzzfeed do, is generate strings of nonsense. This isnt quite a new phenomenon, but started in the 80s with MTV. "Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another." https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used... Compare America's funniest home videos, with a host, callbacks, and even a basic narrative structure to tiktok. At least Tiktok accomplishes SOME of the culture missing from prior products on the market in the last decade by inviting people to remix videos with the same audio.
The part about keeping society frozen in time is contradictory to the rest of the text.
It's leading people on to the extreme end, so a conspiracy theorist will become even more of one etc. A frozen society would be unchanging... But it does change as extreme ideas spread like never before.
Something to keep in mind, regardless of how correct you think your habitual info channels are. If dissent is stamped out, like it is on many subreddits and Twitter, that’s a pretty bad sign.
That would be true if the catalog of material to watch/listen/read remained static. But it does not. Nobody 10 years ago who was into music theory/practice would have seen Rick Beato's videos, or 12 Tone's. And things are different because those channels exist (and will presumably be different in another N years because of a different set of people producing new material).
Just see what happens to other markets in maturity, e.g. food: https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/10-companies-own-...
I still see the spirit of what the OP is saying, though. At least the AI will know if I like my Kraft Mac-n-cheese extra-creamy or dry.
The fact that the WTC just wasn't there any more and someone had ran a plane into the Pentagon was the actual definition of shocking (as opposed to the Millennial definition of shocking which gets used for everything down to stubbing your toe on the coffee table). It wasn't all that surprising that we'd been attacked though and it was pretty obvious who did it, in real time. It was also obvious that we'd dive into bloodthirsty wars in the Middle East, and plenty of us protested the 2003 Iraq War on the streets, to no effect. The country wasn't really all that "unified". A bunch of people in the middle who didn't pay any attention to events did suddenly have one rammed into their face and they all jumped in the same direction and mindlessly rallied behind the flag in a way that led to disastrous wars in the Middle East. That isn't something to look back on with fond remembrance. We were predictably fucking idiots and ignored the people who bothered to point out the hazards of our actions. Stop being nostalgic about that.
The success of the plan is what's shocking. The visual symbol had a jarring effect that allowed the narrative of unity to prevail temporarily. The parallels to Pearl Harbor are deep.
Twitch live streamers share experiences with tens or hundreds of thousands of folks. For example, I can guarantee any millions of young kids who played Fortnite learned about the musician Travis Scott through that.
Perhaps the era of mass media where 10-50+ million all tuned in at once is over, but there’s plenty of music and media that captivates many millions for live events.
Watching something like this after the fact you most likely already know what's going to happen and it will not have the same emotional impact. Plus, whatever the outcome is, it's in the past.
Someone brought 9/11 as an example and that's definitely a good one. You can watch the videos online and feel grief, anger, sorrow. But you already know it happened. You will never watch this footage thinking this can't be real, this isn't happening. You will never have that sobering experience after the fact since you now live in a reality where it already occurred.
Baby shark is most definitely a shared experience.
As someone who has no kids, I haven't seen Baby Shark, so maybe it does that too.
Doo dooo dodo dodo
If you want to know examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced, you have options beyond the blind, scheduled consumption of a single sitcom, however well written.
What makes you think this has changed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...
I was looking over Wikipedia's lists of most watched youtube videos and wondered the same thing there. Lots of them are music videos and I'm sure recording companies are inflating the views to some extent, especially early in.
this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the farthest and the fastest are memes and quick hits of dopamine and rage. Those are what comprise our most shared experiences today. I think we'd agree that it's better to not be limited to only those things that have been curated for us by broadcasters and media conglomerates, but between our natural tendency to seek and spread low effort content and the curation of algorithmic gatekeepers optimizing to exploit that tendency our most seen and shared media typically ends up being far more shallow than it used to be.
A few generations ago the most 'viewed video' was mankind's first steps on the moon, an incredible feat of science and engineering that ignited their imaginations. Today ours is Baby Shark.
I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes."
And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.
I don't really think they are comparable in any meaningful way. To bring any comparison we would try to make a little more towards apples-to-apples, let's just consider the subject of war. On one side, let's take the entirety of the MASH run, 250-odd episodes, and on take a handful of 2 minute compilations from the war in Ukraine. IMO more depth, info and meaning about war is more easily accessible from the meme-videos; It's impossible not to be viscerally affected when you watch a grenade drop a couple hundred feet onto some poor bastard below. MASH have may moments like "Keep that damn chicken quiet!" but it just isn't the same, nor as true.
Out of curiosity, when you wonder about "comparability" in this context, what metrics of qualities are you thinking about including in the comparison?
Knowing that perhaps our best example of "unifying culture", something that has been watched an incredible 11 billion times, is a cartoon song where 80+ percent of the words are "doo" repeated over and over...
Maybe Armageddon isn't such a bad thing.
Also, one point is that those algorithms operate on global scale. Even if there are a million other people who are in the same bucket as you are, they mostly don't live in your close proximity and you might never meet any of them in person. It's no wonder we feel isolated and lonely.
Anyway, that is a sidetrack; I agree with the rest of your point. Seeing the garbage that recommendation algorithms serve me is proof enough that they are not successfully crafting a unique experience just for me but instead putting me in some heap based on what they mistakenly think they know about me.