> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences
People being different is bad?
People being different is bad?
Some of this is just me not being hip with the next generation's culture. But he also has not seen almost any of what I would call the American film canon. So we can't even discuss cheesy 80s action films. Eventually we figured out he had seen Stargate. He was surprised I had seen it.
He can't tell what's mainstream and what's highly esoteric. I do think that's a problem. I know no one will have any idea what I'm talking about if I bring up my favourite synthwave artists in conversation.
It occurs to me that the form of media often informed my awareness about that. Was it on TV? Popular book at the library? Or did I find it in the back of some weird 'zine?
It's all the same on YouTube. Though there is the view count. It's often watched alone, so no social feedback. When it comes to movie nights, for example, finding something that's acceptable to most, not just hyper-tailored to yourself and full of in-references, is an important social skill.
I think most YouTubers and uncomfortably fake to watch, but I would still prefer people watch that over mainstream tv…
My point is that there was such a thing -- a common film canon -- that people who were interested in film, could be expected to be somewhat familiar with. No longer true?
Yes. Lowest common denominator. Some common point of reference gives a common vocabulary. Even if it sucks.
Believe it or not, not a whole lot of people will watch Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time and think it was an amazing movie anymore. That’s not to say it isn’t well made. It is. But is also just not very interesting to modern youth.
The place I volunteer at has quite a few teen volunteers, and I've noticed I can immediately spot the chronically-online teens (and there's a lot of them), because it's like they're from a different planet. They use language I don't understand, their humor revolves around memes I don't understand, they constantly reference people/events from their favored internet niche, and then completely lose interest in talking with people who don't understand their niche.
I think this ends up decreasing the amount of difference and diversity teens are exposed to, because when there are a million [insert niche here] fans online who "totally get you", there is far less incentive to make friends in the real world. And if you do make real-world friends, they likely are going to be part of that same niche, and have the exact same language/interests/etc that has been crafted by the online community. (It's honestly a bit eerie how good these niches are at creating cookie-cutter teens. I've had bizarrely similar conversations with kids who have never met each other, but are into the same niche. And it's not just their interests that are similar, it's their attitudes/outlooks/political views/etc.)
I find this really concerning, because it's important for teens to be exposed to a wide variety of people/experiences and be encouraged to respect them all. And that's hard to do when you're in a bubble of people who are identical to you, and have very little incentive to branch outside of that bubble.
I think back to my teen friend group, and it was a hodge-podge of computer geeks, theatre kids, journalism nerds, etc. I got so much benefit from having such a diverse friend group, and it's concerning to see those types of friend groups becoming rarer.
When you make hyperspecialized memes, and you have many of them, you're basically fragmenting a larger pool of shared meaning into many smaller ones.
Diversity, and of itself, is not inherently a virtue -- although lots of people would like it to be. Rather, diversity in the ecological sense, leads to more resiliency. There's still have to be some kind of unifying aspect (such as, unifying on humanity as a whole, or better yet, the whole earth as a whole) within which there is diversity. There's a sense of belonging to something greater than you while simultaneously participating and relating from the uniqueness of an individual.
> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences
My take is it’s a bunch of people who are out of touch with the youth assuming that the youth feel out of touch with each other.
"Social media" accelerates unmoderated interaction with other irresponsible people, which, generally speaking, is not healthy for teenagers.
Other irresponsible people means their peers right? Like teens talking to teens without adult supervision?
Merely existing on the playground, on the field, or in the cafeteria in the 80s and 90s reinforced the idea that being different was bad.
How is this unique to post-2012? At least Instagram doesn't hold you up against a chain-link fence while TikTok punches you in the gut for being different.