It’s like the author is blaming technology for illustrating the truth in a highly efficient way.
She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
It’s like the author is blaming technology for illustrating the truth in a highly efficient way.
She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
I think this is actually the answer: the word "just" is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than first meets the eye.
The digital era has brought a lot more quantifiable data, and with that has come a much easier (and in many cases automated) comparison, value-attribution, calculation of the probability of success, etc. The article speaks to this in the second half.
Previously this was largely impossible outside of government and other organisations with dedicated statistic collection. The author talks about how even sales numbers for authors were very imprecise and easy to exaggerate or fudge.
You could argue that the Digital Era has turned some of "life" (or at some of "art") into one big Goodhartian[1] parody.
That said, it does feel like the author has stopped believing that art has intrinsic value - and that its value might be different for different people, including the author. That is pretty much the mental step you need to take to end up in the parody to begin with.
you answered it yourself.
What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet? What if you base your self on something that's fringe at a global scale, but acceptable in your local culture? What if all your human interactions are on the internet (with millions of strangers that tend to treat you badly, because people are way more rude online than in real life) vs on your local community (where people treat you better simply to avoid getting punched in the nose, but you might think they like you)?
_Everything_ is different online (and that obviously impacts people's psychologies)
In one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books, he talks about the emotional impact of looking at one's portfolio performance. If you do it rarely, like quarterly or annually, it'll generally be a positive experience. If you do it day by day, you'll have quite a lot of negative experiences. Because we're wired for loss aversion, we'll weight those negative experiences more highly. The same facts, presented differently, have very different impacts.
If I'm doing my own thing, like the author was with roller skating, my basis for comparison is me. There will be ups and downs, but more of the former, because we can't help but learn. But as you say, the bigger group I rank myself against, the more those experiences will be negative. I also think the bigger groups discourage camaraderie, because the declining chance of future interaction means smaller rewards for collaboration and support.
>> When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours [...] One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating [...] Soon after, I stopped skating.
Seems like the author struggled with comparison before the internet, like the grandfather comment said.
One thing importantly different about our age is context collapse. With communication costs and marginal costs near zero, a global service is easier and cheaper to build than local ones with equivalent coverage. It's as if we've taken every ecosystem in the world and dumped it onto the San Francisco peninsula to fight it out to discover "the truth" about what plants and animals are "best".
What's different about those small locales and villages is that each one of them naturally had its own values. Skills and tastes co-evolved. Schools of thought were born and elaborated. Communication and movement between locales gave useful exchange and inspiration, but generally weren't enough to swamp variation.
In the pre-web era, the question of, say, whether Irish music was better than Spanish music would be seen as kind of a dumb question to take any more seriously than for an entertaining argument. But having put everything in Meta's global blender and reduced it to counting updoots, the ever-present metrics purport to provide "the truth" to questions like that.
They don't, of course. But they do place a much larger burden on us to recognize that not everything that goes up and to the right is an unalloyed good.
I would argue that the scale and the ease that comes with the digitalization and algorithmization is what makes the difference: eg. only literary critics can publish review of your book in a newspaper vs. everyone on the internet can post one.
This kind of meme nonsense belongs to reddit, not here
You can switch your job as desired. Kids can’t switch their school.
You can not have a job (economic consequences aside). You can’t not be in school.
They didn’t choose to be there and if they hate it, the main way out is waiting.
You can OBVIOUSLY it be in school. No country on earth forces kids to join any school (let alone to attend it).
Most people didn’t choose to be at their jobs and hate it, the main way out is waiting for retirement.
It's always been going on. But it has changed, not in kind, but in degree, and it does more damage.
Does that mean the internet and digital advances are bad? No, it just means we were unprepared for them in a very meaningful way.
I don't see how digital technology diminishes that in relative comparison.
When compared with a pool of 40 million, that doesn't seem like much to be proud of.
Things are complicated today. Doing what's always been done is not enough, you need to do better. Having a job is not enough, we no longer view jobs as purpose.
Especially in tiny peasant villages in pretty much every country, except maybe Switzerland and some Polynesian islands.
You dont even have to go that far into the past, you can simply talk to anyone who lived prior to the internet.
pick something like skateboarding. The best skateboarder in 100 kids could shock and impress peers with tricks they had never seen.
Pick a given subject, the best expert someone would be exposed to was very limited.
Technology isn't always fractal, but you seem to be assuming it is. The internet is not just "a really efficient printing press", in the same way that New York is City is not "a little town or village made bigger".