There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things.
The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community.
The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So culture as a whole has been biased towards pessimistic rituals and values.
Stuff like you have to pay as an attendee for things that used to be free, like to see who's attending, it costs a lot to run a group now (something like $200 per year?), and they pop up with ads/offers after many kinds of interactions like RSVPing
Upsetting some people has been part of art at least since the épater le bourgeois attitude of early twentieth-century modernism. One of the reasons that culture feels stagnant, is that the attention economy optimizes only such such upsetting that is conducive to maximizing engagement and selling advertising. This has resulted in a lot of stoking of outrage about the social and political contexts around art, while there is much less discussion of anything upsetting in the actual content of the art (the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that a music uses, the linguistic resources used in fiction or drama, etc.)
For me it's been the same as always, I'm able to connected with others that have the same niche interests as me, wherever they are in the world, and I'm eternally grateful for it existing.
Everything new always end up being "less useful" or "actively harmful" to some people once it's exposed to the real world, but that doesn't mean there is a large part of us that benefit from it many ways it regardless. I grew up in a rural place where no one cared about the same things as me, and once we got the internet for the first time, it was like a whole new world opened up. I still feel like this today.
But even so, others get pulled into it, or spit out of it, and they get harmed. And it sucks, ideally nothing should harm others. But it seems unavoidable that it does, even the bestest of tools with the bestest intentions will be misused by people, to harm themselves or to harm others. Maybe human nature just sucks.
Thankfully, nowadays I can find people from all around the world who listen and watch the same things as me.
The net effect is...Such a relief.
That was a feature, not a bug. You broadened your knowledge, and did the same for the people you talked with.
Compulsive navel-gazing is not healthy, individually, or for society.
But there never is. If you like things that are niche then you don't get a "Oh, that's not something I've heard of, tell me about it!" - and I agree that the world would be a better place if you did.
Expecting people in the office to be able to talk about that show is too much to expect. Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.
Things are different than say 20 years ago.
I don't know, but I can see why some people might think so.
Surely there is some middle ground. When we don’t have anything in common with our real life counterparts, there’s an issue. Likewise if we are forced to exclusively socialize with people we have nothing in common with. I feel like we’re on a pendulum swing where online interactions are taking over everything, and I’m hoping that swings back to some extent, but not to the thing we had before.
I finally found out there's a "Friends only feed" on Facebook which is newish. None of my friends hardly are posting - over the last 7 days, just 5 people had posts.
Seems like the engagement beast has really driven people away, is my take.
Did you consider if their observation could transfer to physical non work settings, non physical work settings, or non physical non work settings?
stumbling into great forums and blogs while searching for something is a rare thing now.
I blame the ad-supported model for everything.
Ad-supported is what made the Internet’s adolescence, in the early 00s, so impactful, because it paid the bills, or at least promised a path to profitability to VCs who paid the bills.
But once the adtech got good enough and everything went mobile, ad revenue became the ultimate bad incentive driver for everyone. Nobody at NBC in 1950 could dream of getting viewers to spend 8 hours a day watching TV, but that kind of watch time is 100% possible today and the TikToks, IG and YouTubes of the world won’t rest unless average watch time reaches 24.00 hours per day.
When Seinfeld was on, there were far fewer video options, and very few high quality ones.
Just like how before there were hundreds of thousands of radio stations, most were "full service," so you were exposed to things you didn't necessarily like or want (farm news, blues, morning chat shows). But you were aware that they existed and shared an experience with people who did like them.
Even when radio started fragmenting, I think of the 80's, we all listened to each other's music. If you listen to reruns of American Top 40 on Sirius, you'll hear a disco song followed by an R&B song, followed by a rock song followed by an oldies song followed by a soul song followed by a folk song.
Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
The internet enables the hyper-optimization of media (music, video, games, sports, politics), which drives us apart, rather than brings us together. And big tech companies are happy to carve out personalized echo chambers for each of us to wallow in.
I heard many people who grew up before 2000 say their children, grandchildren, students, or so listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. I heard none say the opposite.
I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
not even an in-person community of people with similar interests?
Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
i mean, you did say "anything in the world" :) that could include a large community, if we decided to get offline more often.
> Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
how is that different from being offline?
* i'm probably coming across more accusatory than i feel - i'm interrogating my own feelings on this subject and i've found that i tend to feel like being online has been a net negative for me in pretty much every aspect of my life.
I feel like the pervasiveness of the internet makes it much easier to find those perspectives that exists outside the norm, and I guess those are more interesting to me as I don't find those around me always, only under certain circumstances or even just happenstance.
So I guess my mind didn't go to "large community around me where I am" because I'd fear they still wouldn't posses, even less gain, those "fresh" perspectives that I seek.
I didn't feel you being accusatory FWIW, and always appreciate when people think about and question what I think, so thank you.