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Do you have a source for that? Young people have way more access to creation tools than ever before. Blogs (writing), memes (photo editing), vlogs (film creatio

Do you have a source for that? Young people have way more access to creation tools than ever before. Blogs (writing), memes (photo editing), vlogs (film creation), Instagram (photography)... Not to mention YouTube is the most incredible source of tutorials on just about every topic imaginable. The internet and smartphones have made all these cheaper/freer than ever before. Anyone with a creative itch has a ton of avenues to learn, share and monetize their creative interests. I find it hard to believe that young people are creating less than earlier generations.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
There's more creation but virtually all of it is ADHD-driven - shallow quick-hit micro-entertainment designed to drive analytics. And a lot of it is interchangeable and repetitive - like all those Instagram photos taken in the same popular locations with the same few stock poses. The same thing applies to music (generic watered-down techno with bass-drum-under-samples and maybe a bit of synth), visual art (digital paintings of pretty anime-influenced girls, lone heroic fantasy figures dwarfed by an impossibly huge menacing monster, relatively trivial generative code animations), and short movies (generic sci-fi settings and tropes, generic scripts, pro-quality CGI.) Unusual talent, deep mastery of a medium with some awareness of its history, non-trivial content, and an original voice are very rare. It's not that it's all terrible, but there's far more superficial trope mimicry than powerfully resonant original creative work.
- danielbln 7y ago
  This reeks of "things were so much better in my day". 20 years ago teenagers would watch copious amounts of TV, anime tropes were already around, it was the decade of shitty superhero movies and trashy TV shows. I give you the gamefied dopamine releasers, but it was never so easy to participate in online communities, find maker spaces, set up a kickstarter/patreon and go nuts creating whatever you feel like.
- dTal 7y ago
  Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap. This has always been the case. To make a compelling argument, you have to show that it's somehow worse than it used to be. For my money, the peak quality now attained by art is definitely better than it used to be. Why, even just in music, within the past decade the musical genres thoroughly burst their banks and now I find most new music defies classification - I can only listen in wonder. Not all of it is good, to be sure, but vast amounts of it are at least interesting.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

There's more creation but virtually all of it is ADHD-driven - shallow quick-hit micro-entertainment designed to drive analytics. And a lot of it is interchangeable and repetitive - like all those Instagram photos taken in the same popular locations with the same few stock poses. The same thing applies to music (generic watered-down techno with bass-drum-under-samples and maybe a bit of synth), visual art (digital paintings of pretty anime-influenced girls, lone heroic fantasy figures dwarfed by an impossibly huge menacing monster, relatively trivial generative code animations), and short movies (generic sci-fi settings and tropes, generic scripts, pro-quality CGI.) Unusual talent, deep mastery of a medium with some awareness of its history, non-trivial content, and an original voice are very rare. It's not that it's all terrible, but there's far more superficial trope mimicry than powerfully resonant original creative work.

danielbln 7y ago
This reeks of "things were so much better in my day". 20 years ago teenagers would watch copious amounts of TV, anime tropes were already around, it was the decade of shitty superhero movies and trashy TV shows. I give you the gamefied dopamine releasers, but it was never so easy to participate in online communities, find maker spaces, set up a kickstarter/patreon and go nuts creating whatever you feel like.
dTal 7y ago
Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap. This has always been the case. To make a compelling argument, you have to show that it's somehow worse than it used to be. For my money, the peak quality now attained by art is definitely better than it used to be. Why, even just in music, within the past decade the musical genres thoroughly burst their banks and now I find most new music defies classification - I can only listen in wonder. Not all of it is good, to be sure, but vast amounts of it are at least interesting.