4 ms·
>That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true? It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation ra
by jasode 7y ago
>That is a common trope. But what if it is only half true?
It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low active participation rates. There's a wikipedia article[1] about this that happens to focus on the internet and its low ratio of contributors.
However, this phenomenon of passive consumption has been happening all through history before the internet and it is independent of technology. Whether it's the Gutenberg Press or earlier primitive technology as simple as the quill pen & paper, there's always been a very small group of people that create the content vs the much larger group that consumes it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- buboard 7y ago> It's mostly true and the "mainstream mass audience" has always exhibited low you 're speaking of a different thing, and as u said participation was low even before the internet's eternal september of 2005-10 happened.
- jasode 7y ago>you 're speaking of a different thing. No, I was responding to your claim of smartphone technology being the barrier to creativity by the mainstream audience: >smartphone [...], it just removes most of the optionality for creativity leaving a device that does one thing well: consume mindnumbing amounts of trivial information.[...] But when all that creativity is funneled through single-purpose devices, it evaporates. That claim assumes that there's a pent up wave of creativity that's being held back by smartphones. However, that misunderstands the fact that new technology doesn't really change the ratio of the people expressing creativity vs those that consume it. There wasn't really any massive creativity to "evaporate"; the desire to "be creative" was never there in the mainstream audience. You can't put the blame on technologies such as smartphones / Gutenberg press / pen & paper.
- buboard 7y agoYes that is true, but it is the content from the 1% that is also degraded.But i do put the blame on tablets/phones. Kids have visibly lost the creativity they might have with a desktop computer (be it word processing / a spreadsheet/ photo editing or writing their first programs). And we as developers are also affected. It used to be that anyone could run P2P nodes for file sharing etc. This no longer happens, the P2P web is not taking off, and nothing of equivalent value has replaced it.