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> Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the

> Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the farthest and the fastest are memes and quick hits of dopamine and rage. Those are what comprise our most shared experiences today. I think we'd agree that it's better to not be limited to only those things that have been curated for us by broadcasters and media conglomerates, but between our natural tendency to seek and spread low effort content and the curation of algorithmic gatekeepers optimizing to exploit that tendency our most seen and shared media typically ends up being far more shallow than it used to be. A few generations ago the most 'viewed video' was mankind's first steps on the moon, an incredible feat of science and engineering that ignited their imaginations. Today ours is Baby Shark.

krapp 4y ago
Comparing numbers between television in the 1960s and modern internet multimedia and then extrapolating that to a comparison of relative cultural impact is disingenuous. Baby Shark is only as viewed as it is because it's an easy way for people to distract their kids. I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes." And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.

krapp 4y ago

Comparing numbers between television in the 1960s and modern internet multimedia and then extrapolating that to a comparison of relative cultural impact is disingenuous. Baby Shark is only as viewed as it is because it's an easy way for people to distract their kids. I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes." And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.