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Until the internet breaks its dependency on advertising income (a significant portion of which are either American or global, meaning they want to be inoffensiv
by ThrowawayR2 3y ago
Until the internet breaks its dependency on advertising income (a significant portion of which are either American or global, meaning they want to be inoffensive to Americans) and the internet breaks its dependency on allowing advertising to be channeled through an American company, moderating to prudish American moral standards is here to stay.
It would be a net positive if Google's advertising business was broken up along regional lines for anti-competitive practices and also being anti-cultural. Anybody want to suggest it to the EU?
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoSure relative to Europe America has prudish standards. But what about the Arab sphere? China? India? You know, like 3-4 billion people? Yeah, I think America has pretty liberal standards.
- cubefox 3y agoInterestingly, the US seems fairly similar to Japan: Large tolerance for violence, small tolerance for nudity. Which is strange, given that US has much stronger connections to Europe. (Though I'm not a Japan expert.)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoDidn't Japanese culture get pretty much rewritten after WWII to be US-compatible?
- Gibbon1 3y agoThe US forced the Japanese to rewrite their constitution with input from the US, the Japanese government and from non governmental groups. US demands were mostly to make it harder for militarists to seize power. Probably the biggest changes was press freedom and the legal rights of women. My impression of the place is you have a modern industrial society replacing large parts of the preexisting feudal culture. Important, Japanese feudal culture is not the same as western Europe feudal culture. More face culture, less shame culture. And Japanese aren't as much prudish, as conservative and obsessed with decorum.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoStill can't find the source of it, but I remembered more details behind the "culture rewrite" hypothesis I read the other day. That source argued that US didn't just defeat Japan, but it thoroughly broke the cult of emperor that existed there until end of WWII, and thus (implied) from the POV of the whole society, the west slew their god, and became a new role model.
- cubefox 3y agoThe Japanese culture is still very different from the Western one. It's more similar to South Korea probably, perhaps even China in some ways.