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The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation. I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so al
by mbb70 3y ago
The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.
I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
- chiefalchemist 3y agoI'm not sure the official name for that is but I call it the "shared experience." Obviously something that pulls us together, but recently with less and less of it we're becoming islands in a sea of nothingness.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoThe old Scheme programmer in me calls it a closure!
- plagiarist 3y agoIf it was an airplane movie the better phrase might be "trauma bonding" :) I agree, though, it is very easy to isolate nowadays. And fewer and fewer third spaces exist if one were looking to interact.
- david_allison 3y agoCollective effervescence?
- lukifer 3y agoShares at least some overlap with a "ritual of common knowledge": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1116212.Rational_Ritual https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1116212.Rational_Ritual
- wkat4242 3y agoYou mean .. like going to the cinema?
- mortenjorck 3y agoMaybe a bit more like walking into a multiplex to discover there’s only one screen and that they’ve locked the doors behind you for the next few hours, but yes.
- throwitaway222 3y agoNo one goes to those anymore because people rotate their streaming platforms, eventually they'll get any movie for free that way.
- kredd 3y agoA very back of the napkin math - so far, 2023's domestic box office total is 75% of 2019th (pre-covid). Although the number of releases in 2023 is 60% of 2019th number of releases as well. I definitely wouldn't say nobody is going to the movies. I would even say, I went to see some this year as many times as I probably went in 2019.
- redwall_hp 3y agoI see more movies than ever in theaters, because I have an Alamo subscription. It just becomes like going out to a restaurant, and you see a movie you might not have otherwise. It also is like a restaurant where everyone is required to be silent and not use phones...
- el_benhameen 3y agoWell, people go to the cinema for the movie. Whereas people get on an airplane for the food.
- happytiger 3y agoAbsorb the irony of that comment. Yea, exactly like going to the cinema. But that’s their point about hyperpersonalization being weirdly isolating.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation. The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc. But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.
- akoboldfrying 3y agoIt's a for-profit company and they have never tried to hide that. If you know a way to make money from exclusively showing users content that makes them happier, better informed, better rested, etc., then by all means go ahead -- I sincerely wish you the best. But you won't need my good wishes, because you will soon outcompete YouTube and all the rest with your healthy-yet-still-profitable alternative.
- idle_zealot 3y agoIt's almost as though basing our society around profit maximization yields negative outcomes. But I'm sure this is just a blip that the Market will correct for.
- akoboldfrying 3y agoYou're right. I think we should instead base society on theories that pretend that humans are better to each other than we actually really are. If it turns out that people don't behave as we had hoped, we can always say that the approach that was implemented is not the true approach.
- Tade0 3y agoOr we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that, instead of leaving the decision to the most selfish of our kind. That was never a good system to begin with.
- gniv 3y agoI’m surprised people preferred watching the plane movie over whatever they had saved on Netflix on their phone.
- irrational 3y agoOr read whatever books they have saved on their phones (which is what I would do since I don’t have any kind of videos saved).
- throwaway290 3y agoWho ever watches Netflix on the phone?
- ahtihn 3y agoA surprising amount of (generally young) people on public transport.
- red-iron-pine 3y agothat wasn't save brah, thats just crushing mobile data
- viraptor 3y agoPeople who want to watch something on the plane where you have no/limited choice of quality movies and/or the screen is way too bright and warm. It's the best you've got, not the best in general.
- throwaway290 3y agoUsually planes have a decent catalogue (remember this was a bugged entertainment system on one flight) and if we are talking about watching on a phone quality doesn't matter (if anything plane screen is bigger).
- viraptor 3y ago
- donatj 3y agoI was honestly kind of shocked to find out a coworker watched a couple of the same YouTubers I do. It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts. About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"
- Borrible 3y agoYou'll be even more shocked when you find out you're coworkers because an HR AI calculated you were a good team fit because of the same preferences. You think, that's just a joke? Just wait until you're married...
- MrVandemar 3y agoRelevant: Maneki Neko, a short story by Bruce Sterling. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/ https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/
- aspenmayer 3y agoThis story was amazing last time I read it and holds up amazingly well considering the age. This could be a Black Mirror episode.
- happytiger 3y agoMedia makes you feel isolated and utterly unique. This is personalization deployed at scale. I worked on the first personalization systems and been involved in their implantation for decades. It’s fascinating how they’ve affected culture to the point where people don’t even see them anymore. Personalization is profoundly powerful technology at scale. Do not underestimate their influence. What you talk about is the ever present concern of people who know you will talk, and almost everyone talks.
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoSame here. I recently discussed YouTube with a friend and I was really surprised we had lots of channels in common. I honestly thought that what I casually watch wild be more or less unique (as a set) Cow hoof trimming (a Scottish guy Hoof GP and a US one someone the hoof guy), painting restoration (complicated name Beaumsometing), cooking (an Aussie guy Andy, and a British one who dances at the end of the preparation) and science (Veritaserum, Numberphile etc.) I skipped the French channels about cooking (grolandiers) and science. I now realize that I am really bad with the names of the channels :)
- jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y agoThat comraderie used to be everyday life. The atomization that capitalism makes inevitable is the most agonizing pain for a reason.
- toss1 3y agoContrast that with the account I read about the 1930s-40s: The major media was radio, and on summer afternoons when President Franklin Roosevelt was speaking, you could apparently walk down the street and not miss a word of the speech, because every radio in every house was tuned to the same broadcast. Unimaginable today.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoImagine a nation that had a direct dialogue with their president like that? Nowadays, it's too polarizing.
- cafard 3y agoDialogue? I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts. But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted somebody at a dinner party in the 1930s, where someone denouncing Hitler was answered with "That's going too far. You're talking about him as if he was Roosevelt."
- skeaker 3y agoI think that's the point though, isn't it? Some people will like the speeches, some won't, but they had all heard the same speech and were all more or less on the same page about what was being discussed.
- dragonwriter 3y agoA one-way radio broadcast is not a dialogue; in fact, we have much closer to realtime dualogue with leaders today, despite greater scale (yes, its still moderated by intermediaries, but its much more rapid and much less wrapped up in the ability to tell different stories to different audiences without information rapidly flowing between them—politicians still try this, sometimes, but it tends to fail, and increasingly to fail very quickly.)
- aragilar 3y agoPlanes used to be like this, and I'm noticing more and more they're expecting you to bring your own device, so it wouldn't shock me if they went back to having no inflight entertainment.
- account42 3y agoIn-flight entertainment is one thing that I wouldn't mind being unbundled because at this point it really is just a crappier version of what you can bring yourself - both the content and the usually outdated and overloaded tech.