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I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and the
by customguy 2mo ago
I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.
- nuclearnicer 2mo agoIt is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households. And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together. I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.
- jgtrosh 2mo agoThe VCR became widespread during the 1980s > The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.
- nuclearnicer 2mo agoAnother good one. My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater. But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.
- m0llusk 2mo agoMy family used it to capture programming we couldn't normally be around for, especially late night BBC content on PBS. Pretty much all we used it for was DVR style recording.
- nuclearnicer 2mo agoMy neighbor's house was awash in PBS recordings! https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/
- ryandrake 2mo agoMy recollection was that the VCR's main selling point was the ability to record TV and play it back later, and I can say anecdotally, that that was the primary way my family used ours in the early 80s. Only later did the idea of Blockbuster and "using VHS merely as content distribution" take hold.
- pamcake 2mo agoAll of those are pretty specific to US national culture whereas GP is talking about something more global.
- nuclearnicer 2mo agoGood point! Interested to hear about the RoW. Where are you from? Was there pre-custom search results fracturing or did you have a (relatively) uniform national media before that?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bloak 2mo agoI never thought of the DVR as a particularly significant development. I thought of it as just a replacement for the VCR. That's what it was for me. But perhaps in some areas DVRs were used to a greater extent than VCRs had been?
- nuclearnicer 2mo agoYeah, I readily concede it's lesser. For me it was the moment that we stopped watching a particular thing and discussing it the next day. But maybe that's more personal biography than sociology.
- chasd00 2mo agoTivo made it very easy and drove the DVR thing IMO. The whole "programming a vcr" was a meme back in the day for something overly confusing.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoBetter quality recording than tapes, and easier (for many people) to program.
- ssl-3 2mo agoWhen I still lived with my parents around the turn of the century, we had a Tivo DVR that talked directly with their DirecTV system's dish. The Tivo was dual-tuner and could do things like record one thing while letting a person watch a different live thing, or it could record two things if the human wasn't watching anything live. In those pre-streaming days, it would often occupy itself by filling otherwise-empty hard drive space with stuff that people might want to watch at a time of their choosing -- based on previous and simple Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down inputs from the handheld remote. In this way, it generally had stuff recorded and available for viewing 24/7 that people in the house might actually want to watch, at just the cost of some otherwise-idle machine time and some simple user ratings to direct it. At that time, it was a very neat DVR with very thoughtful features that were implemented in smart ways. I wanted to watch THX-1138, which was supposed to be George Lucas's first feature-length film. It was somewhat obscure; I couldn't find it to rent locally. I couldn't find it in the published schedules for the premium channels we had, either. I could have bought a new copy, maybe, but IIRC even that was problematic. This whole Internet thing was still mostly confined to the old-web era and inexpensively mass-produced DVDs hadn't entered the era of ubiquity. So I told the Tivo DVR to record that film, anyway, without further instruction. Despite knowing that it was hard (mabe impossible!) to find on-air: I just gave it the name and told it to make it so. And as unlikely as that seemed to me at that time: It did. It took months for it to find THX-1138. When it was eventually scheduled to be aired (one time, in the middle of the night): It made that recording a priority, executed that recording without flaw, and kept that recording so I could watch it later. That was gold. VCRs never, ever did that stuff. (Most other DVRs never did, either.)
- rayiner 2mo agoThat was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralized.
- flir 2mo agoNot totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.
- rayiner 2mo ago> The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. You're assuming that "rich" is the only relevant dividing line, which it isn't.
- shimman 2mo agoThis discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?
- hnlmorg 2mo agoWhat even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equate to different people consuming the same content. The real crux of the modern problem isn’t preference drive choices. It’s independent publishers being driven out by corporate greed. Eg AI traffic making it unviable for independent blogs. But then one could argue that the current ecosystem, where the barrier for publishing being so low, is an anomaly because historically that was always prohibitively expensive. To go back to the TV example: you couldn’t commission a show without deep pockets and a lot of TV exec contacts. I’d love our golden age of information to be persistent. But, and as yourself and others have alluded to, that’s not guaranteed unless we fight to keep it that way.
- chrisjj 2mo ago> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. A: It excludes opinion.
- benfortuna 2mo agoEverything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.
- Ajedi32 2mo agoYes, there's certainly less of a monoculture now that people have greater choice in what media they consume. Personally I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing. Greater diversity of taste, culture, and opinion makes for a richer, more interesting society in my opinion. Though I recognize it does have downsides. I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks. Certainly echo chambers are undesirable.
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago> I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks The answer society mostly settled on is representative democracy. You appoint qualified candidates via consensus, and then give them the microphone and some measure of control as long as the consensus stays strong. This is sort of what we have now with influencer culture. The flaw has always been human nature. It turns out that half of all people are of below average intelligence and they consequently make bad decisions. Especially if the smarter half use them as pawns to assume control, which is what US politics has become. Once the Morlocks and the Eloi have settled into their roles the entire thing falls apart and democracy dies screaming.
- lazyasciiart 2mo ago> It turns out that half of all people are of below average intelligence and they consequently make bad decisions. Worse than that; it turns out that even people of above average intelligence consistently make bad decisions! AND they still attempt to control others!
- mapontosevenths 2mo agoGood point. Humans in general are the problem... ChatGPT for president!
- sph 2mo agoCulture is shared experiences. There is no culture if everyone lives in their own little bubble of reality.
- customguy 2mo ago> But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. Yeah, absolutely. But for the web, at least for my daily use of it, this was the first big "shift". Learning how something was spelled by someone googling it and quoting the number of results to the others.. good times. And you can no longer find out what the page with highest page rank says about "pizza" regardless of where YOU happen to be.
- zajio1am 2mo agoWell, loss of (control over) shared narrative was one of complains of the Church against the printing press ...
- smegger001 2mo agoAnd institutional control of information didnt really start again until the Statute of Anne struck up a deal between printers and the state giving printers copyright over written works and the state the right to cencor and ban works the disapproved of nearly 250 years latter. Radio gave us Demagogues like Father Coughlin in the US and Hitler in Germany, and we still havent dealt with the problems radio introduced when television came along and now we have the internet with social media, podcast, and algorithmic echochambers, and algorithm induced radicalization. Radio television internet any one is just as much a shock to society as print was and we still havent figured out how to adapt yet to any fully.
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]
- DuncanCoffee 2mo agoI have a dream, to ban targeted advertising globally. It would solve many problems and possibly, cherry on top, kill some corporations
- MetaWhirledPeas 2mo agoStop the purchase and sale of user data, period. Kill the weed at the root.
- drstewart 2mo agoWho's selling user data? Do you think Facebook is out there selling it? How do I buy it if so?
- Yiin 2mo agonot directly, but https://brightdata.com/products/datasets/facebook https://brightdata.com/products/datasets/facebook
- simonra 2mo agoThere are many indirect ways to get information though. Better would be to ban "discrimination" of customers/humans (no loyalty programs for long term customers/whales or people who know people), and ban of usage of all personal information for decision making except short pre approved lists. Most industries would do fine with "payment received", some maybe could make legitimate cases for also "delivery address" or perhaps "age". Would probably also be good for efficient competition on merit, which should appeal to the groups with enough wealth to use it to accumulate wealth.
- fouc 2mo agoOnline advertising is what drives the desire for user data. Ban online advertising and the demand for user data withers.
- MetaWhirledPeas 2mo ago
- mapt 2mo agoPersonalization came along in MMOs around the same time, and it was hard to communicate the difference to people between a persistent MMO zone as a "place" where people and things exist, even if those things are inappropriate for your character or hostile to the point that you can't survive there or too crowded for the intended flow... versus an instanced MMO zone, a little pocket universe for you specifically that has no strangers in it, which is more of an "experience" or "cut-scene" for you to imbibe prepared content. A heavily instanced MMO may as well be a single-player or co-op game with a shared chatroom as a lobby, there is absolutely none of the emergent play, none of the characterization of players & groups of players, nothing original. Instead, give me the same ground to walk on as everybody else, even if our tread wears all the grass off of it; Half of my life in these games was getting bored waiting for a mob to spawn and fucking around making friends waiting in line, or ganging up on the guy who wanted to cut in line, or waging war on the clan that currently controls the needed territory, or grouping together to fight mobs higher than I should be able to hit (which the instance will just Adjust Downwards). Instancing and other auto-personalization algorithms cut the annoyances that are central to human socialization, achievement loops, and wayfinding.
- hamdingers 2mo agoSimilar impact to non-massive multiplayer online games. Skill based matchmaking destroyed the third place that once existed on public game servers. I still don't understand the appeal of an online game where you're algorithmically guaranteed a ~50% win rate after a calibration period. Seems to be selling well enough though.
- rightbyte 2mo agoI think the lure with matchmaking was that when it was introduced, it made you really good compared to before by easier access to better practice. In Data 2 the skill level shifted upwards enourmously for pro players and I feel also for normal players. But the scene also got kinda lame and boring with too optimized strategies.
- hamdingers 2mo ago
- criddell 2mo agoBefore search engines, we had personalized search results in the form of yellow pages. The yellow pages in Chattanooga are different than the Wichita. There was no global yellow pages where plumbers from Odessa were listed beside plumbers from Tokyo, was there? If you were looking for something more esoteric, you were going to find different results in the World Christian Encyclopedia than you would in the Encyclopedia Britannica
- cgyvbunji 2mo agoWait, so anything that's not sold everywhere is personalized? Don't think so.
- andai 2mo ago(At the playground) "...but how do I know that what I perceive as a certain meme, you also perceive as that same meme??"
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- naidnegib 2mo ago[flagged]
- lazyasciiart 2mo ago> I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality It ignores the fact that there was no such shared reality. Just go and look for the time when everyone agreed if racism existed.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]