We don't value information enough

[digital-man]

The information in the west is heavily spread and then forgot.
I feel like there is more aspects of the old net that remained these years in Japan than in the west, they seem to have more solid communities in the internet and trends are something more secondary.

Maybe I'm wrong but I want to know what you think.

 

[Aral]

No idea what it's like on the Japanese web, but they don't have this obnoxious "look at me" culture that we have in the West and that is pretty much the root of all digital evils of today. In Japan, drawing attention to yourself is quite looked down upon, whereas here in the west it's the reverse. If you keep to yourself, people will shit on you or straight up say you have a mental problem. So probably, this is true. Japanese communities are possibly more close-knit and reminiscent of the Y2K era because it's unacceptable to stand out in their culture. Collectivist vs (pathologically) individualist. Though I could argue that they may be pathologically collectivistic as well, but that's another story.

 

[s0ren]

In the West, our overlords do not want us to know things. They just want us to consoooooooooom

 

[DonRamon131]

Agreed on the modern internet culture in the west. There's so much content and most of it is trash content, from news to entertainment. I think it would be greatly beneficial to teach kids how to differentiate good and bad/trash/deceptive content; that alone will give people a way to think on their own and not believe everything that's put in front of them. But then again this all stems from capitalism, in which it insist that you must be you. It (along with everyone else) insist that you must be different, that greatness awaits you. Whereas eastern countries tend to be more collective. tldr: consoom as little as possible. It will be better for your mental health.

 

[Rebel]

Agreed on all points in this thread - I think Western culture largely has shifted towards this individualistic attention-drawing mentality, which has permeated all parts of society.
When it comes to tech, even more so, with stuff like Tik Tok, you can see it everywhere in Western culture. Japan has a very strong focus on societal structure, so everything ends up looking like people working together and not standing out (which I prefer). As said earlier in this thread, That's likely why you see Japanese Internet communities which remind you more of the older days of the Internet, with more people acting as a community, in contrast to many people trying to draw attention and be 'individuals'.

 

[LostintheCycle]

I was close with a teacher at my high school in Australia who was on the path of making our school more Japan-affiliated, and ended up being a helper in two exchange programs. From what I saw, I'd say that will be less and less true because the Western digital culture and ideas is being pushed out to them. Some of the girls, and even some of the boys, would flaunt their selves online a bit. But they weren't all that bad y'know. It was nice to finally feel tall next to a girl. At the farewell ceremony, they all wanted to take pictures with me

 

[Fairykang]

Shortened attention spans. I wonder how many people nowadays are physically capable of reading a book.

 

[Rebel]

I was close with a teacher at my high school in Australia who was on the path of making our school more Japan-affiliated, and ended up being a helper in two exchange programs. From what I saw, I'd say that will be less and less true because the Western digital culture and ideas is being pushed out to them. Some of the girls, and even some of the boys, would flaunt their selves online a bit. But they weren't all that bad y'know. It was nice to finally feel tall next to a girl. At the farewell ceremony, they all wanted to take pictures with me

Fellow Aussie, represent.

 

[JihyoParkXX]

Shortened attention spans. I wonder how many people nowadays are physically capable of reading a book.

People blame Tik Tok for the instant gratification it gives you, causing our attention span to decrease. I'm just glad that I always preferred longer videos and couldn't get into Tik Tok or other short-form content.

 

[roxytonic]

The information in the west is heavily spread and then forgot.

Super short on time right now but I've noticed that, on a more local scale, the problem is not being able to organically/easily/intuitively resurface old information. I do this on Twitter--picked up the habit from visakanv last month--and I'm gaining far better insight but not many others do this. So we need better ways to remember our digital corpus.

tired: viral posts
wired: referenced posts

 

[Some_porcupine]

Agreed on the modern internet culture in the west. There's so much content and most of it is trash content, from news to entertainment. I think it would be greatly beneficial to teach kids how to differentiate good and bad/trash/deceptive content; that alone will give people a way to think on their own and not believe everything that's put in front of them. But then again this all stems from capitalism, in which it insist that you must be you. It (along with everyone else) insist that you must be different, that greatness awaits you. Whereas eastern countries tend to be more collective. tldr: consoom as little as possible. It will be better for your mental health.

But how to know? If you are gov, do you want people to know all your tricks you use on them? It is, I guess, on the level of as we see children Vs adults ...
Why to learn all that, if it is easier and cheaper, to let them keep learning what is good and bad, with fake authority over the facts?!
You can't know if you are made tired, on purpose! ... Ok, this makes no sense and I say bullshit

Human curiousity is inborn . It can be destroyed by wrong type of education, by learning useless crap (1860s Vs web3 ) (no crypto, just next step of web2, 1)
You can't question authority if you don't see any
If you make it so that people are learnt to fear, hate, spite each other then they can never rise up. But what for. I miss something, you can't rise up if there is nothing to ruseup against, no?

Guys help I lost it, my argumentls fall on themselves and each other. This must be how God feels like lol. Or, how Pytagoras discovered tunes, but then too, that 1²+1²=√2 - spoiler: he hated that idea...

/Too smart to know better, too dumb to realize. Too smart to enjoy life, too dumb to hate it...

 

[Some_porcupine]

Old people who don't understand trends tend to ruin them

This isn't meant to be an attack on older people. I'm in my late twenties and I see this a lot from people my age too. In general, trends are often followed by older people who try to understand the trend and in the modern age that leads to YouTube videos about the trend and then waves of people...

forum.agoraroad.com

As any niche interest grows, it's natural for more and more people from what I call "the lowest common denominator" to engage in these interests.

These people may be truly interested in such hobbies, but aren't fully invested enough to understand or care about the hobby in the same manner of the first wave of adopters. I don't really notice these people being older though. Maybe I'm not as observant but I guess they could be older people since the cohort that consists of this lowest common denominator tend to "participate" in a hobby by throwing money at it.

Eventually as more people from the lowest common denominator engage in a hobby, the bar will gradually lower to the point that normies enter the scene. They may see the hobby merely as a fashion statement or something that will raise their social status. At that point the niche hobby is no longer a hobby but a consumer market.

Click to expand...

Reminds me of politics and Capturing the flag
You pick Biden when you can't have Sanders
And leftists clump when there is no one to represent them, even if it harms them all, the in-group, and the whole spectrum too
"I am leftist, I support (RW candidate), yes we exist" them sounds like joke, but hear me out, it is not
There are as many sides and political parties/groups as there are people
Some.hate aspects of this clupong, some don't. Some people want them all to clump, some don't. Take e.g.

People who believe kids should teach sex-ed from 4 years , versus some ultra-leftist socialist fury who want to fight for right to walk on streets almost naked in tiny harness. This is how mass media works.
Take things out of context ... Gatekeep girlboss gaslight - and you have Fox News or 60 Minutes. Next Big Scare...

lemme quote

This isn't older people ruining trends, it's people who want to make a quick buck. Hustle culture commodifies people's enjoyment and turns it into niche markets for exploitation. This happened in the vintage keyboard hobby over covid when dickheads started market manipulating, but we are a small enough hobby that we eventually ran those people out.

It's a function of both "hustlers" existing and also stupid paypigs with bigger wallets than sense giving them the money to continue to make it profitable. You can only stop it by forming a united front against both types of people.

 

[Pangolin]

The primary reason we don't value it is because we have too much of it and its now common and mundane to us to have so much information within easy reach, but in the olden times you either had to own an encyclopedia, go to a library, ask someone who knows, or just accept that you don't have all the information.

Yet with all the information at our fingertips we are flooded with a deluge of information to where it becomes important to learn how to filter the deluge of information we have, and more so than the data itself. Such a thing is known as data science.

I've been practicing with data-isolation to where I actively try to reduce the amout of information I take in or at least give myself some time to process it all. That feeling of having so much data yet not having time to compress and parse it is a symptom of a data overload. I would say that in no other point in time have we been flooded with so much information that we litterally reach the peak of what we can actually process and retain.

The most insidious bits of data are those that remain stuck in your memory yet have no purpose and give you no benefit. For example, news of across the country in bum-fuck nowhere. Yeah okay so you know what something blew up there. So what. Its useless information designed to clog your mind.

 

[Cammell]

We have obnoxious intake of useless information

We don't need that much content really

We need to treat things as more finite, as that there is end to them

But there is no end while scrolling TikTok...

 

[4d1]

In the West, our overlords do not want us to know things. They just want us to consoooooooooom

Or alternatively, they want us to spew out everything possible, because them three-letter-agencies are too lazy to set up a social credit system (for now) and want us posting every thought/photo/message for them to hoover up and analyse - by having it engrained as part of our culture, we comply and cannot be a reserved and quiet potential threat, because mentally we have to share everything or else we suffer socially! /s

 

[Some_porcupine]

Or alternatively, they want us to spew out everything possible, because them three-letter-agencies are too lazy to set up a social credit system (for now) and want us posting every thought/photo/message for them to hoover up and analyse - by having it engrained as part of our culture, we comply and cannot be a reserved and quiet potential threat, because mentally we have to share everything or else we suffer socially! /s

analyyyyyyyyse, dont think, just loooooooooooook for what isnnnnnnnnnnt eveeeeeeeeem there!!!!1!1!1!1

 

[eve]

Shortened attention spans. I wonder how many people nowadays are physically capable of reading a book.

afaik, the majority of younger ppl dont even read anything anymoar ... everything they consume is thru podcasts or video essays, not articles or books
i can imagine that even if they tried it would be pretty difficult considering most of them probably dont have the skills to actually form a unique opinion on whatever they read
death of media literacy or something or other

 

[McGovern '72!]

afaik, the majority of younger ppl dont even read anything anymoar ... everything they consume is thru podcasts or video essays, not articles or books
i can imagine that even if they tried it would be pretty difficult considering most of them probably dont have the skills to actually form a unique opinion on whatever they read
death of media literacy or something or other

It's not the death of media literacy, it's just the death of regular literacy. I've babysat eight year olds who couldn't even distinguish their ps and qs. It isn't that there's too much information going around, it's that there isn't enough of it— everything has been replaced with raw commodity-slop. If you'll permit a heaping of pseud larp, Mark Fisher talked about this in Capitalist Realism:

"Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read - slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. 'Writing has never been capitalism's thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate', Deleuze and Guattari argued in Anti-Oedipus. 'Electric language does not go by way of the voice or writing: data processing does without them both'. Hence the reason that many successful business people are dyslexic (but is their post-lexical efficiency a cause or effect of their success?)"

imo we need to get kids reading for fun again, and that means injecting books back into the popular flow of pseudo-slogans. Though that's a double-edged sword because of shit like booktok, as well as the pseud^2 larp hordes of infants who latch onto le popular book and then recite the same meanings they read off of >reddit to anyone who asks about analyzing it (e.g. Blood Meridian, though it's fucking fantastic if you ignore the pyrocynical-tier analyses on >reddit).

 

[containercore]

The information in the west is heavily spread and then forgot.
I feel like there is more aspects of the old net that remained these years in Japan than in the west, they seem to have more solid communities in the internet and trends are something more secondary.

Maybe I'm wrong but I want to know what you think.

View attachment 24972​

I think what you're describing is part of the shift in our perception of the internet and its function. Much of this shift comes from conscious design choices made by Silicon Valley. The metaphor that gets thrown around a lot is that for the first two or so decades, the internet was thought of as a library, an indexed repository of information which a user could reference. That's one of the reasons why early on we had surprisingly functional search engines. It took a long time for people to really start gaming the system, because it just didn't make sense in the mental model of internet-as-library. How and why would you try to game the Dewey decimal system? Old websites are often incredibly well-organized despite having pretty primitive web design. They'll have tables of contents, chapters, indices, bibliographies etc. Effectively they're books, because that's how the author and user were interfacing with them.

As the concept of clicks, views, engagement, etc. started making themselves known, you end up with something called the attention economy, which is something similar to prime-time TV. There's a finite amount of space in a feed (actually it's infinite, but a person has a finite amount of time to scroll it, so it amounts to the same thing, priority is given to the most engagementy stuff so the user will keep engaging), just like there's a finite amount of time slots on a television channel like Canal+. This accounts for both the low quality and impermanence of the type of information generated for this paradigm. And these are two sides to the same coin, just like how the television paradigm created a lot of generic, insipid and forgettable content that only lives on as wikipedia articles and occasional fodder for video essays, the high churn rate and short shelf-life means you have to get the information out the door as fast possible.

The hollowness and pointlessness of chasing clicks/views/engagement is starting to dawn on people (only took about a decade and a half), and I've seen a number of people finally waking up to how utterly soulless the concept of content really is. Normie youtubers are starting to say it:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtbFwzZp6Y


I don't have a lot of confidence that the library model of the internet will ever make a resurgence over the television model, though. Internet usage in general has been conditioned for this new model. I think it's probably best to just spend more time reading books.

 

[Fairykang]

Since the thread's been bumped, I'll contribute some more.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

www.theatlantic.com

This article is an observation from all the way back in 2008 about how the Internet was shortening attention spans.
A more in depth exploration of the topic was the book "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr.
Basically, it was observed that the way the Internet was used at the time(following hyperlinks) was having a profound effect on everyone's neuroplasticity.

I'd be very interested to see if there's been more investigation on how that effect has changed in Web 2.0.