Comment by krapp
7 hours ago
The TV was evil?
I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on social media now existed with television. Propaganda, misinformation, addiction, emotional manipulation, mind rot, overstimulation, excessive advertising, even moral panics blaming it for violence and deviant behavior.
Television didn't create self-reinforcing bubbles of hyperreality because it represented a corporate model of reality applied to an entire culture. It could only do so much being a one-way means of communication, but bear in mind all most people do with social media now is consume. The more social media becomes like television, the worse it becomes.
I would go so far as to say that the criticisms of broadcast television were completely correct; and that for all the problems of modern centralized social media and other internet use, one major good thing that it has done is kill off broadcast television. It is much easier now than it was for much of the 20th century for random ordinary people who weren't members of established mass media organizations to broadcast their ideas to the world, and try to build an audience that cares about their message. And even though this results in a lot of bad content being made (or just content that is uninteresting to you personally), it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.
> it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.
What is such an example? I just want to calibrate what you consider a gem that could not have been made in mass culture making system.
One salient example is Grant Sanderson's 3blue1brown math explainer youtube channel and the various other people inspired by him (and often using his open-source software) to make similar math content on youtube. The kinds of math videos he makes are a pretty niche interest when you consider percentage of a regional or national TV market, and so they didn't end up getting made in the 20th century broadcast TV era of mass-culture-making.
There was some math and science content made in that regime, some of it even good - but it mostly got made by publicly-funded television studios with limited airtime, and subject to the inherent constraints of having to make mass-market-friendly content. But when you have internet-based platforms that allow people starting out as hobbyist enthusiasts to broadcast to anyone who can understand English in the entire world, you can do things like actually put real, difficult equations in your videos, and still have that build a sustainable audience.
In general the state of math and science communication on the internet is way better than it was under broadcast television, and this is one of many ways that the world has steadily improved over the past few decades.