Things are going downhill far too quickly. Attention grabbing headlines and no useful content from articles rule the internet.
It makes no sense.
I cannot understand if this is due to AI, corporate greed, propaganda, or a mixture of all of the above.
I love exploring new and creative content. It brings me such great joy to learn new things.
Recently I’ve felt that I’ve been backed into a corner on every platform/service that I use and can’t get out of getting the same spoon-fed content they think I’ll like rather than allowing me to actually discover something fun and new.
Garbage content has been the most accessible for a long time. Most tv shows are kinda garbage, good ones are harder to find. Same with movies and writing.
Modern clickbait is no different from the tabloids in the supermarket, also the most visible and accessible option, screaming their latest celebrity gossip in bold font at you. No different from daytime soap opera tv. Or tv evangelists offering miracles for money. Or the bottom half of Steam releases, the stuff hardly anybody ever buys except because some youtuber made fun of it. Just the garbage stuff.
Also worth noting, the first amendment protects garbage and lies just as much as it protects facts and the truth. It’s not a right to true speech, it’s just literally free speech. So it always comes down to the same consideration–in a free world, people are free to consume garbage if they want. This should probably not really be changed, either, as that would also come with consequences.
This goes back ages though. Was ancient Greek mythology particularly helpful for them to understand the world around them? Tough to say, but I kinda doubt it.
Final note, but one of the reasons why garbage can appear to be a recent phenomenon, is because the old garbage doesn’t tend to stick around very much. We keep the good stuff from the past, they eventually get called “classics”. But the garbage will not be retained, future generations will look at your garbage and find it dumb, and will have different, perhaps slightly better, garbage that they prefer.
I guess it just makes me upset that the internet is turning into a grocery store checkout lane.
Well, I’d say their polytheistic structure made them more open minded and assigning reasons to events even if they’re made up made them look for causality. Not that I’m an expert by any means but I’m sure it wouldn’t stick around if it was useless.
Utility is one thing. Utility can be anything, it can assist in the pursuit of some goal that someone, somewhere, has.
Specifically though, I asked if it helped them with understanding the world around them. Not if it helped them do anything at all. I’m sure it helped them do quite a lot, starting with such simple things as passing the time with quality storytelling. Just for starters.
Fair enough. Also, it wouldn’t even need to be useful for the general populace. It might’ve been a controlling tool like monotheistic religions in the middle age or a good way to dupe some wealthy people into buying cheap trinkets.