There is no shortage of cultural commentators out there. One is Jonathan Haidt and he writes in The Atlantic: WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
One blogger comments that Allan Bloom was saying something similar back in the 80s. I have a weird perspective on this because I moved to Mexico over 20 years ago so I have only been seeing these trends from afar. Mexico seems on rather a different path, though influenced, of course.
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?
I notice this trend on YouTube where the presenters seem to get more and more ridiculous all the time, mugging for the camera and dumbing down their content. Even a very serious fellow like Samuel Andreyev puts up clips like this:
There are music clips like Sonata Form, explained in ten minutes:
There are music theory courses in ten minutes or, a more expansive one, in sixteen minutes. These are from other authors. It reminds me of guitar courses from decades ago: learn guitar in ten easy lessons! Back then I used to laugh at them. We're not laughing any more.
Samuel Andreyev is a brilliant presenter on music who really knows his stuff, so he must be looking at his traffic and concluding that this is the only way to go.
So it seems that there is a whole trend towards, well, can we call it stupidity like Jonathan Haidt? I don't know. Is it lack of attention span? Is that just a different kind of stupidity? I read a study from a British university years ago that concluded that being in the typical interrupt-driven work environment with various phone lines, text messages, emails and other interruptions knocks about 10 points off your IQ--about the same as if you have smoked marijuana.
Some other things I notice, but I'm not sure of their significance. When I was young it was not uncommon for people to write poetry. It was a fairly normal thing to do to get out your angst or whatever. Also, a lot of people played musical instruments fairly casually. These things seem to have dwindled precipitously. These days it seems that everyone is headed for business school as quick as they can. But as I say, I have no data on this, just a few personal impressions.
Some music to inspire your thoughts. Silvius Leopold Weiss:
Actually I thought Mr. Andreyev made very sensible suggestions which match my approaches to various classical pieces, esp. modern, - listen multiple times, withhold judgement. Revisit after several days/weeks.
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear, Mr. Andreyev is, as I said, a brilliant commentator on music. My point was that even he seems to be feeling the pressure to provide shorter bite-size clips. Everything in ten minutes.
ReplyDeleteTechnology gives, technology takes away. YouTube videos on music theory and history can be dumb and shallow, but when I was a kid, the available multimedia music theory and history resources were... nonexistent. It's annoying to be interrupted all the time at work, but I remember typewriters and land lines and fax machines, and there is no comparison to be made with Zoom and email. Poetry writing is a very common activity among young people, they call it slam now and it overlaps heavily with hip-hop but is poetry all the same. There are certainly aspects of the contemporary world that I find distressing, like the climate collapsing, and America sliding into theocratic minority rule, but stories of cultural decline are ubiquitous in every era and always have a conservative political agenda buried not too far below the surface.
ReplyDeleteEthan your comment here and on the post about Spotify and music streaming seem to point to what I consider a real messaging problem the left has (especially in the US). It seems like there’s often this tension between wanting to critique the consequences of capitalism and neoliberal economic policy but at the time having a knee jerk defensive reaction when someone voices a critical opinion of a societal shift (especially if it’s fueled by younger people), even if that shift is largely the result of those same economic structures. I understand the impulse and I imagine as a fan of hip hop you feel it more acutely. As you mention these kinds of articles are nothing new, they really seem to be as old as the phenomenon of writing about society is itself. But just because that’s true doesn’t mean there’s never real decline or that there aren’t legitimate and unique concerns to be voiced in the current moment. Sites like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, etc are designed to saturate you with information and choices, optimize your engagement with them, and generally increase a desire to consume more. It’s true that they’re not entirely novel (though I would argue their effectiveness is) in that regard but to dismiss it simply with “these problems have always existed” or “people said the same things about newspapers once” or “the technology itself is neutral” is just parroting the talking points of the people making a lot of money selling this stuff. Like I agree that obviously there are nice things about the internet and it has the potential to be very beneficial to society but l also think the broad shift to web 2.0 over the past decade has been more detrimental than anything else (and god help us if the web 3.0 they’re threatening now ever comes along). I think of something like 4chan or other internet cesspools that existed when I was a kid, they were there but they just didn’t have the volume to make a broad impact until facebook and twitter came along with billions of dollars from venture capitalists and allowed those voices to be amplified like never before (and I still don’t think it’s been fully acknowledged just how much those modes of communication from places like 4chan have saturated the internet and society at large now). Now I’m sure people often have a pleasant enough time on facebook and twitter, get a nice endorphin rush from likes, maybe learn something interesting here and there, but those sites also played a huge role in getting Trump elected and convincing a significant portion of the population that the democratic party is largely a front for an international pedophile ring. In my mind that alone should be considered a net loss for society in general. You mention the climate and the political situation in the US and I just don’t see how you can think large social media sites, youtube, etc. aren’t major contributors to both problems.
ReplyDeleteBryan, It’s been a decade since I was an undergrad so you can take my opinion for what it’s worth but my experience in high school and college was also that there’s still plenty of young people writing poetry (even in a tradition more along the lines I imagine you’re thinking of compared to what Ethan mentioned). Frankly I would’ve been happy to encounter a little less of it :)
ReplyDeleteTo the musical instruments point, I also haven’t really noticed a drop off as a private teacher. I teach mostly junior high-high school age kids: some advanced rock kids, a few interested in jazz, even more rarely some classical guitarists, but by and large it’s just kids who have the idea that it would be fun to learn an instrument even if they don’t know what kind of music they want to play. Honestly it surprises me too because it’s easy to feel like people are just done with the guitar these days, but it’s actually very rare that any openings in my teaching schedule last more than a month. It may just be where I live or whatever (urban US but not NYC or LA scale) but from my vantage point it seems like the idea that it’s good to be able to play an instrument still has some staying power left in it.
Thanks to both of you for your corrections and amplifications.
ReplyDeleteAry, I'm glad to hear that young people are still interested in creative hobbies. I guess this is an artifact of moving to Mexico and not having as much contact with young people.
I am perfectly happy to recognize signs of social decline when there is evidence for them. (See, again, the climate.) But social media is extremely complicated in its effects and while it may amplify the underlying currents, I don't see a big net causal effect in any particular direction. America has had plenty of feckless and inept leadership in previous eras - George W Bush didn't need social media to dupe the nation into supporting the War on Terror, he had all the help he needed from the legacy media institutions. No doubt that social media has given a boost to fascism and conspiracy theorists, but it has also been the catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement and unbelievably rapid progress in LGBT rights. The present fascist backlash is, in its own way, evidence of just how fast some of this positive change has been.
ReplyDeleteEthan, the part that I would agree with wholeheartedly is that the situation is extremely complicated! I think we would need a whole raft of statistics--reliable ones--to even sort out the basics.
ReplyDeleteOy...I wish I shared your optimism Ethan but that is exactly the kind of response that makes it hard. From my more purple area of the country it looks much more asymmetric than that. That is 'progress' for the left comes in the form of symbolic victories and cynical gestures from corporations while the right responds quickly with much more damaging legislation and an even stronger sense of communal goals.
ReplyDeleteFrom my, admittedly eccentric, point of view, a lot of the problem comes from a populace poorly grounded in basic principles. I guess that is the Aristotelian in me! I mentioned I was eccentric! I am frankly shocked at the economic policies proposed by people that purport to understand economics, for example. But I don't want to start sliding down the slippery slope towards a political discussion!
ReplyDeleteI'm not disputing that the right is well-organized and highly activated. But gay people can get married now! That was inconceivable when I was a kid. And we can't get complacent about that kind of progress, I know that large forces are at work to roll it back, but it did happen.
ReplyDeleteI've always wondered about the dialogue in older novels (especially 19th century and earlier), which is often conducted in paragraphs, and with such clarity and consideration. Dialogue is modern novels is rather different. To what extent does this represent a real change in the way people speak and think? Considerably I would think. It is partially confirmed by reading parliamentary debate, past and present, where one also sees a similar change.
ReplyDeleteWe wrote poetry as teenagers, which was not terribly long ago. We loved writing lyrics even more so, and we also wrote stories, scripts... Though I did notice towards my mid-latter teens more often my friends (and to some extent me) were doing things like creating videos, computer games and things like that.
Thanks, Steven. Sometimes it is quite useful to muse on these things in a non-statistical way.
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