Banned from r/Leica for a Photo of John Abernathy being Arrested/Assaulted and tossing his M10 to a Fellow Photographer

Status
Not open for further replies.
boojum said:
TV's got cheaper which meant folks who were less affluent could buy them. And generally the less affluent are less sophisticated and the live drama was relaced by quiz shows, soap operas and serial TV shows.
Click to expand...
Archiver said:
Careful now, someone will look at what you've written and infer that you're elitist. 😄 But the wider the spread of technology, the lower and lower the common denominator of users becomes. Now that every man and his dog has the internet, every man and his dog can post whatever they like.
Click to expand...
There's a German philosopher called Theodor Adorno who seems relevant here; he wrote a lot about the difference between "high culture" and "low culture" in the 1960s, and is generally talked about as if he absolutely despised popular culture, but it's worth pointing out his earlier works dealt more with the method of delivery than an elitist stratification of culture itself. There's a quote referenced in his Wikipedia page that says it well: "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert hall where people sit as if they were in church."

I think that's both the root of the TV and Internet issues here. Regardless of their socio-economic background, it seems that the less effort people have to put in, the less they value the result (or the thing they consume). That's what's really fuelling the "race to the bottom".

Someone else mentioned Usenet; I've been thinking a lot lately about "eternal September", or the changing of Usenet's culture when Usenet access was bundled in with AOL accounts, flooding the service with non-techy users. That basically defines the entire internet for me: while Web 2.0 et al. claimed to be democratising the internet, reducing the barriers to entry (or, more accurately, creation) just flooded the entire web with low-effort, poorly-thought-through noise with no curation. And people saw this as a get-rich-quick scheme, monetising it through one idea or the other (YouTube ad revenue, paid influencers, crypto, etc.) while simultaneously trying to find ways of doing it faster and faster with less effort (leading to the GenAI-created slop that is overwhelming every space on the internet now).

Same thing's happened with news: people don't read any more. They don't study. They don't take time to understand. They just want it fast and easily consumable. And companies and corporations want to give them that, because it's quicker and costs less for them to make while bringing in more money.

I don't know how to undo that rot, but making the whole thing more difficult again might be a start.
 
Coldkennels said:
There's a German philosopher called Theodor Adorno who seems relevant here; he wrote a lot about the difference between "high culture" and "low culture" in the 1960s, and is generally talked about as if he absolutely despised popular culture, but it's worth pointing out his earlier works dealt more with the method of delivery than an elitist stratification of culture itself. There's a quote referenced in his Wikipedia page that says it well: "The meaning of a Beethoven symphony heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert hall where people sit as if they were in church."

I think that's both the root of the TV and Internet issues here. Regardless of their socio-economic background, it seems that the less effort people have to put in, the less they value the result (or the thing they consume). That's what's really fuelling the "race to the bottom".

Someone else mentioned Usenet; I've been thinking a lot lately about "eternal September", or the changing of Usenet's culture when Usenet access was bundled in with AOL accounts, flooding the service with non-techy users. That basically defines the entire internet for me: while Web 2.0 et al. claimed to be democratising the internet, reducing the barriers to entry (or, more accurately, creation) just flooded the entire web with low-effort, poorly-thought-through noise with no curation. And people saw this as a get-rich-quick scheme, monetising it through one idea or the other (YouTube ad revenue, paid influencers, crypto, etc.) while simultaneously trying to find ways of doing it faster and faster with less effort (leading to the GenAI-created slop that is overwhelming every space on the internet now).

Same thing's happened with news: people don't read any more. They don't study. They don't take time to understand. They just want it fast and easily consumable. And companies and corporations want to give them that, because it's quicker and costs less for them to make while bringing in more money.

I don't know how to undo that rot, but making the whole thing more difficult again might be a start.
Click to expand...

This, so this.
 
Last edited:
filmtwit said:
And yet Politics and Good photos are at the center of Leica.
Click to expand...
It's a sobering reminder that the internet is not a free platform. Maybe it was designed to be, but we all agreed to be herded into privately-held sandboxes, which will only become increasingly censored on what ideology can be represented.
 
Freakscene said:
Дрек in Russian means the same thing. It came into Russian from Yiddish, and ultimately from German.
Click to expand...
interestingly the word 'Schmutz' is also from Yiddish and is a synonym for Dreck

i only heard americans say Schmutz before. Doesn't matter anyways. In the end it is all שמוץ
 
Last edited:
Harry the K said:
Excuse my digression, just asking from a linguistic perspective: Is this the German word "Dreck", which means "dirt", "rubbish"?
Click to expand...

Yes, demagogy in use but more polite than Sheiss

Correction, used correcting on the word processor and got demagoguery rather than derogatory. My error. I should have caught it.
 
Last edited:
agentlossing said:
It's a sobering reminder that the internet is not a free platform. Maybe it was designed to be, but we all agreed to be herded into privately-held sandboxes, which will only become increasingly censored on what ideology can be represented.
Click to expand...

It was actually designed by ARPA for the US Department Of Defense to build a computer communications technology that would be resilient in the face of war or nuclear attack. Initially, only government and universities had access in any meaningful way. The commercialization didn't happen starting until some time in the early 1980s and really took off then the World Weird Web got laid down on top of it by Tim Berners-Lee around 1989. It came to its fullness in the late 1990s during the "Dot Com" era.

The point is that it was never really a "free" thing, nor was it intended to be. The researchers, of course, gave "free" access to their students but even that was paid for by someone.

In the context of this conversation, I have no problem with the owner/funder of a collaboration site like RFF establishing expected norms of behavior. They're paying for it, after all. I am unenthusiastic about platforms that use heavy handed viewpoint moderation and have thus chosen not to participate in them.

P.S. I was there for almost all of this and - from the beginning - isolated islands of information were purposely built. For example, at the Department Of Energy's Los Alamos facility, they had two more-or-less identical computer systems with the best stuff money could buy - Cray supercomputers, Silicon Graphics workstations, Thinking Machines TM-5 parallel computing, etc. One was connected to the internet and used for things like modeling physics and climate problems. The other one used the same connection technologies but was completely stand alone and isolated from the internet. It was presumably used for whatever weapons related research DOE was doing at the time (they declined to provide us specifics 😉. That sandbox was behind a door with a well armed US Marine. We were informed that we'd likely be shot on sight if we attempted unauthorized entry. We stayed well away 😉
 
chuckroast said:
The point is that it was never really a "free" thing, nor was it intended to be. The researchers, of course, gave "free" access to their students but even that was paid for by someone.
Click to expand...
I didn't mean "no cost," I meant free as in freedom of information and expression. As you say, that was hardly the intention of the original architects of the web, but there was a dream... I remember it in the 90s and early 00s...
 
Yeah, there's a fundamental disconnect here - the internet, as @chuckroast points out, was a military development with tightly closed (and regulated) access.

Berners-Lee's addition of the World Wide Web - which most people somewhat erroneously refer to as "the internet" - on top of that was a much more utopian and "free" idea. The ideology and rhetoric of folks like Berners-Lee is very, very different to what ARPA et. al. intended for their technology.

Seeing this uncomfortable dichotomy, it should perhaps be no surprise that the web was so thoroughly weaponised against the general populace (see: Cambridge Analytica, Internet Research Agency, the NRA, and so on).
 
agentlossing said:
I didn't mean "no cost," I meant free as in freedom of information and expression. As you say, that was hardly the intention of the original architects of the web, but there was a dream... I remember it in the 90s and early 00s...
Click to expand...

Well, you know, yesterdays weapons become today's toaster ovens 😉 Almost all of the technology we enjoy today around the world has its roots in the US military systems of the 1960s (the space race) and 1970s (internet et al).

If only they could come up with a safe fusion reactor to power my house ...
 
I remember
chuckroast said:
Well, you know, yesterdays weapons become today's toaster ovens 😉 Almost all of the technology we enjoy today around the world has its roots in the US military systems of the 1960s (the space race) and 1970s (internet et al).

If only they could come up with a safe fusion reactor to power my house ...
Click to expand...
I remember a couple of marketing types at WANG Labs complaining about the engineers having troubles getting TCP/IP working on the VS systems. They were so used to developing their own products that often didn't see the light of day. They had text (WANG Office Mail) to voice (read into voice mail messages) down so well with their PBX back in the mid 80's it was amazing.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom