Please, please, please make more posts on this issue. I really like what I see here, I’ve found it very helpful, and I need to see more.
Please message me on your thoughts if you ever have anything you’d like to share about this problem, e.g. what works, what doesn’t work, what seems to happen to people, etc.
A book I highly enjoyed on the topic was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which was Neil Postman mourning the death of rational discourse from TV in the year 1985. Very highly reccomend.
Postman is a great writer and this is one my favorite books.
What’s changed between 1985 and today is that human attention has become the scarcest (ie. most valuable) resource. Because of this, the Web is under immense market pressure to turn into a perfected form of cable TV as described by Postman. This is what’s driving platform centralization (ie. Facebook, TikTok, etc.) as well as the one-to-many model where a handful of users (influencers) produce while a great majority merely consume.
We’re not there yet, but we’ve swung strongly in that direction in just a decade with change. My hope is that counter-forces like Digital Minimalism as well as the inherent flexibility of the medium of the Web will arrest or even revert this change.
I think reading the book and/or trying it yourself would be very informative. You have at least until next Sunday when he reads this comment or potentially writes more.
You should message Kurt, who’s mentioned in the post as TurnTrout’s inspiration for doing this in the first place. Sounds like TurnTrout isn’t going to be online/messaging much in the near future :)
Please, please, please make more posts on this issue. I really like what I see here, I’ve found it very helpful, and I need to see more.
Please message me on your thoughts if you ever have anything you’d like to share about this problem, e.g. what works, what doesn’t work, what seems to happen to people, etc.
A book I highly enjoyed on the topic was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which was Neil Postman mourning the death of rational discourse from TV in the year 1985. Very highly reccomend.
Postman is a great writer and this is one my favorite books.
What’s changed between 1985 and today is that human attention has become the scarcest (ie. most valuable) resource. Because of this, the Web is under immense market pressure to turn into a perfected form of cable TV as described by Postman. This is what’s driving platform centralization (ie. Facebook, TikTok, etc.) as well as the one-to-many model where a handful of users (influencers) produce while a great majority merely consume.
We’re not there yet, but we’ve swung strongly in that direction in just a decade with change. My hope is that counter-forces like Digital Minimalism as well as the inherent flexibility of the medium of the Web will arrest or even revert this change.
I think reading the book and/or trying it yourself would be very informative. You have at least until next Sunday when he reads this comment or potentially writes more.
:)
You should message Kurt, who’s mentioned in the post as TurnTrout’s inspiration for doing this in the first place. Sounds like TurnTrout isn’t going to be online/messaging much in the near future :)