> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here?
This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse.
People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common.
The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to what they all have in common, it becomes very surface level.
Therefore all things that want to get mass approval must be very basic, vague, and shallow. This is the capitalist way of creating content.
Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared. This unique thing was then valued by large groups of people, and became culture.
Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it.
Art must always start that way, or else it is simply content.
//EDIT
I also want to add that this is not a new thing and it's root cause is not social media. It is any media that is shared, whose goal is a large number of eyeballs. This has happened with every medium and will continue to happen forever.
If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
I am very interested in your take. When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture.
But when a teenager makes a tiktok about the pain of being rejected by their crush, and it's a feeling many people have shared, and many people like it, that's basic, vague and shallow.
> When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture.
So, first, any art that is funded by the church or a patron is not really in this conversation. The entire economics of that art is outside of the eyeball conversation.
If art that is pre-funded strikes a chord with people, it is the same thing as I said about artists in the past. Like Coltraine or Hendrix, they expressed something unique or personal that it was discovered that all people shared, and it therefore became culture.
There are mounds upon mounds of crappy pre-funded religious art that impacted no-one whatsoever. So Pietra is precisely the opposite of pop art, although that is what it became. Which is what makes it culture.
What makes the tiktok vague and shallow isn't the topic itself, but the awareness that there's already a hundred thousand identical tiktoks expressing the same or similar feelings in roughly the same way.
What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks.
A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just must become known to approximately everyone in a society. It must somehow become the one representative work in its class, so that when someone makes a reference, everyone knows exactly which work is being talked about, and that everyone else knows it too. Being unique is not strictly necessary, but is highly helpful.
There are an awful lot of sculptures/paintings, etc. about the sixth sorrow of mary, and most are pretty interchangeable, imo.
I wonder if the difference with tiktok is that there are thousands of videos about the same thing, everyone sees a few of those thousands, but they see a different few. So even though we're sharing the feeling, culturally, we're not sharing the same artifact.
Like maybe the trouble is that tiktok puts each user into their own custom bubble, and the bubble the user finds themself in is completely opaque - you can't readily compare what you're seeing to what your friends are seeing?
Yeah, this shared artifact - aka "social object" - is the key. It's why the Internet culture is defined by things that "went viral" - because those are the ones everyone saw, and everyone can expect everyone else saw them too.
As for the sculptures and paintings of Mary, etc., I'd say they are all boring and entirely interchangeable, but that's because I have no connection to any of them. Each such work is meaningful to the community that had a personal connection. But I'd say none of them are culturally important, except those individual ones that for some reason (like being very old) become widely known among people outside artifact-adjacent community.
Side point: culture always has a scope. Something may be important cultural object for the city I live in, unremarkable for anyone else in my country, and entirely unknown the rest of the world. With the Internet enabling arts and entertainment on demand, there is little overlap between communities we live in and the entertainment choices of individual community members. We end up having communities with no culture.
Interestingly this is the exact opposite of the usual argument as to why Shakespeare is still popular, i.e. that his work speaks of a deep universal truth about the human condition.
> Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared.
Shakespeare has exactly this going on too, though. He contributed like a thousand neologisms to English that actually stuck. That probably doesn't happen unless your art is a bit like science, almost "discovering" something in the collective unconcious rather than an act of invention. When that happens, you have something that's new/unique but also something that is deep/universal. Cubism and surrealism are also like this
There's an argument that Shakespeare didn't coin (all or some of) those phrases or words, that they were in common everyday use at the time but never written down because the type of people who used them couldn't write.
That would still be valuable in disseminating those neologisms further and giving them staying power, but it's less discovery and more documenting.
> Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it.
Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they want and pay for things they deem to be valuable.
> If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
I'd say almost everything but capitalism values authoritarianism. E.g. socialism in the end by "society" means "the state".
Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools. Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit.
You seem to be conflating "systems values" versus "People in the systems values"
Capitalism works best with a non-authoritarian government, but that leaves a lot of different options for implementing how that is handled.
Individual capitalists will almost always push for some of authoritarianism as they become more successful because they will seek to minimize competition.
> You seem to be conflating "systems values" versus "People in the systems values"
How so?
> Individual capitalists will almost always push for some of authoritarianism
Lots will push the other way, because that keeps the engine running smoothly. This is sometimes called "people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires", but really it's "people knowing the best way (on average) to invent a better future".
In capitalism's case, the name is really informative. At the heart of capitalism lies capital and the ability to invest it, which gives people who own it power to get stuff without doing any work. People without the capital do work for people with capital, so that the may survive (and do more work).
The problem is that direct work is not the only way to contribute, which is why Marx's definition of things is too narrow. Taking risk is also something valuable to reward. As is having the right connections. One or more of these things together make value that a company that can then sell to people who want it. Deciding that risking capital is worth nothing is an incomplete view.
> "Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools"
Are you saying that sports are not profitable in America? That schools and colleges in America are not run for profit? That churches and charities are not formed primarily for financial/tax benefits? Or that people can't play non-profit basketball in their local park under socialism? Or that capitalism hasn't done a work on the 'local community' by replacing third-places with places that require you to spend money to hang out, for example?
> "Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit."
This is exactly what my employer does? They take value I add, and dole it out (or not) as they see fit.
> Are you saying that sports are not profitable in America? That schools and colleges in America are not run for profit? That churches and charities are not formed primarily for financial/tax benefits? Or that people can't play non-profit basketball in their local park under socialism? Or that capitalism hasn't done a work on the 'local community' by replacing third-places with places that require you to spend money to hang out, for example?
That's correct; I'm not saying those things.
> This is exactly what my employer does? They take value I add, and dole it out (or not) as they see fit.
Then your claim "Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools." has fallen over. Those things are taken over by capitalism-slash-markets because there is profit to be made, above all other concerns (e.g. the health of football players / brain trauma, the constant advertising, the promotion of players to celebtrities and the association of product with celebrity, etc. etc. These things are community-destroying but profit-making.
This seems highly incomplete. Millions of people play football amongst themselves. Only looking at professional footballers is just the apex fallacy. The fact that a few people are paid to play doesn't negate that cultural reality.
Even then they are voluntarily playing football as probably by far their best option in life. Paid for by hundreds of millions of people who want to watch the best football possible, and will pay for it.
Finally, people choosing to pay for things isn't capitalism taking over culture. Everything about football requires money: paying for a football to go for a kickaout isn't hideous commercialism.
This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse.
People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common.
The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to what they all have in common, it becomes very surface level.
Therefore all things that want to get mass approval must be very basic, vague, and shallow. This is the capitalist way of creating content.
Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared. This unique thing was then valued by large groups of people, and became culture.
Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it.
Art must always start that way, or else it is simply content.
//EDIT
I also want to add that this is not a new thing and it's root cause is not social media. It is any media that is shared, whose goal is a large number of eyeballs. This has happened with every medium and will continue to happen forever.
If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.