As someone who has been on the net since the 1980s, I (still) love the Internet and technology as a whole.
On the other hand I absolutely loathe the still-spreading BuzzFeedification of virtually everything online.
It is really starting to drive me nuts. If only I knew one weird trick to filter all this shit out from the rest of what I use the Internet for, but even when you try to avoid it it tends to seep in through all of the social connections from other uses of the net.
>> On the other hand I absolutely loathe the still-spreading BuzzFeedification of virtually everything online.
Agreed.
The analogy I use with my friends is to think of TV and for that matter Cable TV before reality tv and where TV is at this point - 95% reality tv, with little or no substance or redeeming qualities.
This is where I feel the internet is right now, but also take the view, the good stuff is out there, you just have to dig a little to find it.
I started taking this viewpoint after hearing Henry Rollins spoken word tour where he really thought punk rock was dead. He then related an experience where he had a friend of his in Chicago take him to a hole in the wall club where 3 punk bands he had never heard of were playing. He said it was amazing. People smelled, the club was dark, the lightening was terrible, and the sound system was sketchy. But the bands played their guts out and blew him away.
He concluded this had become a theme in his life. A lot of things, like Punk music isn't dead, you just have to dig a little deeper these days to find the good stuff buried underneath all the BS and garbage we get feed everyday.
There is always an underground. When subcultures are appropriated by the mainstream, there will be people who continue to operate in opposition to that state of affairs.
BuzzFeed is basically a supermarket checkout line magazine for the Internet. (So is Huffington Post.) It's less part of the Internet and more something the mundanes brought over from print.
To be clear, I wasn't attacking BuzzFeed itself. If it existed in a vacuum it would be harmless (and I guess even entertaining to people who like that model) and easy to avoid. The problem is all of the other websites that have seen its success and attempted to emulate it. The model it uses has become incredibly pervasive with what I consider to be a lot of negative consequences.
Again, this is part of the general popularity of the Internet; it looks more and more like popular entertainment pre-Internet than it looks like the thoughtful, intelligent place the Internet briefly was when only a smaller group of enthusiasts wrote online. Instead of the Internet itself being an intelligent niche, it looks more and more like TV and one has to seek out intelligent niches within.
On the other hand I absolutely loathe the still-spreading BuzzFeedification of virtually everything online.
It is really starting to drive me nuts. If only I knew one weird trick to filter all this shit out from the rest of what I use the Internet for, but even when you try to avoid it it tends to seep in through all of the social connections from other uses of the net.