Decades ago we learned how to use a PC with a Commodore or an Amstrad or whatever, and you had to write your own programs, and you used the command line: and you produced content.
Nowadays were are growing childs who just consume, they consume from Facebook, from Youtube, from Twitter: Yet they don't produce any content.
What is even more alarming is the quality of consumption has rapidly degraded. Lawrence of Arabia was photographed & designed to be watched in a pitch dark packed theatre with zero disturbance on a huge 72 feet by 52 feet imax screen. There is a whole generation that is consuming that same Lawrence of Arabia as a tiny youtube video on a tiny 9 inch by 8inch ipad, while simultaneously checking their twitter feed & sexting whilst sitting by themselves on a couch in a bright room. This to me is just SAD. Forget production, even the quality of consumption has been so grossly cheapened. These kids will NEVER know the grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia. It just makes you ask - what is the fucking price of progress ?
And to go back to Lawrence of Arabia times: Even earlier people staged their own plays at home. And when they wanted to listen to music, they played it from sheets. Instead of just tuning into the radio. That's quality of consumption for you.
I.e. people will always complain about earlier times being better, even and especially so in those earlier times themselves.
No, they didn't. Theater plays were staged publicly until at least 5th century B.C.
>And when they wanted to listen to music, they played it from sheets. Instead of just tuning into the radio. That's quality of consumption for you.
Indeed it is. Was this meant ironically?
>I.e. people will always complain about earlier times being better, even and especially so in those earlier times themselves.
And people might always have had a point. Depending on what they were complaining about. That we have used to be living in a time when this doesn't exist anymore, doesn't mean that their initial complain was bogus.
Matter of fact, it takes a lot of search for find people complaining about "earlier times being better" in earlier times. There are quotes complaining of decline, from Hesiodus to Plato to latin writers etc, but fewer and far between. And there was times like the enlightenment era or the modernist period where optimism and looking into the future was the prevalent emotion.
Nowadays, every 12 year old on YouTube laments that he wasn't born 30-40 years ago.
Yes. There were public stagings, no arguing about that. And private performances at home were popular in e.g. the 19th century as a family entertainment.
Optimism is the prevalent emotion, now. Just do not restrict yourself to judging by youtube comments. Go to any emerging country (where the majority of earth's population live nowadays).
I would guess that non-optimism about the future was the prevalent emotion for most of history. But I would have to dig up some sources for that.
We are replacing one-way devices like TVs, books, and newspapers with devices that are inherently two-way like phones, tablets, and PCs. This is emphatically not heading towards a "consumption society." Kids are writing more than they ever have in the past, and though people bemoan the use of text-speak as though it's inferior, it's only people who don't understand language and that language is continually changing.
Our society is changing greatly, but it's towards more creation, more recording of creation, and more sharing with each other. Younger generations are going to create more of this culture, and us older and less flexible folks may not understand it, but there's no reason to think that kids are going to be all zoning out, particularly any more than they were in the TV generation. People who would never, never, have spent time writing in the past are now writing on their Facebook walls, not particularly well, but they're doing it. I'm incredibly excited for the future.
The proof of that? It is all around you: Your fridge will break into pieces within ten years, but the equivalent model from 40 years ago could run for another century. Your pair of denim jeans will be reaped to shred in about the same time frame, however there were originally designed as some very resistant piece of clothing.
The reasoning behind this quality degradation? My bet is on market predictability: You want to know what would be the time frame for a consumer to come back to the market as a buyer and outside fashion trend (which would mean not relying on "Extra Cash" that house hold have at their disposition in order to buy product that are not coming from need). Specially when the asked price is starting to be viewed as a share of your monthly/yearly income.
Consequence? I believe that we are more or less unconsciously moulded into wanting to consume more and more.
But I digress. Yes I do agree to a certain extend that we are viewed more as a consumer mass than a participating group of individuals, but at the same time we are in an information revolution (akin to the printing revolution). I would recommend to read "The Pirate's Dilema" from Matt Mason (published in the UK in 2008) which present some of the opportunities offered to consumer to turn into content creators.
Actually more people produce content nowadays that any other period in history.
Heck, there are 600,000+ apps in the iTunes App Store. More than all the commercial titles ever written for Amiga and Atari combined.
You also forget that people with an Amiga, Commodore, Amstrad etc were a minority. And of those, those who wrote their own programs an even smaller minority. And of course, being early adopters, they were more the programmer/geek type that the average person, hence them writing programs etc more as a percentage of the THEN total. But in raw numbers, more people write stuff nowadays than ever before.