>> The prospect of paper-based augmented books also holds out the possibility of revolutionary combinations of text, image and sound that would recast the boundaries of literary art.
Sounds like a solution in search of a problem, or worse - the sort of kidutainment geegaws you find in modern libraries.
Or rather as special case learning tools that would gather dust, I suspect.
On one hand, one could think "oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass".
On the other hand, if you know well the period, the newspapers of the time - which were closer to the tabloids of today, but worse - did a lot to stir hatred of foreigners, of Jews, of Poor, and contributed massively in causing wars, colonialism and pogroms.
Emile Zola published "J'accuse !" in a newspaper, but it was newspapers who stirred rabid antisemitism everywhere.
It’s not a coincidence.
Of course if you set the baseline expectation at Baudelaire’s or Balzac’s writings then it’s true that newspapers heralded an age of barely sentient readers consuming nonsense written by moronic and corrupt journalists.
Because the vast majority of the population, including those working for newspapers, are dumber and less virtuous relative to the 99.9th percentile of notable writers… by definition.
Edit: The real question is why would anyone set their expectations so high?
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_V%C3%A9lo
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Auto
The anti-Dreyfusards won, put the Dreyfusards out of business by starting the Tour de France, and eventually went on to support Vichy.
So TikTok with subtitles (which are often not actually reflecting the sound)
Note that the article is not taking the simplistic position that, because 19th century French writers decried the emergence of the newspaper, and 21st century contemporary thinkers decry the dominance of social media, that the latter should be dismissed. It's more nuanced than that, and it's really mostly an accounting of how those Modernists thought about newspapers, with a little bit of "let's consider a modern example..." at the end.
One thing I'd like to point out, though, is that very common argument by which one waves away concerns about social media today because, in the past, Socrates said reading is bad, and Mallarmé said newspapers are bad, is really a canard for two reasons.
First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers, it's a different thing altogether, and in any case what happened in the past does not strictly determine a new case in the present or the future.
Second, because I'm fairly certain Mallarmé and Proust and Baudelaire would probably look at the world newspapers created, and say "I was right about newspapers all along". It did create yellow journalism, it did create tabloids, it did redefine truth, and recalibrate leisure, and it did create doomscrolling, and make people think in different—and not necessarily better—ways. Technology changes the world, and people adapt to it. After the fact of that change, the world normalizes, and new generations can't conceive of any prior alternative way of being. But, that does not mean the change was an improvement.
As a consequence, it may be categorically incorrect for us to even try to evaluate these historical positions from our modern perch. Maybe all we can do is listen to what people living through that change said, and take it as read, pun intended.
Sure, but this is just as true of the earliest printed works in the 16th and 17th centuries. So this really is a fallacious argument unless you also think that we should be dispensing with freedom of the press in general.
Tech elites on HN worrying about the moral fortitude of the unwashed masses in the face of the technological changes they themselves have brought about…it’s all a bit too “self-important loathing” imo.
Everything’s fine and going to be fine.
One might ask if it wasn't just down hill from the tabloids to social media in our current time. I tend to think that the development from tabloids to radio, television and social media is actually a consistent and logical development. The aim has always been to generate as many readers / listeners / viewers and engagement as possible, and the possibilities have become increasingly effective and efficient thanks to digital information processing. However, the side effects that each new medium introduces are becoming more extreme.
Are you suggesting that historical books and newspapers were not pandering to populist whims? Of course they did. Is the difference the precision of the targeting? That sounds like a difference of degree not of substance.
> It did create yellow journalism, it did create tabloids, it did redefine truth, and recalibrate leisure, and it did create doomscrolling, and make people think in different—and not necessarily better—ways.
It also created the article we just read and this web site to find it on.
> Maybe all we can do is listen to what people living through that change said
Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I never understood this argument.
It's obvious that the pace and scale of "progress" increased dramatically, making things much harder to contain/study and making them much more potent to a much larger group of people
Were was he proved wrong that tabloids made people more stupid? Humans are very adaptable, the fact that we're still here doesn't invalidate his opinion.
The logical progress from these things gave us 24/7 opinion news channels and they definitely make people stupid, much more than paper news.
Finally even if he was wrong, there is no logical way to use it to prove that a tiktok ban is wrong, someone being wrong about something vaguely related in the past doesn't automatically make every future vaguely related opinions wrong for eternity
I would suspect Chinese kingpins wouldn't be operating without the Party's blessing, but everyone seems too shy to point fingers, easier to blame the addict. Still, someone's getting rich off it, now as then.
Long before the Sacklers appeared on the scene, families like the Astors, the Peabodys, and the Delanos cemented their upper-crust status through the global trade in opium.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-old-money...
> someone's getting rich off it, now as then
Is it the free circulation of newspapers?
Would you prefer to ban journalism or restrict the exchange of information, and what would that imply for the internet?
If you ask me, it seems like the incentive "money" might be a problem. Maybe commercial journalism and social media are the main issue? Which is closely related to the concept of media as entertainment.
Not a new idea either, and a boring reply without a real answer, I know.
Allowing only state-sponsored journalism would not be any better, right?
Public broadcasting (as independent from the government as possible) is nice, but doesn't solve the issues discussed here.
It seems like a reasonable and common view that being dependent on other's money hurts freedom of thought and expression, which is a basic requirement for free press.
So commercial media always was the default, but being dependent on commercial success and the favor of the public always hurt the mission we ascribe to a free press.
Same goes for the requirement to entertain the readership – it cannot be disregarded, no matter how sophisticated the media we consume might be, it needs to capture our attention in some way. This differntiates writing from data.
So my long answer kind of confirms your observation that "we can't even conceptualize correcting it now". I'm not sure if it's impossible though.
I'd be curious what your own ideas are about how to "fix the mistake". It seems like a political question for sure though.
China has only strong state sponsored journalism and strict censorship. Outside the Chinese government official, I have not yet met a person who thinks the model is working.
Also we have historical examples in the West. East German etc. Czechoslovakia was squashed by 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops because they liberalised newspaper.
But at the same time, social media brain rot is definitely real, and its hurtful effects on public discourse.
The comparison to early press is warranted to open up this topic and really take a look at reality. Banning specific platforms seems like symbolism at best, but paper press was not personalized in such a fine-grained way, although the bubble phenomenon is not strictly limited to the web.
And no paper journal ever had access to so much personal data of their readers.
I think many debates about this boil down to the question whether we want to merge private and public discourse.
Coincidentally, this is not just a property of social media but also of totalitarianism.
So far so good…
so far so good…
How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!"
Does that prove tabloids make people stupid? Or disprove it?
Good luck. But I’m pretty sure hunting down tabloids isn’t going to be on anyone’s priority list if they are tasked with ‘making society smarter’ today.
"How Rush Limbaugh Paved The Way For Trump" (2021)
<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/how-rush-l...>
Audio: <https://chrt.fm/track/53A61E/pdst.fm/e/dts.podtrac.com/pts/r...> (MP3)