>In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling: [...] The poet’s revulsion was widely shared in 19th-century France. Amid rapid increases in circulation, newspapers were depicted as a virus or narcotic responsible for collective neurosis, overexcitement and lowered productivity.
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.
>oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass
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.
And on the grasping hand, one could think they were right - so instead of defending social media by pointing at the past and saying it's "just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass", or - conversely - instead of claiming social media is a new and uniquely bad thing, we could perhaps consider that their observations were valid then, and are even more valid now; that we've been going down the wrong road for the past 100+ years, and social media is merely an incremental worsening of a mistake made so long ago, we can't even conceptualize correcting it now.
But it wasn't continuously bad, or at least that's the impression I get. Yellow journalism reached it's heyday in the 1890's but started turning things around towards respectability in the 1900's.
They had opium, we have fentanyl.
It's not all bad but it's more potent now by far.
Poetry with a heavy dose of truth.
Any idea where I could get my hands on such records? Lately my voracious reading appetite has been encouraging me to seek out first hand accounts
I still can't get over the fact that there were Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard bicycle racing newspapers.
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.
> 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
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.
> The internet and its associated gadgets stir reactions remarkably like those once directed at the press. In some quarters, futurist technophilia; more commonly, alarm at the social, political and cultural impact of these innovations, combined with neurotic dependence upon them.
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.
To me this comment reads like a lot of bending over backwards to try to the justify a gut feeling of “yea but for sure this time is different right??”
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.
Everything's not fine, hasn't been fine for at least a decade, and it's not at all certain that everything is going to be fine.
Everything has never and will never be completely fine. Things are better today than ever and continue to improve. Get offline and look around the real world for a while.
Things are certainly better overall, but that improvement is not universal, and not evenly distributed. Clearly. Otherwise, we would simply say "everything is as good as it can practically be," which is something few people are doing. One of the ways in which the world is imperfect is that our media—and our relationship to that media—could be better. Anything in that to disagree with?
By most metrics, things were better about a decade ago. We're on a downward trajectory now. Except by GDP.
What metrics do you think were better in 2015?
They weren’t wrong, the people controlling the media, whether that be the owner of the newscompany or the owner of the algorithm that influences what newscompany gets recommended prefers it when the reader gets recommended criticism of others based on race or other indignificant things instead of riches, cause they are the people with riches.
It’s not a coincidence.
There's a reason Hearst was rich enough to build a castle.
They were right to be alarmed, weren't they? (As an analytical statement, not a prescriptive one.)
Interesting article but unfortunately, as is often the case with serious literary folk talking about technology, I find his concluding observations (hopes) about augmented books completely unconvincing as well as vague.
>> 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.
> as is often the case with serious literary folk talking about technology
You should also see technology folk talking about serious literary folk - it's equally misconstrued and off track.
> ''sort of kidutainment geegaws''
Or rather as special case learning tools that would gather dust, I suspect.
>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.
So TikTok with subtitles (which are often not actually reflecting the sound)
This seems like a tautology.
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?