>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.
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 how exactly would you define the "mistake made so long ago"?
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.
Yes I was thinking about mentioning China, but I have not experienced this kind of blatant censorship and control myself. Hoping ofc to keep it that way.
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.
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.
I don't think this gets mentioned enough. Rush Limbaugh was the result of the doctrine's abolition. You can draw a straight line from Limbaugh to Fox News, et al.
But at some point if you’re saying hundreds of years of human history are “the wrong road”, isn’t it like saying gravity is the wrong road? Even if true, what does it matter? I don’t believe prescriptive changes to human nature have ever worked.
You are correct imho, but bear in mind there is a large minority of people who believe in people as "blank slates" that are only formed and influenced by environment. I think it's Quixotic to fix people that way but many would disagree.
I haven't been able to back this up and I'm afraid I'm making trumpesque accusations, but Chinese manufactured fentanyl always seemed to rhyme too well with the flood of American opium back in the day (second only to the English, not for lack of trying)
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.
> 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".
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
Tabloids have been everywhere for a very long time. Near as we can tell, people are smarter now than they were.
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.
Conceptually they’re just a medium. Social media is just a medium. But there’s a big difference in how they operate, the former had to be paid and had many competitors, the latter is paid by advertisor and there are just a few who own the whole landscape.
>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.
> 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.
Seems a great idea. The trash on social media is some how less trashy than the papers. We should ban it for one or more years then give them their freedom back conditionally, under supervision. We should elect the supervisors.
> 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.
> First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers, it's a different thing altogether
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.
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 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?
> In 2018, extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day (in 2011 prices, $2.57 in 2023 dollars),[2] set by the World Bank.
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.
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.
>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)
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?
>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.
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 how exactly would you define the "mistake made so long ago"?
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.
We have examples on all sides.
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.
Yes I was thinking about mentioning China, but I have not experienced this kind of blatant censorship and control myself. Hoping ofc to keep it that way.
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.
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.
And then returned in the 1990's with the 24 hour news networks.
More the removal of the fairness doctrine.
Even if it was left in place it would have become increasingly a joke as non-broadcast news grew in the form of cable rollouts and the internet.
You’re ignoring the power am radio has had on the political landscape.
I don't think this gets mentioned enough. Rush Limbaugh was the result of the doctrine's abolition. You can draw a straight line from Limbaugh to Fox News, et al.
WNYC's "One the Media" have done just this:
"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)
But at some point if you’re saying hundreds of years of human history are “the wrong road”, isn’t it like saying gravity is the wrong road? Even if true, what does it matter? I don’t believe prescriptive changes to human nature have ever worked.
You are correct imho, but bear in mind there is a large minority of people who believe in people as "blank slates" that are only formed and influenced by environment. I think it's Quixotic to fix people that way but many would disagree.
A mere hundreds of years of human history have a lot less "gravity" than gravity.
The mistake, IMO is thinking there are any options that are not ‘mistakes’ in one or more ways.
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.
edit: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/tour_de_france/
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.
I haven't been able to back this up and I'm afraid I'm making trumpesque accusations, but Chinese manufactured fentanyl always seemed to rhyme too well with the flood of American opium back in the day (second only to the English, not for lack of trying)
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...
If you look past ideology this is the key:
> someone's getting rich off it, now as then
Do you see the Chinese really trying to crack down all that hard? I’m sure they appreciate the irony.
> 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".
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
Tabloids have been everywhere for a very long time. Near as we can tell, people are smarter now than they were.
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.
Tabloids aren’t really news, they’re more like rage baiters and celebrities salads.
I’m totally fine saying newspapers, conceptually, are just net negative.
They are a tool that can be used for good or evil but largely inevitably end up in the hands of selfish commercial or political interests.
Conceptually they’re just a medium. Social media is just a medium. But there’s a big difference in how they operate, the former had to be paid and had many competitors, the latter is paid by advertisor and there are just a few who own the whole landscape.
>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.
> 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.
Seems a great idea. The trash on social media is some how less trashy than the papers. We should ban it for one or more years then give them their freedom back conditionally, under supervision. We should elect the supervisors.
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
> 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.
> First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers, it's a different thing altogether
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.
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?
Opioid deaths down 2x, for one
What metrics? Do you think the millions of people lifted out of extreme poverty in the last decade would agree?
Didn't I say "except by GDP?" Extreme poverty is decided based on GDP.
No extreme poverty is not decided based on GDP[0]. So which metrics?
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
> In 2018, extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day (in 2011 prices, $2.57 in 2023 dollars),[2] set by the World Bank.
I'm ending this discussion now.
What.... what do you think GDP is? You seem very confused.
What real world?
"Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself:
So far so good…
so far so good…
How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!"
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.
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.
>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)
> 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.
I want to be cynical and say we're even worse about that than literary folks on technology.
They can both be wrong
> ''sort of kidutainment geegaws''
Or rather as special case learning tools that would gather dust, I suspect.
They were right to be alarmed, weren't they? (As an analytical statement, not a prescriptive one.)
Recommended reading: "The Banquet Years" by Roger Shattuck (1955)
[dead]
[flagged]
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?
If you want to solve a problem pretend it is your fault.
I tried pretending aging was all my fault and it didn't do a goddamn thing.
Now try blaming someone else.