Masculinity problem is reaching critical mass. I specialize partially in seeing teenage male clients, and right now they're some of the most lost (and forgotten) cohort of humans here in America. Over the decades, we've rightfully shifted attention towards minority, under-served, and diverse demographics to bring equity to society. One of the unintended consequences, however, is men have been left by the wayside. Women have evolved, but society isn't teaching men how to catch up. Undergraduate enrollment here in the states is now 60/40 women to men, with young men being much more likely to attempt suicide than young women as well (and a whole host of other problems).
This doesn't have to be a zero-sum game; when I talk to my fellow therapists about raising up men, it's assumed (and loudly vocalized) it must come at the cost of women's rights. No! We can raise everyone up. We can invigorate and support minority groups in their fight for equality without having to also put some other group down! There isn't a ceiling on the resource that is joy.
P.S. The most chilling part of the infographic you provided about entertainment is the spot where the source says "Did you know half of all waking hours are now spent engaged in entertainment? Learn more about how this might impact your brand." It would be like saying "half of all waking hours are now spent laying on the couch, learn more about how this affects your store's furniture sales."
“We can invigorate and support minority groups in their fight for equality without having to also put some other group down! There isn't a ceiling on the resource that is joy.”
I love this! Thank you for your work with young men.
"We _can_ raise everyone up," Max, and we must. My contribution to this thick emotional and cultural issue is to raise the awareness of 'value' in culture overall, for all.
Obviously, I write from the point of view of a 'tween (in between two cultures - Italo-European, and America/Australian. Ok, maybe it's more than two). In the 17 years I've been publishing online -- and Conversation Agent blog, and now here -- I've built an audience that skews towards males. So there's that.
On the personal angle, I view relationships as partnerships. Spouses are made of two complete human beings, each with strengths and stories. That's the fertile hummus on which to build a more balanced conversation that doesn't rely on the societal or cultural gender assignations. We help each other through, point out how we see issues/the world from a personal lens and are open to and inviting towards the views (biases and all that) of the other.
We don't teach conversation like this in school -- though I did learn it there in my humanistic education (grammar school, Liberal Arts, philosophy, all that jazz that we seem to want to throw away with the bathwater.)
A very good article, I mean really, but . . . (well, there had to be a 'but'!) . . .
What does an ordinary man, like your humble reviewer here, do with all this? I mean, I'm not bound for glory in politics or on a corporate board, I'm just a reasonably intelligent man who eschews wealth and profile for reasons of principle and taste (not to mention laziness) and who is doing his best to give his teenage son a decent baseplate in life.
But how do I respond to the world as it is presented in so many publications and YouTube videos, and with particular poignancy in this piece of yours? I can continue buying books, CDs, vinyl, and the odd DVD of an cinema classic so my home stays a bastion of a departing 'culture'. Maybe buy a new home further out of town in someplace inconspicuous. However retreating or circling the wagons rarely wins the day unless the cavalry shows up. But do we have any cavalry left? Or even one guy riding a white horse? Hell, even Sancho Panza on a donkey is starting to seem too much to ask for.
My point is, I find myself going ever inward, focused on old ways and things, essentially turning my back on the future. This may be healthy for individuals, at least in the short term, but it's no way to run a society. You feel like you're hiding with a candle under a blanket inside a madhouse. You spend your time muttering and snorting into your walrus moustache over things that you read online. I've led my life according to the dictum 'never a leader nor a follower be' (actually I think it's 'never a lender nor a borrower be' but they mean something similar), but instead of exploring strange new worlds and boldly going where no self-effacing 'person' has gone before, I'm finding myself holed up somewhere waiting for the zombies.
That was a very humorous post. I especially enjoyed the image of someone snorting into their walrus moustache over things one reads online.
It's also an insightful post, and I think many people feel the same as you do re: holing themselves up somewhere waiting for the zombies.
I am in my mid-40s and my vocation, which I love, puts me around little humans between the ages of 5 and 10. When I tell any of them that I was born in the '70s, they exclaim, "you're so old!", and "did you watch Laurel and Hardy when you were a kid?". I rightly feel like a dinosaur in many ways because most of my youth and young adulthood wasn't that much different in some ways than that of my parents and even my grandparents. Not so with the younger generations; they are true digital natives, as they say, and they bring a different set of expectations to the table.
But I digress. Aside from the optimism I gain from teaching these little ones, I also become more aware of what I can and cannot change. I cannot change the fact that in some ways, we seem to be moving from a literate society to one that's more interested in cat memes. I see it with my students: more and more of them are less and less interested in reading books with "lots of words", and they instead seek out and demand more graphic novels and manga. Now, there's nothing wrong with those last two formats, but when this is all we're reading, it makes me a bit worried. YouTube, Tik Tok; not evil per se, but they entirely devote themselves to holding our kids' attention with digital images and vids. Content that can be consumed quickly and easily. It reminds me of yet another moment in undergrad (my parents would be very happy that I remember these odd bits from all that schooling!) in which Bishop Honorius of Autun said that "pictures are the literature of the laiety". He was making the case for church iconography so that the peasants could understand the story of Jesus through pictures, since most of them weren't able to read. Well, that was typical of the times, because he lived in the 11th century. Talk about medieval! We all know that a few centuries later Mr. Gutenberg came along, and his invention revolutionized literacy, and widespread literacy was achieved in the West in the 1800s and 1900s. Well, I would argue that we are choosing to move back to a medieval mindset in which pictures (and vids) will hold more sway, and the written word less sway. It's a cultural shift, and as one person, there's nothing I can do about that.
Which leads me to what we CAN do. We can cultivate ourselves. When cultures face these moments of change/disintegration across time, some people take the opportunity to take a more introverted turn and focus intensely on what they can control in their own lives. On the religious side, you have people like Rod Dreher who has argued for small, intentional Christian communities to form and band together to form Augustine's City of God while the rest of the non-Christians live in an increasingly abject City of Man. That's not my cup of tea, but I understand why he makes that argument. On my end, I have begun to informally study Stoicism, that wonderful school of thinking entirely devoted to how we can regulate our emotions regarding things we can control and things we cannot. I also spend more time creative writing, sometimes sharing with a group, and they with me. In recognizing that advertisers are looking more intensely for our clicks, I am more mindful of my "computer time". I also used to be a prolific texter, emailer, and etc., and now I've put up auto-response on my personal email telling folks I only check it once a week, and if there's something urgent, to get in touch with me some other way (because if it's really urgent for me, they already have that info). I play music informally with a small group; we're not good, but we enjoy our music and our time together. I spend more time exercising and doing creative writing.
Do these things change the direction of society? No. Do they prevent a government shutdown? Nope. But what they do do (and my kids would laugh at hearing that!) is help me focus on what I can control, and it helps me to eliminate the distractions/cacophony that much of the world wants me to click on, lose my mind in, and go down the rabbit hole over.
So when you say "what are we to do?", I would suggest you first ask yourself, "what am I to do?"
Thus is an excellent response to the OP @davidpalmer, and I agree that we ourselves ultimately have the power to control what we do with our time. Yet Man is a social animal. We need the emotional support of others regarding our values, as the infamous Asch Experiment proved.
This is one benefit of ad-free forums like Substack, especially in this subset of Ted Readers who share a certain life aesthetic by virtue of their love for music.
Perhaps we're not a Silent Majority (oddly enough, a term coined by Richard Nixon in 1969) but certainly our numbers are not insignificant.
Thanks for your response. Perhaps I should have articulated mine better in terms of a split: between focusing on one's self more, but also on finding community that matters to you. I did give some examples of community that I rely on (the music group where we don't perform that well, but have a good time doing it), as well as the community of writers I belong to. Plus, there's our Substack communities! So I should have articulated this dichotomy more clearly, and thanks for pointing that out.
On further reflection, I think in answer to the OP's question of "who's going to save us?", the answer is the dichotomy I outlined: cultivating one's own self, which also means recognizing what is and is not in our control, AND finding/creating intentional community of likeminded people with whom one can share good times, fun, emotional support, etc.
So the answer to the OP's question is, we as individuals and we as intentional community will "save" ourselves. That is the best most of us can do at any given time!
As the OP whose comment your fine response gave some reflected luster to, I'd like to say we're very much in agreement. It is frustrating to see what's going on 'out there' but if you charge out with the cavalry to take action you leave your fort undefended.
The Age of Reason began, what, three centuries ago, and gave birth to its offspring science. We seem to be in a counter-revolution, with reason and science under attack from the likes of the Covid madness, the trans-gender movement, the climate change narrative, official racism, the attack on democracy, and a few more besides.
The human race seems to progress like a pendulum, lurching from one extreme to the other until the middle way of reason and spiritual insight is found (but of course, how can you find the middle without first charting the extremes?). If this is the case, hopefully this new Dark Age isn't as stygian as the last.
>> I’ve grumbled here in the past about tech companies manipulating customers and users instead of serving them. This may seem like a small thing, but the end result is a culture that grows more tyrannical and inflexible with each passing month.
Completely agree. Put a bit differently, something I've noticed frequently is that people who create amazing things tend to have an odd attitude towards money: they tend to have a somewhat cavalier attitude about it, and plow it back into what they're doing.
Disney seemed to take every penny the Disney company made and put it back into the business to the point where, in the early days, the studio was almost always strapped for cash. His personal fortune he put on the line to build DisneyLand. Musk, whatever you think of him, took the money he made from PayPal and put it all on the line to create SpaceX and Tesla. Jobs I never heard mention money as a goal, but he sure talked a lot about what technology could do for humanity. (The watch was developed after his death, as it turns out.)
I'm kind of using "pursuit of money as an end" as a proxy for "manipulating rather than serving". But I really think you can feel the shift when a company loses the joy in pleasing its customers and moves over to treating its customers like piggy banks.
"But I really think you can feel the shift when a company loses the joy in pleasing its customers and moves over to treating its customers like piggy banks." See health system in America, and alas increasingly in many parts of the world. My argument is that we need to re-engage with a broader definition of 'value' in culture and society. Because what you describe, @mikemaletic is taking away the future from those who come next.
A manager of mine whom I worked for at Silicon Graphics would refer to "when the bean counters take over". It describes the same phenomenon. We made computer stuff because it was helpful and cool. Yeah, it had to make money, or we wouldn't have jobs. But it wasn't really the point.
The origin of the word "entertain" comes from the Latin inter ‘between’ + tenere ‘to hold’. Entertainment was supposed to "hold us between" the main parts of life. If we are spending half our waking our hours in "suspension", what has our life become about?
We have Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business."
When I spoke of this to a perceptive colleague he replied: " . . . it's not even being 'amused,' it's being distracted to death!" Nowadays it's not even valid "amusement," which might have at least some meager value, but mere distraction . . . OK, let's see–whats next? And next . . . and next . . .
Ted gave us the link https://luminatedata.com/. You just have to click on it, and at the top, it says "The most comprehensive analytics platform revealing the trends, behaviors and insights across film, television and music." When people give you links, use 'em, I always say!
I have no idea about that. Honestly, I have a tv I rarely watch, I only have Netflix and Prime Video, and I don't really follow what Warner Bros and other media companies do. Ted is my source for that kind of information!
I never had a tv until I was given a one in 1980. Turned it on, and thought it was ridiculous, returned it to the giver. I don't understand how people can sit there and watch it hours every day. A former friend asked me how I could live without a TV? I answered, my brain still works, and I enjoy thinking. She seemed puzzled by that answer.
I think that whatever you give your attention to, that has no redeeming value, (cartoons on a Sat. morning) could be called entertainment. Listening to music with full attention, or reading something that contributes to your well being could be called enrichment.
We're also drowning iin STORIES... three acts, a hero, a challenge, triumph at the end and everyone goes home. The dramatic structure has seeped into just about every human interaction, especially political.
But life isn't a story. It's make-believe. Trying to make life fit the requirements of story is a losing game.
I’ll switch my brain off sometimes. Everybody needs a break. But if you’re a creator in any way, self-discipline and live of the craft usually take up much spare time, as it should. Balance is always good.
You know, I was raised by a man who wasn't toxically masculine. He had scarlet fever as a young child, was sickly for a long time afterward, and as the youngest of four brothers his mother claimed him to help her in the kitchen.
In consequence, he could cook and sew with the best of them. He was great with kids, too, but I think his father probably was, too. I learned it from him. His gender presentation was clearly and obviously masculine, but behaviorally, like me, he was pretty androgenous. Pretty much right in the middle.
There is a path here to follow, but it's not a path that gets a lot of attention. The whole "loud and proud" thing is what gets eyeballs, whereas compassion and empathy doesn't. That's what's making it hard for men, they don't see the alternative. Though it is there.
I think it's scary that half of waking hours are now dedicated to entertainment. Don't get me wrong; I love entertainment! But as my Latin teacher taught me, "ne quid nimis", or "nothing in excess". And THAT is an excessive amount of time. Also, when I think of it, it reminds me of a book I had to read as an undergrad: Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business". In short, the book points to a dystopian future in which our politics would suffer because we're all so entertained and amused by tv (the book was written in '85) that we fail to notice that our liberal democracy is slipping away from us. One thing's sure: the more our collective time is taken up with entertainment, the less time we're spending doing EVERYTHING else in our lives (or doing it only in halves as we try to divide our attention between a Netflix series and whatever loved ones we might be watching it with). Neil Postman didn't have an answer for this, and nor do I.
One of the reasons why I love reading @tedgioia is his take on the systemic forces that are holding culture hostage. I've read most of Postman's work and listened to his take on the (then-current) narrative. And I think that's what he meant.
Part of the answer is pushing back -- starting from education and all the way through what we read, write, support, etc.
And a necessary part of that is the printed word. Postman thought the 18th century was the zenith of rational argument, and a highly sophisticated argument is based on words, not images or videos.
I work in education, and the big challenge to what you suggest is that the text of books is becoming simpler, and pictures and videos are increasingly the media in which information is conveyed. To return to the word, printed or digital, already has something counter-cultural to it. And it will continue to do so.
And that’s one of the reasons I’m thankful for Substack: it’s a place where we can write and read words. No small thing.
I recently retired from higher ed and as a librarian (!) ran into this a lot. Academic writing is a tough row, especially for undergraduates. Sometimes reminding them that it *is* hard to read and that they needed to give themselves time and space to absorb what they were reading helped. Sometimes.
This stuff is all disturbing. As a James Brown fan, I particularly dislike the idea of Universal making AI-driven simulacrum of his music. Do they not understand how unique he was as a singer, songwriter and producer? His kind of skill cannot be easily reproduced by technology.
Yes. It’s a must. It is painful to watch James Brown slay the room then make the Stones follow (but to their credit, I believe they acknowledge all of it). This is probably a better Ted post than a me post.
With respect to the effect of songs that exceed 10 minutes, if you question just how immersive this can be, allow me to direct your attention to the album "Concierto." The sextet is therein is led by guitarist Jim Hall, accompanied by Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. One of the comments that accompanies this video captures its aesthetic perfectly: "A 20- minute musical conversation among artists who use their instruments as paint brushes and our senses as their canvas," My all-time favorite jazz piece and it's not even close.
I have mixed feelings when ii comes to Taylor. While he's demonstrably capable of creating stunningly good music, he's also the guy who, at least IMO, was one of the key players involved in and responsible for the watering down of straight ahead jazz. While I genuinely appreciate his efforts to make the music more accessible, it was never my sense or feeling that this was a problem in search of a cure.
Fair enough. But in my work as an engineer, log scales are most effectively used if the underlying mechanism behaves exponentially. Then you get a straight line on log scales and do a bit of interpolation. And you also don't get confused on which direction is increasing when less than unity. There are better ways, imho, to handle the effects of outliers.
The prevailing wisdom at the Boston Consulting Group in those days was that we should strive for scrupulous accuracy in our analysis (I'm not sure they still believe that at BCG, but who knows for sure?)—and a constant growth rate looked like it was accelerating over time when depicted on a plain numerical chart. But by relying on log scale, a constant growth rate was a straight line, so it was much easier to see if a trend was strengthening of weakening. By the same token, BCG always insisted on charts where the vertical axis starts at zero—because that also was the most visually accurate way of conveying a trend. We also deflated all financial numbers to remove the impact of inflation. I'm not a hardliner on any of these rules (and I bet they are forgotten at BCG today) but they did make it a lot harder to play games with the data. The chart was more likely to represent reality and not somebody's ideology or spin.
Amazing information here, as always. I actually reference this article and Substack in my latest podcast episode for @ourmindonmusic which will be published here on Substack on Thursday, Oct. 19: https://substack.com/@ourmindonmusic?utm_source=profile-page
Masculinity problem is reaching critical mass. I specialize partially in seeing teenage male clients, and right now they're some of the most lost (and forgotten) cohort of humans here in America. Over the decades, we've rightfully shifted attention towards minority, under-served, and diverse demographics to bring equity to society. One of the unintended consequences, however, is men have been left by the wayside. Women have evolved, but society isn't teaching men how to catch up. Undergraduate enrollment here in the states is now 60/40 women to men, with young men being much more likely to attempt suicide than young women as well (and a whole host of other problems).
This doesn't have to be a zero-sum game; when I talk to my fellow therapists about raising up men, it's assumed (and loudly vocalized) it must come at the cost of women's rights. No! We can raise everyone up. We can invigorate and support minority groups in their fight for equality without having to also put some other group down! There isn't a ceiling on the resource that is joy.
P.S. The most chilling part of the infographic you provided about entertainment is the spot where the source says "Did you know half of all waking hours are now spent engaged in entertainment? Learn more about how this might impact your brand." It would be like saying "half of all waking hours are now spent laying on the couch, learn more about how this affects your store's furniture sales."
“We can invigorate and support minority groups in their fight for equality without having to also put some other group down! There isn't a ceiling on the resource that is joy.”
I love this! Thank you for your work with young men.
"We _can_ raise everyone up," Max, and we must. My contribution to this thick emotional and cultural issue is to raise the awareness of 'value' in culture overall, for all.
Obviously, I write from the point of view of a 'tween (in between two cultures - Italo-European, and America/Australian. Ok, maybe it's more than two). In the 17 years I've been publishing online -- and Conversation Agent blog, and now here -- I've built an audience that skews towards males. So there's that.
On the personal angle, I view relationships as partnerships. Spouses are made of two complete human beings, each with strengths and stories. That's the fertile hummus on which to build a more balanced conversation that doesn't rely on the societal or cultural gender assignations. We help each other through, point out how we see issues/the world from a personal lens and are open to and inviting towards the views (biases and all that) of the other.
We don't teach conversation like this in school -- though I did learn it there in my humanistic education (grammar school, Liberal Arts, philosophy, all that jazz that we seem to want to throw away with the bathwater.)
Good discussion, thank you for starting it.
Guante does a lot of thinking / speaking on the topic of masculinity (also, amazing spoken word) - see https://guante.info/2022/05/31/manup/
I'll ask you since you seem to know about this stuff:
Why can't people get over themselves?
A very good article, I mean really, but . . . (well, there had to be a 'but'!) . . .
What does an ordinary man, like your humble reviewer here, do with all this? I mean, I'm not bound for glory in politics or on a corporate board, I'm just a reasonably intelligent man who eschews wealth and profile for reasons of principle and taste (not to mention laziness) and who is doing his best to give his teenage son a decent baseplate in life.
But how do I respond to the world as it is presented in so many publications and YouTube videos, and with particular poignancy in this piece of yours? I can continue buying books, CDs, vinyl, and the odd DVD of an cinema classic so my home stays a bastion of a departing 'culture'. Maybe buy a new home further out of town in someplace inconspicuous. However retreating or circling the wagons rarely wins the day unless the cavalry shows up. But do we have any cavalry left? Or even one guy riding a white horse? Hell, even Sancho Panza on a donkey is starting to seem too much to ask for.
My point is, I find myself going ever inward, focused on old ways and things, essentially turning my back on the future. This may be healthy for individuals, at least in the short term, but it's no way to run a society. You feel like you're hiding with a candle under a blanket inside a madhouse. You spend your time muttering and snorting into your walrus moustache over things that you read online. I've led my life according to the dictum 'never a leader nor a follower be' (actually I think it's 'never a lender nor a borrower be' but they mean something similar), but instead of exploring strange new worlds and boldly going where no self-effacing 'person' has gone before, I'm finding myself holed up somewhere waiting for the zombies.
So what are we to do, mate?
That was a very humorous post. I especially enjoyed the image of someone snorting into their walrus moustache over things one reads online.
It's also an insightful post, and I think many people feel the same as you do re: holing themselves up somewhere waiting for the zombies.
I am in my mid-40s and my vocation, which I love, puts me around little humans between the ages of 5 and 10. When I tell any of them that I was born in the '70s, they exclaim, "you're so old!", and "did you watch Laurel and Hardy when you were a kid?". I rightly feel like a dinosaur in many ways because most of my youth and young adulthood wasn't that much different in some ways than that of my parents and even my grandparents. Not so with the younger generations; they are true digital natives, as they say, and they bring a different set of expectations to the table.
But I digress. Aside from the optimism I gain from teaching these little ones, I also become more aware of what I can and cannot change. I cannot change the fact that in some ways, we seem to be moving from a literate society to one that's more interested in cat memes. I see it with my students: more and more of them are less and less interested in reading books with "lots of words", and they instead seek out and demand more graphic novels and manga. Now, there's nothing wrong with those last two formats, but when this is all we're reading, it makes me a bit worried. YouTube, Tik Tok; not evil per se, but they entirely devote themselves to holding our kids' attention with digital images and vids. Content that can be consumed quickly and easily. It reminds me of yet another moment in undergrad (my parents would be very happy that I remember these odd bits from all that schooling!) in which Bishop Honorius of Autun said that "pictures are the literature of the laiety". He was making the case for church iconography so that the peasants could understand the story of Jesus through pictures, since most of them weren't able to read. Well, that was typical of the times, because he lived in the 11th century. Talk about medieval! We all know that a few centuries later Mr. Gutenberg came along, and his invention revolutionized literacy, and widespread literacy was achieved in the West in the 1800s and 1900s. Well, I would argue that we are choosing to move back to a medieval mindset in which pictures (and vids) will hold more sway, and the written word less sway. It's a cultural shift, and as one person, there's nothing I can do about that.
Which leads me to what we CAN do. We can cultivate ourselves. When cultures face these moments of change/disintegration across time, some people take the opportunity to take a more introverted turn and focus intensely on what they can control in their own lives. On the religious side, you have people like Rod Dreher who has argued for small, intentional Christian communities to form and band together to form Augustine's City of God while the rest of the non-Christians live in an increasingly abject City of Man. That's not my cup of tea, but I understand why he makes that argument. On my end, I have begun to informally study Stoicism, that wonderful school of thinking entirely devoted to how we can regulate our emotions regarding things we can control and things we cannot. I also spend more time creative writing, sometimes sharing with a group, and they with me. In recognizing that advertisers are looking more intensely for our clicks, I am more mindful of my "computer time". I also used to be a prolific texter, emailer, and etc., and now I've put up auto-response on my personal email telling folks I only check it once a week, and if there's something urgent, to get in touch with me some other way (because if it's really urgent for me, they already have that info). I play music informally with a small group; we're not good, but we enjoy our music and our time together. I spend more time exercising and doing creative writing.
Do these things change the direction of society? No. Do they prevent a government shutdown? Nope. But what they do do (and my kids would laugh at hearing that!) is help me focus on what I can control, and it helps me to eliminate the distractions/cacophony that much of the world wants me to click on, lose my mind in, and go down the rabbit hole over.
So when you say "what are we to do?", I would suggest you first ask yourself, "what am I to do?"
Thus is an excellent response to the OP @davidpalmer, and I agree that we ourselves ultimately have the power to control what we do with our time. Yet Man is a social animal. We need the emotional support of others regarding our values, as the infamous Asch Experiment proved.
This is one benefit of ad-free forums like Substack, especially in this subset of Ted Readers who share a certain life aesthetic by virtue of their love for music.
Perhaps we're not a Silent Majority (oddly enough, a term coined by Richard Nixon in 1969) but certainly our numbers are not insignificant.
Keep on keepin' on guys. We are not alone.
Thanks for your response. Perhaps I should have articulated mine better in terms of a split: between focusing on one's self more, but also on finding community that matters to you. I did give some examples of community that I rely on (the music group where we don't perform that well, but have a good time doing it), as well as the community of writers I belong to. Plus, there's our Substack communities! So I should have articulated this dichotomy more clearly, and thanks for pointing that out.
On further reflection, I think in answer to the OP's question of "who's going to save us?", the answer is the dichotomy I outlined: cultivating one's own self, which also means recognizing what is and is not in our control, AND finding/creating intentional community of likeminded people with whom one can share good times, fun, emotional support, etc.
So the answer to the OP's question is, we as individuals and we as intentional community will "save" ourselves. That is the best most of us can do at any given time!
As the OP whose comment your fine response gave some reflected luster to, I'd like to say we're very much in agreement. It is frustrating to see what's going on 'out there' but if you charge out with the cavalry to take action you leave your fort undefended.
The Age of Reason began, what, three centuries ago, and gave birth to its offspring science. We seem to be in a counter-revolution, with reason and science under attack from the likes of the Covid madness, the trans-gender movement, the climate change narrative, official racism, the attack on democracy, and a few more besides.
The human race seems to progress like a pendulum, lurching from one extreme to the other until the middle way of reason and spiritual insight is found (but of course, how can you find the middle without first charting the extremes?). If this is the case, hopefully this new Dark Age isn't as stygian as the last.
>> I’ve grumbled here in the past about tech companies manipulating customers and users instead of serving them. This may seem like a small thing, but the end result is a culture that grows more tyrannical and inflexible with each passing month.
Completely agree. Put a bit differently, something I've noticed frequently is that people who create amazing things tend to have an odd attitude towards money: they tend to have a somewhat cavalier attitude about it, and plow it back into what they're doing.
Disney seemed to take every penny the Disney company made and put it back into the business to the point where, in the early days, the studio was almost always strapped for cash. His personal fortune he put on the line to build DisneyLand. Musk, whatever you think of him, took the money he made from PayPal and put it all on the line to create SpaceX and Tesla. Jobs I never heard mention money as a goal, but he sure talked a lot about what technology could do for humanity. (The watch was developed after his death, as it turns out.)
I'm kind of using "pursuit of money as an end" as a proxy for "manipulating rather than serving". But I really think you can feel the shift when a company loses the joy in pleasing its customers and moves over to treating its customers like piggy banks.
"But I really think you can feel the shift when a company loses the joy in pleasing its customers and moves over to treating its customers like piggy banks." See health system in America, and alas increasingly in many parts of the world. My argument is that we need to re-engage with a broader definition of 'value' in culture and society. Because what you describe, @mikemaletic is taking away the future from those who come next.
A manager of mine whom I worked for at Silicon Graphics would refer to "when the bean counters take over". It describes the same phenomenon. We made computer stuff because it was helpful and cool. Yeah, it had to make money, or we wouldn't have jobs. But it wasn't really the point.
The origin of the word "entertain" comes from the Latin inter ‘between’ + tenere ‘to hold’. Entertainment was supposed to "hold us between" the main parts of life. If we are spending half our waking our hours in "suspension", what has our life become about?
Thank you for that, @ruthgaskowski , because it's useful to know where things come from to understand where they could go.
CONTROL
We have Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business."
When I spoke of this to a perceptive colleague he replied: " . . . it's not even being 'amused,' it's being distracted to death!" Nowadays it's not even valid "amusement," which might have at least some meager value, but mere distraction . . . OK, let's see–whats next? And next . . . and next . . .
Ted,
I'm curious as to what the definition of "entertainment" is. Reading a book? Reading a Substack post? Commenting on one? Visiting a museum?
I couldn't find the definition. It would be helpful to know if the definition is available.
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about (free)
Ted gave us the link https://luminatedata.com/. You just have to click on it, and at the top, it says "The most comprehensive analytics platform revealing the trends, behaviors and insights across film, television and music." When people give you links, use 'em, I always say!
I checked out the link. Do you think Warner Bros. consulted them when they pushed for a franchise on The Departed?
I have no idea about that. Honestly, I have a tv I rarely watch, I only have Netflix and Prime Video, and I don't really follow what Warner Bros and other media companies do. Ted is my source for that kind of information!
I hear you. I haven't watched TV since 1977.
I never had a tv until I was given a one in 1980. Turned it on, and thought it was ridiculous, returned it to the giver. I don't understand how people can sit there and watch it hours every day. A former friend asked me how I could live without a TV? I answered, my brain still works, and I enjoy thinking. She seemed puzzled by that answer.
I think that whatever you give your attention to, that has no redeeming value, (cartoons on a Sat. morning) could be called entertainment. Listening to music with full attention, or reading something that contributes to your well being could be called enrichment.
Doesn't matter what it is titled. Who cares what it is called ? The fact that you enjoy it is what counts. Keep it up
it is like crack and cocaine. both are a drug but one is more high-brow and elite.
We're also drowning iin STORIES... three acts, a hero, a challenge, triumph at the end and everyone goes home. The dramatic structure has seeped into just about every human interaction, especially political.
But life isn't a story. It's make-believe. Trying to make life fit the requirements of story is a losing game.
Not me buddy! 🙂
I’ll switch my brain off sometimes. Everybody needs a break. But if you’re a creator in any way, self-discipline and live of the craft usually take up much spare time, as it should. Balance is always good.
I meant “love of the craft” lol stupid cellphone keyboard
You know, I was raised by a man who wasn't toxically masculine. He had scarlet fever as a young child, was sickly for a long time afterward, and as the youngest of four brothers his mother claimed him to help her in the kitchen.
In consequence, he could cook and sew with the best of them. He was great with kids, too, but I think his father probably was, too. I learned it from him. His gender presentation was clearly and obviously masculine, but behaviorally, like me, he was pretty androgenous. Pretty much right in the middle.
There is a path here to follow, but it's not a path that gets a lot of attention. The whole "loud and proud" thing is what gets eyeballs, whereas compassion and empathy doesn't. That's what's making it hard for men, they don't see the alternative. Though it is there.
I think it's scary that half of waking hours are now dedicated to entertainment. Don't get me wrong; I love entertainment! But as my Latin teacher taught me, "ne quid nimis", or "nothing in excess". And THAT is an excessive amount of time. Also, when I think of it, it reminds me of a book I had to read as an undergrad: Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business". In short, the book points to a dystopian future in which our politics would suffer because we're all so entertained and amused by tv (the book was written in '85) that we fail to notice that our liberal democracy is slipping away from us. One thing's sure: the more our collective time is taken up with entertainment, the less time we're spending doing EVERYTHING else in our lives (or doing it only in halves as we try to divide our attention between a Netflix series and whatever loved ones we might be watching it with). Neil Postman didn't have an answer for this, and nor do I.
One of the reasons why I love reading @tedgioia is his take on the systemic forces that are holding culture hostage. I've read most of Postman's work and listened to his take on the (then-current) narrative. And I think that's what he meant.
Part of the answer is pushing back -- starting from education and all the way through what we read, write, support, etc.
And a necessary part of that is the printed word. Postman thought the 18th century was the zenith of rational argument, and a highly sophisticated argument is based on words, not images or videos.
I work in education, and the big challenge to what you suggest is that the text of books is becoming simpler, and pictures and videos are increasingly the media in which information is conveyed. To return to the word, printed or digital, already has something counter-cultural to it. And it will continue to do so.
And that’s one of the reasons I’m thankful for Substack: it’s a place where we can write and read words. No small thing.
I recently retired from higher ed and as a librarian (!) ran into this a lot. Academic writing is a tough row, especially for undergraduates. Sometimes reminding them that it *is* hard to read and that they needed to give themselves time and space to absorb what they were reading helped. Sometimes.
Don't vote for the nazi.
Each one of these stories you posted revealed so many interesting trends. Your a cultural forensic as well as a music historian.
This stuff is all disturbing. As a James Brown fan, I particularly dislike the idea of Universal making AI-driven simulacrum of his music. Do they not understand how unique he was as a singer, songwriter and producer? His kind of skill cannot be easily reproduced by technology.
If you haven’t seen the TAMI show ‘64, it’s a must. Historically and otherwise.
It's on my bucket list. I'm a fan of many of the artists on the lineup.
Yes. It’s a must. It is painful to watch James Brown slay the room then make the Stones follow (but to their credit, I believe they acknowledge all of it). This is probably a better Ted post than a me post.
Makes me think back to that vacuum cleaner ad that used Fred Astaire posthumously. I don’t think people will like this idea either.
He's already subsumed in the digital mire. You'll be seeing him soon in the role of wardrobe persuader:
"I break out...in a coooooooooooold sweater!"
With respect to the effect of songs that exceed 10 minutes, if you question just how immersive this can be, allow me to direct your attention to the album "Concierto." The sextet is therein is led by guitarist Jim Hall, accompanied by Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. One of the comments that accompanies this video captures its aesthetic perfectly: "A 20- minute musical conversation among artists who use their instruments as paint brushes and our senses as their canvas," My all-time favorite jazz piece and it's not even close.
https://youtu.be/iD6k2E61ABY?si=dP6h2fG0vuyT4RzY
Thank you for sharing. No words but my brain lit up.
I have mixed feelings when ii comes to Taylor. While he's demonstrably capable of creating stunningly good music, he's also the guy who, at least IMO, was one of the key players involved in and responsible for the watering down of straight ahead jazz. While I genuinely appreciate his efforts to make the music more accessible, it was never my sense or feeling that this was a problem in search of a cure.
The Wired Google antitrust advertising article was taken down for not meeting editorial standards.
Hmmmmm....
Fair enough. But in my work as an engineer, log scales are most effectively used if the underlying mechanism behaves exponentially. Then you get a straight line on log scales and do a bit of interpolation. And you also don't get confused on which direction is increasing when less than unity. There are better ways, imho, to handle the effects of outliers.
The prevailing wisdom at the Boston Consulting Group in those days was that we should strive for scrupulous accuracy in our analysis (I'm not sure they still believe that at BCG, but who knows for sure?)—and a constant growth rate looked like it was accelerating over time when depicted on a plain numerical chart. But by relying on log scale, a constant growth rate was a straight line, so it was much easier to see if a trend was strengthening of weakening. By the same token, BCG always insisted on charts where the vertical axis starts at zero—because that also was the most visually accurate way of conveying a trend. We also deflated all financial numbers to remove the impact of inflation. I'm not a hardliner on any of these rules (and I bet they are forgotten at BCG today) but they did make it a lot harder to play games with the data. The chart was more likely to represent reality and not somebody's ideology or spin.
Amazing information here, as always. I actually reference this article and Substack in my latest podcast episode for @ourmindonmusic which will be published here on Substack on Thursday, Oct. 19: https://substack.com/@ourmindonmusic?utm_source=profile-page
I do hope you'll check it out.