culture
It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.
The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction
Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
Henrik Karlsson • First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us
The size of the effect is astounding. Cross-class friendships are a better predictor of upward mobility than school quality, job availability, community cohesion or family structure. If these results are true, then we have largely ignored a powerful way to help people realise the American dream.
David Brooks • Why rich friends are so important to success
iron law of the internet: any movement or subculture will be judged by its most cringe members
nihilism disrespecter • Tweet
The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.
But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we
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