Found this through this comment on R*ddit. Partial quote of the comment which summarizes the Medium piece: The writer of that Medium piece may very well be a Tildes user, given what they've...
Found this through this comment on R*ddit. Partial quote of the comment which summarizes the Medium piece:
There’s this concept called “the Ennui Engine.” In short, the term refers to the way in which low-effort content – content that’s very easy to create and consume – acts like junk food, cigarettes, and leaded gasoline all rolled into one. It numbs us and depresses us, and it tricks us into thinking that “bored” is the same thing as “relaxed;” that “distracted” is the same thing as “entertained.” Moreover, it engenders an ongoing decline in standards (for everything from writing, to production quality, to critical thinking), meaning that it allows hatred, vitriol, and propaganda to spread with increasing ease.
The writer of that Medium piece may very well be a Tildes user, given what they've written about how to better spend our time online.
Wasn't sure which ~ to post this in, but I think people here may enjoy learning of this concept, or were already aware of it, but just didn't have a name for it.
I find ideas like this interesting sometimes, but most of the time I wonder how much of it is just people screaming at clouds. Every now and then someone comes along and writes an article about...
I find ideas like this interesting sometimes, but most of the time I wonder how much of it is just people screaming at clouds. Every now and then someone comes along and writes an article about how [new thing] is making things worse and that [old thing] was objectively better and gives a bunch of reasoning for why they're right.
I don't really think there's much validity in calling someone else's entertainment emptier or somehow "less than" your entertainment, or whatever other entertainment is the "right" entertainment (outside moral extremities, of course). His argument that we're lowering standards on entertainment is the same argument that has been made since the beginning of time. MY entertainment was always the better way, and all the new stuff is just people lowering their standards. It's all very condescending and pretty ironic, considering the medium he's using (which was being described in exactly the same way he is doing now only a few decades ago).
A couple centuries ago people thought that fiction books were rotting the minds of kids and now we all want kids to pick up a book and read. When I was a kid the adults always bitched about NWA and Wu-tang, talking about how rappers weren't "real" artists and that rap was rotting people's brains - exactly how we look down on people for enjoying the short videos of TikTok today. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, people believed video games were "junk food" and not the "right way" to be entertained, but the industry has churned out works of art that are just as impactful and culturally important as some works of classical literature.
You can't quantify this stuff and try to make it seem there's some kind of high standard by which all entertainment avenues are valued. There's just what you like, and what others like, with a smattering of morality thrown in to keep it civil, and it's not really appropriate to look down on people who like things like TikTok, etc., and claim they're making everything worse - even if the author tried to make it an indirect judgement by saying "we" and "us."
The author states that we have "tricked ourselves" into thinking we're entertained by this new media. But he offers no metric for this statement and provides no real clarity or precision for something that is vaguely defined. By what measurement does he say people aren't entertained? What does he base this claim on? The fact that more people are sad and unhappy these days? I wish my own depression was as simple as that.
Here, the author makes the millennia-old argument that our new toys are making us worse: "The only thing that we ever really accomplish is a gradual yet consistent lowering of standards…" What standards is he using as the standards by which all this other stuff is now being measured? His own?
Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of this kind of holier-than-thou-ism in this article when it comes to entertainment. Mediums change, they evolve, new ones come up to join the old ones. No need to look down on people who enjoy something, and no need to assert that they're lowering some kind of standard.
I'll direct you to the only untainted study about the impact of Television, Notel. You'll have a tough time convincing me that the video options we have today are significantly better in that...
I don't really think there's much validity in calling someone else's entertainment emptier or somehow "less than" your entertainment
I'll direct you to the only untainted study about the impact of Television, Notel.
You'll have a tough time convincing me that the video options we have today are significantly better in that regard. Video games at least have the potential to be interactive and social in a way that pure passivity does not.
It's well known that reading stimulates thinking in a watching does not. I personally feel more fulfillment and relaxation by completing a proctastinated home project than I ever do doomscrolling.
There is definitely a quality vs quantity discussion to be had, and I think the distinction between 'entertainment' and 'distraction' is a good one.
To borrow some phrases, Entertainment fills the void in your soul. Distraction averts your eyes from it.
I think it's a lot simpler than this. There are children, and there are adults. This is so well understood that even the internet can't fuck with it. Most of these arguments are adults 'talking...
I think it's a lot simpler than this.
There are children, and there are adults. This is so well understood that even the internet can't fuck with it. Most of these arguments are adults 'talking down' as if to children, or a pack of kids throwing 'smack talk' at adults. In the end, it's as simple as making sure that these two groups of people don't inhabit the same spaces.
Stop hanging out in chat rooms full of kids and demanding that they behave like adults. Or, stop hanging out in chat rooms full of adults and crying that your fart jokes aren't going over well.
I think we all need to stop pretending this problem is rocket science.
That's pretty reductive, and seems to indicate that you didn't read the second half of the piece: Emphasis mine. If I read it right, the author proposes that we keep using [new thing], because it...
Every now and then someone comes along and writes an article about how [new thing] is making things worse and that [old thing] was objectively better and gives a bunch of reasoning for why they're right.
That's pretty reductive, and seems to indicate that you didn't read the second half of the piece:
There is a solution to all of this; a way that we can reclaim our lives, help both people and online entertainment improve, and escape the endless churn of the Ennui Engine. It doesn’t begin with turning to legislators or forum-administrators, though, and it doesn’t involve a retreat from the Web, but it does require that we stop encouraging the ritual. As unpleasant as it may be to admit, we are each individually to blame for this slump-inducing cycle’s persistence, and we are each responsible for halting it.
When we scroll through our various feeds, we need to remain consciously aware of what we’re doing and what messages we’re silently sending. Our upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets need to be reserved for only those things which truly deserve to be amplified, not just because we personally appreciate them, but because they’re of exceptional quality. If we’re ever unable or unwilling to define what “exceptional quality” actually means, we should refrain from reacting at all, and only influence those offerings on which we can make informed assessments.
It’s completely okay to consume low-effort or low-quality content that happens to cross our screens, but we should hold ourselves back from encouraging it to go any further. Whenever we feel ourselves getting listless, we should step away, then challenge ourselves to find (or create) something new, original, and requiring of a bit more effort than we might initially want to expend. We need to remember that five minutes invested in reading an article – even a mediocre one – will almost always offer a better payout of emotional energy than five minutes of gambling on a slot machine with only one reel.
We have to shun the cargo cult, elude the Skinner box, and stop believing in Tom Navy.
The Internet was created with the intention of connecting exceptional people and sharing noteworthy content, and it can still fulfill that purpose today. As such, the takeaway here is not that we should distance ourselves from social media, turn off our screens, or reject the trappings of the modern era.
Emphasis mine.
If I read it right, the author proposes that we keep using [new thing], because it does have benefits, but that we use it differently, with more intention. Like how Tildes and Reddit are similar, but because of different design choices and policies, we use them differently.
I largely agree with your assessment. This story is as old as time. New ways of expressing oneself come along, and people used to expressing themselves in the old way prefer what they’re...
I largely agree with your assessment. This story is as old as time. New ways of expressing oneself come along, and people used to expressing themselves in the old way prefer what they’re comfortable with.
The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if the quality of self expression is lower in new mediums. Not because the new medium is inferior, but because people are still experimenting with how to best self express using the new medium. More effort goes into creating a 1 minute ticktock than one might think, especially ones that propagate successfully and gain momentum. But the expressive content in a 1 minute is lower than if someone who has participated in forums for two decades spent the same amount of time creating a topic and participating in the ensuing discussion. This doesn’t degrade the new medium, it means that people are spending the effort learning how to self-express.
Of course, this argument would suggest that self-expression in places like Facebook today should be about where forums were back in the early 2010s. Maybe that’s true, but if it is I certainly haven’t experienced it myself.
Either way, I do think that people underestimate how much effort it takes to forge new paths, even if that new path is just expressing one’s self using a new medium. To those who say things like Tiktok are low quality, I say give it time. YouTube’s quality has certainly gone up (at least the explainer scene) in the last decade as people learned how to use it. Give Tiktok users and those of other new platforms the same opportunity to build an understanding of what works and what doesn’t - quality content will follow.
OP, I saw this post and was intrigued right away, but didn't escape the ennui engine enough to read it until just now. I'm so glad Tildes' design allow us to "bump" slightly older threads -- good...
OP, I saw this post and was intrigued right away, but didn't escape the ennui engine enough to read it until just now. I'm so glad Tildes' design allow us to "bump" slightly older threads -- good heavens, 2 days ago isn't old at all...How can we expect users to have time to read everything everywhere all at once?
This article put to words something so many of us have felt, but wasn't quite sure how to question it or what it is that we were cargo-ing to achieve anyway. Many of us grew up latch-key'd: woken up for school, being bored at school, coming home to empty house and the internet. When the family wants to do something together, we'd just all sit in front of the tv and ennui together and call it "quality time".
There is a part of the article I'd like some discussion on, that pertains especially to Tildes:
We feel the compulsion to find communities, yet we shy away from opening ourselves in ways that would let us be truly seen and understood.
As the flood of people escape from yonder, a lot of us are feeling this compulsion to find communities, and a lot of us are feeling the desire to leave the ennui engine and the cargo cult of doomscrolling for dopamines. There's a significant overlap of course, but those two things could actually be opposed to each other.
Stop hanging out in chat rooms full of kids and demanding that they behave like adults. Or, stop hanging out in chat rooms full of adults and crying that your fart jokes aren't going over well.
Some of the users want a casual "hang out" space where we talk about pets and this cool bug I saw or hey listen to this. Some of us want articles like this, and AMA about cosmology and tutorial space for programming or linux. So what does Tildes want to be?
Does it want to firmly stay in the middle, such that we only want to commune with those who ALSO "read the f'n articles" and upvote good content in equal measures to the casual hang outs? Do we want to consciously eject users who just want to hang out, or do we accept that a community has diversity and it's okay to have everyone who wants to stay --- [edit] with the added effort to NOT become another ennui engine?
Found this through this comment on R*ddit. Partial quote of the comment which summarizes the Medium piece:
The writer of that Medium piece may very well be a Tildes user, given what they've written about how to better spend our time online.
Wasn't sure which ~ to post this in, but I think people here may enjoy learning of this concept, or were already aware of it, but just didn't have a name for it.
ETA: Interview with the author, Max Schlienger
I find ideas like this interesting sometimes, but most of the time I wonder how much of it is just people screaming at clouds. Every now and then someone comes along and writes an article about how [new thing] is making things worse and that [old thing] was objectively better and gives a bunch of reasoning for why they're right.
I don't really think there's much validity in calling someone else's entertainment emptier or somehow "less than" your entertainment, or whatever other entertainment is the "right" entertainment (outside moral extremities, of course). His argument that we're lowering standards on entertainment is the same argument that has been made since the beginning of time. MY entertainment was always the better way, and all the new stuff is just people lowering their standards. It's all very condescending and pretty ironic, considering the medium he's using (which was being described in exactly the same way he is doing now only a few decades ago).
A couple centuries ago people thought that fiction books were rotting the minds of kids and now we all want kids to pick up a book and read. When I was a kid the adults always bitched about NWA and Wu-tang, talking about how rappers weren't "real" artists and that rap was rotting people's brains - exactly how we look down on people for enjoying the short videos of TikTok today. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, people believed video games were "junk food" and not the "right way" to be entertained, but the industry has churned out works of art that are just as impactful and culturally important as some works of classical literature.
You can't quantify this stuff and try to make it seem there's some kind of high standard by which all entertainment avenues are valued. There's just what you like, and what others like, with a smattering of morality thrown in to keep it civil, and it's not really appropriate to look down on people who like things like TikTok, etc., and claim they're making everything worse - even if the author tried to make it an indirect judgement by saying "we" and "us."
The author states that we have "tricked ourselves" into thinking we're entertained by this new media. But he offers no metric for this statement and provides no real clarity or precision for something that is vaguely defined. By what measurement does he say people aren't entertained? What does he base this claim on? The fact that more people are sad and unhappy these days? I wish my own depression was as simple as that.
Here, the author makes the millennia-old argument that our new toys are making us worse: "The only thing that we ever really accomplish is a gradual yet consistent lowering of standards…" What standards is he using as the standards by which all this other stuff is now being measured? His own?
Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of this kind of holier-than-thou-ism in this article when it comes to entertainment. Mediums change, they evolve, new ones come up to join the old ones. No need to look down on people who enjoy something, and no need to assert that they're lowering some kind of standard.
I'll direct you to the only untainted study about the impact of Television, Notel.
You'll have a tough time convincing me that the video options we have today are significantly better in that regard. Video games at least have the potential to be interactive and social in a way that pure passivity does not.
It's well known that reading stimulates thinking in a watching does not. I personally feel more fulfillment and relaxation by completing a proctastinated home project than I ever do doomscrolling.
There is definitely a quality vs quantity discussion to be had, and I think the distinction between 'entertainment' and 'distraction' is a good one.
To borrow some phrases, Entertainment fills the void in your soul. Distraction averts your eyes from it.
I think it's a lot simpler than this.
There are children, and there are adults. This is so well understood that even the internet can't fuck with it. Most of these arguments are adults 'talking down' as if to children, or a pack of kids throwing 'smack talk' at adults. In the end, it's as simple as making sure that these two groups of people don't inhabit the same spaces.
Stop hanging out in chat rooms full of kids and demanding that they behave like adults. Or, stop hanging out in chat rooms full of adults and crying that your fart jokes aren't going over well.
I think we all need to stop pretending this problem is rocket science.
That's pretty reductive, and seems to indicate that you didn't read the second half of the piece:
Emphasis mine.
If I read it right, the author proposes that we keep using [new thing], because it does have benefits, but that we use it differently, with more intention. Like how Tildes and Reddit are similar, but because of different design choices and policies, we use them differently.
I largely agree with your assessment. This story is as old as time. New ways of expressing oneself come along, and people used to expressing themselves in the old way prefer what they’re comfortable with.
The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if the quality of self expression is lower in new mediums. Not because the new medium is inferior, but because people are still experimenting with how to best self express using the new medium. More effort goes into creating a 1 minute ticktock than one might think, especially ones that propagate successfully and gain momentum. But the expressive content in a 1 minute is lower than if someone who has participated in forums for two decades spent the same amount of time creating a topic and participating in the ensuing discussion. This doesn’t degrade the new medium, it means that people are spending the effort learning how to self-express.
Of course, this argument would suggest that self-expression in places like Facebook today should be about where forums were back in the early 2010s. Maybe that’s true, but if it is I certainly haven’t experienced it myself.
Either way, I do think that people underestimate how much effort it takes to forge new paths, even if that new path is just expressing one’s self using a new medium. To those who say things like Tiktok are low quality, I say give it time. YouTube’s quality has certainly gone up (at least the explainer scene) in the last decade as people learned how to use it. Give Tiktok users and those of other new platforms the same opportunity to build an understanding of what works and what doesn’t - quality content will follow.
OP, I saw this post and was intrigued right away, but didn't escape the ennui engine enough to read it until just now. I'm so glad Tildes' design allow us to "bump" slightly older threads -- good heavens, 2 days ago isn't old at all...How can we expect users to have time to read everything everywhere all at once?
This article put to words something so many of us have felt, but wasn't quite sure how to question it or what it is that we were cargo-ing to achieve anyway. Many of us grew up latch-key'd: woken up for school, being bored at school, coming home to empty house and the internet. When the family wants to do something together, we'd just all sit in front of the tv and ennui together and call it "quality time".
There is a part of the article I'd like some discussion on, that pertains especially to Tildes:
As the flood of people escape from yonder, a lot of us are feeling this compulsion to find communities, and a lot of us are feeling the desire to leave the ennui engine and the cargo cult of doomscrolling for dopamines. There's a significant overlap of course, but those two things could actually be opposed to each other.
@Amarok says,
Some of the users want a casual "hang out" space where we talk about pets and this cool bug I saw or hey listen to this. Some of us want articles like this, and AMA about cosmology and tutorial space for programming or linux. So what does Tildes want to be?
Does it want to firmly stay in the middle, such that we only want to commune with those who ALSO "read the f'n articles" and upvote good content in equal measures to the casual hang outs? Do we want to consciously eject users who just want to hang out, or do we accept that a community has diversity and it's okay to have everyone who wants to stay --- [edit] with the added effort to NOT become another ennui engine?