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French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspaper's voracious dynamism

https://aeon.co/essays/the-french-modernists-loathed-and-loved-the-mass-media-of-their-day
93crescit_eundo | | 27 | HN
aredox | parent | next
>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.

TeMPOraL | parent | next
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.
bryanlarsen | root | parent
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.
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plastic-enjoyer | parent | next
>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.

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yapyap | parent | next
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.

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scandox | parent | next
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.

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airstrike | parent | next
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MichaelZuo | parent
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?