What is sold as culture today is just that: a product; a derivative of humanity, sold by the world’s most successful companies as a hollow substitute, but one that sells like hotcakes.
I think you’re looking in the wrong places. Culture is everywhere. The mediums and groups of people that propagate culture shift over time, but humans are inherently creative and will always develop it.
Try looking in places where there is a focus on community, connection, and the art itself—not places that focus on producing “content” for profit.
PoastRotato@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is an incredibly myopic view of what’s considered “culture.” If you’re only looking for culture on TV and mass media, then you’re going to find products, because that’s exactly what those things were designed and optimized to sell. But culture definitely still exists, and it’s exactly where we left it: In the interactions between the people around you.
DandomRude@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You don’t seem to understand what I mean at all. I mean people who try to make a living from their creative work. Do you think that’s still possible?
JASN_DE@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Of course it is. Has mostly always been that way, will probably be possible for quite some time.
Just not for every artist, also like always.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I wasn’t considering music or TV, but you’ve just tickled what I thought OP was talking about. With social media taking off a lot of our culture is online now.
We had a lot of fun sharing jokes and songs and parodies of things etc on YouTube. This gave way to mini-cults as people started getting popular, and started sponsored content. Somewhere along the way people stopped doing it for fun, and it started being “game the system by any means necessary to make it big enough to sell shit”.
Its hard to put into exact words my issue, but it makes my soul ache.
Its not that crass commercialisation is dominating music, because that’s been the case longer than ive been alive. It just feels like its reached too far. Its in too much of what we do. Maybe its just this generation that will feel this way. The “old folks” are pretty much out of the game and dont understand this newfangled Internet thing, and the kids are growing up in this world and itll just be normal.
The next thing is “ignore it, get offline, touch grass, go to your local bar and meet real people” but even that is tainted now. People you meet have strong opinions that have been planted in them by targeted bots on the Internet. Theres big signs placed all over the walls “FIND US ON SOCIAL MEDIA” because you need an Internet presence for your business to survive, which means they need to be mindful of what they present themselves as to appease the algorithm, and suddenly they’re not real places for real people, they’re another extension of this near-singular will.
Its too big a concept for me to put into words, and i might be overstating it or missing a core concept, but it scares a tiny bit of me a whole lot.