alt Hacker NewsI have genuinely put a lot of thought into this lately. I have the sensation like older media was more expressive and thoughtful, there's at least more... interesting flavors there generally...
I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.
I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?
I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.
What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.
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Weird analogy, but it feels similar to the way old music differed to new music.
Old music had more variation in volume - volume rises and falls to add nuance to the piece. New music is produced differently and has a more “flat” sound due to everything being louder and variation being reduced by compression.
Seems like some parallels to other forms of media.
I wonder how much this is just a sampling bias. Older media has been repeatedly filtered over time, so you don't see all the bland, derivative ripoffs that were abundant at the time. Likewise, interesting and forward-thinking work produced today may not be widely appreciated for many years - consider that Van Gogh's work was largely ignored during his lifetime.
Similar to how music changes perceptions of movie scenes (it's usually silly but the effect is there), newsrooms have been decorated to look like a crisis center with the choice of colors and words.
People are naturally prone to pointing their attention at sources of alarm. And attention is important for advertisements which pay the bills.
News was not produced or directed back then like it is today.
The barrier of entry for media is very low now. That means a lot of things that wouldn't have gotten made now get made.
What that also means is that there is much more cheap junk pushed out the door. The investment to try again is now much lower than to try to add meaning to so-so film, so you just quickly land it and move on.
There is certainly survivor bias when looking at the quality of older media but at the same time, the incentives to only produce quality media has evaporated.
We're in the stochastic age where all business is run on chance. Don't make 1 good films, make 20 and hope one is good.
Interesting thought-provoking movies still exist. They're just far away from regular people's comfort zone. I'll recommend you three post 2015 movies that will get you thinking:
Wandering (2022)
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Monster (2023)
But I'd concede that maybe making movies nowadays is harder because things are turning more and more expensive and there's too much pressure for producing profitable movies. So Art takes a back sit in movies that look for profit.
I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
Risk management kills any attempt at bold choices, decisions are steered at the modelable and the low risk. There space is thus shrunk. When there were fewer media behemoths there were more variations on the risk models and the pattern was less descernable.
> The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age.
I'm a boomer so the opposite is happening to me. The people in media look more and more like children to me. So I can't tell if the fact that they seem to be speaking more childishly is real or just the expected bias from an old fart. I should experiment with getting AI to put the same words in Walter Cronkite's mouth to see if it changes them.
It’s definitely not the only reason but it is a big reason in my opinion. All new movies are stripped of grit and edge. They have no gravitas. There are no rapes, purely objectified women, any sort of implied CSA, truly hero tier “alpha” men etc. Everyone in movies these days seem like mild mannered office workers. I feel like filmmakers are bound by many rules that turn everything into mass accessible milquetoast.
Its care. Us humans can feel when something was made with care vs when it’s made to check some lists people with ties made. Same with music, food, books, art, software, hardware, design, houses. Most stuff today is made to avoid some risks instead of being what it ought to be. Not trying to please anyone is the best way to make great things. Or maybe it is my hate of focus groups who spoiled it all (and I used to be a game user researcher…)