Post AohWuNCZPtkZgtZDGK by namelessblob@mastodon.world
(DIR) More posts by namelessblob@mastodon.world
(DIR) Post #AohTylR6xIt29HlpeC by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T11:16:15Z
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When I was in college some people were really into “intentional media consumption” the idea being that if you should consume media, you should give it your undivided attention or not bother with it at all. At the time, I found this idea annoying and a little pretentious. They claimed things like reality TV and 24 hour news wouldn’t be popular if people only did this. AI content is making me want to revisit the idea. Maybe do a personal experiment. What happens if you pay attention?
(DIR) Post #AohU6W2G6DoChUqHBo by slothrop@chaos.social
2024-12-04T11:17:38Z
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@futurebird If you pay attention to the news, the internal screaming grows progressively louder, until it becomes unbearable.
(DIR) Post #AohUcBwULAAReLFOro by Xanadu@glammr.us
2024-12-04T11:23:22Z
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@futurebird I also think the other side of it, what might be called critical ignoring, has potential. There's a huge amount of media being made and circulated vehemently, and being intentional about what you don't give your attention to is as important as what you do.
(DIR) Post #AohV827kNe5cSthGTY by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T11:29:08Z
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This morning I put on xckd’s new video about shooting the moon with lasers as I got dressed and brushed my teeth. xckd isn’t just a “source of content” to me, Randall Monroe is a person I’ve come to know through his creative work. But, this stuff about lasers ain’t all that deep, it’s the perfect way to wake up a groggy brain and interesting and amusing. Another video comes on. It’s not Randall. But, it’s another “what if?” Great! “what if the sun were the size of the earth?” OK. 1/
(DIR) Post #AohVilXL0wVtjeBLzU by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T11:35:47Z
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You could probably see this coming, but this next video was AI generated— but more to the point it was made in imitation of Randall’s video. It’s intended to amuse the same people. People like me. I was amused for the first few sentences. But, then the cracks started to show. The question wasn’t very interesting. The sentences, while individually well written didn’t progress to make a point. There were no subtle jokes. (eg. ‘a model M mechanical keyboard is richter -7; a regular keyboard is -8’)
(DIR) Post #AohVqAx4v4piaOktKy by EvilCartyen@mstdn.dk
2024-12-04T11:37:05Z
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@futurebird That's how I do it, never thought about it in that way though. But I never have something on as background, I am always actively choosing to watch or listen to something specific.I've always wondered how people can consume so much low quality content, but I guess they're not really paying attention? Makes sense.
(DIR) Post #AohVyHrp5oVGLlAITo by NatureMC@mastodon.online
2024-12-04T11:38:33Z
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@futurebird As a journalist, I do it for coping with the information overflow. I watch/read news only at fixed times. Here, I sorted journalists/media in a list, silenced in my timeline - plus many filters with warnings for especially ugly topics.But even at the fixed times I sometimes stop (fortunately, I'm not working for the news).It's great for mental health balance. It's great to change my perspective to become active instead of re-active. And I read less via social media, more directly.
(DIR) Post #AohWKSAnSK5SgUbqoS by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T11:42:36Z
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Maybe it’s better to just dress in silence. To be alone with my own thoughts (scary) and, since Randall is a human and he can’t make 20 videos a day for me to watch just sit down and watch the singe video he makes a week. It criminal and a loss to treat the interesting seeming noise of the content farm slop on equal footing with a scripted and researched bit of pop science with animations. There are people who really hope we don’t care and can’t tell the difference.
(DIR) Post #AohWuNCZPtkZgtZDGK by namelessblob@mastodon.world
2024-12-04T11:49:04Z
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@futurebird wait, xkcd has a youtube channel?!? Wow, I totally missed that.
(DIR) Post #AohXCL0iIoBY6iaTRY by namelessblob@mastodon.world
2024-12-04T11:52:19Z
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@futurebird I feel like there are two points here. One, it's okay to not give all your attention to something, if you feel like it doesn't diminish the value much. Two, we should be intentional about choosing to consume some media in the first place, and what we choose. I understand it requires extra effort to choose what to watch, but I think it's worthwhile. So I'd never just watch "the next video", whatever youtube wants me to watch. I'd always choose on purpose.
(DIR) Post #AohXoZLZRr57ZiZazY by TeflonTrout@beige.party
2024-12-04T11:59:13Z
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@futurebird well, I don't know if it's interesting to you given your lack of discussion about the subject, but a channel called Driving 4 Answers is a favorite - he details the workings of weird and wonderful engine and transmission types. I'm listening to him talk about a geared CVT transmission, which is super cool
(DIR) Post #AohY2T9JHvSYPJSyYa by jwcph@helvede.net
2024-12-04T12:01:44Z
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@futurebird Sidebar, I hope you also watched the sequel, what if we shoot the moon with *even more powerful* lasers 😊
(DIR) Post #AohbVdGJ4FS023KvWC by michael_w_busch@mastodon.online
2024-12-04T12:40:37Z
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@futurebird Wait.Is someone deep-faking Randall Munroe's voice?Or is it just an anonymous voice synthesizer plagiarizing his words and style?
(DIR) Post #AohduZVqLQYlYFcijg by llewelly@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T13:07:32Z
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@futurebird "What if the Sun were the size of the Earth?"one way or the other, this is going to degenerate very quickly ...
(DIR) Post #AohfemMF1EFWfHjHiC by Kierkegaanks@beige.party
2024-12-04T13:27:05Z
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@futurebird There’s also the alternative of podcasts, where flesh and blood middle aged middle class white men who weren’t beaten down enough by reality as children expose their unhinged levels of unjustifiable self confidence as background noise(My selection of pods might be more narrow than others)
(DIR) Post #Aohfs6XTIU1l1JKutU by paninid@mastodon.world
2024-12-04T13:29:29Z
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@futurebird The era of mass synthetic media, reading closely is political and #punk AF
(DIR) Post #AohiR5ap0QZ287iH6u by johncomic@mastodon.social
2024-12-04T13:58:14Z
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@futurebird I HAVE TO consume media this way, if I watch something, I WATCH it. (Music is a sort-of exception.)
(DIR) Post #AohigFA3iHgi9KQAts by llewelly@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T14:01:00Z
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@futurebird there have always been corporations and propagandists trying to take advantage of partial attention to manipulate people. It's particularly insidious because in many situations, partial attention is difficult or impossible to avoid. But in the same vein, words like "consumption" for watching a video were deliberately chosen by corporate propagandists to encourage people to think of watching a video as the same as eating it, or burning it in a fire. Don't use the enemies' language.
(DIR) Post #AohmBrWvPOglzIswhU by ambiguous_yelp@social.coop
2024-12-04T14:28:02Z
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@futurebird Ive even been trying to do this with youtube videos, I look at the timestamp and think to myself is this topic/concept worth X minutes, would I be watching this if I wasn't utterly bored, and if I find that I completely wouldn't care if I had something better to do I just don't. I have a lot less youtube slop recommended to me nowadays and it feels like I watch more educational content but theres still fun stuff in there just not what I would consider slop
(DIR) Post #AohmOLjQweal8Egrei by whknott@mastodon.social
2024-12-04T14:42:33Z
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@futurebird It's the quality of the attention paid that matters
(DIR) Post #Aoi4i9UjwxAc97PTV2 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T18:07:50Z
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@michael_w_busch It was not a deep fake— just a video with a similar premise but much much worse.
(DIR) Post #Aoi4yohuUUUmb6W4wa by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T18:10:51Z
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@WesternInfidels @namelessblob “I keep turning "Auto-Play" off in my various apps and devices, and I keep having to do it over again, because every update seems to turn it back on.”This pisses me off so much. I *know* I’ve turned that feature off many times but there is always the sneaky way it comes back on after a bit. Maybe I can find an extension to keep it shut off.
(DIR) Post #Aoi55G8dPpx3PX5YUi by artemis@dice.camp
2024-12-04T18:12:00Z
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@futurebird This is where I seem to be headed. I love learning things and enjoying people's creations and thoughts, but silence is so, so much better than slop.I now seek out media more intentionally, and when I discover I'm watching something incredibly low effort, whether it's AI or just old-school lazy plagiarism and inanity, I turn it off as fast as I can—it's miserable to interact with.
(DIR) Post #Aoi5XPRmOp78OESz6O by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T18:17:06Z
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@artemis I sincerely wonder about kids raised on this kind of media. Will they have low expectations? Sometimes people complain that young people don’t pay attention well enough (but I’m skeptical of such points since people have always complained about this. Do the young people have short attention spans or are you just boring?) That said I don’t think it gives one enough time to imagine your own nonsense if the background noise never stops and it’s all low quality.
(DIR) Post #AoiE4TnE3sdx3emHaa by indigoparadox@mastodon.social
2024-12-04T19:52:42Z
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@futurebird I'll put stuff on in the background when I play video games. A lot of the time, I'll just rewatch the same media. I've seen the Folding Ideas Line Goes Up / The Future Is a Dead Mall / This is Financial Advice trilogy many many times at this point, and I always notice something new because I'll be paying attention at different points than I was before.I kinda stick to a few creators I know and maybe find new ones by who they have as guests. The algorithm is no longer reliable. 😩
(DIR) Post #AoiSh5vE962ffwpMxs by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2024-12-04T22:05:48Z
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@WesternInfidels @namelessblob @futurebird My car's dashboard media display can act as a phone display through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, which is very useful for using the phone as an in-car navigation device but also allows playing music and podcasts from the phone, etc. It can also just stream audio through Bluetooth. For some reason, Apple's version of this feature obsessively insists on playing music from Apple Music whenever it connects, regardless of whether you told it to or not, under some set of conditions we have never been able to figure out. The Android one doesn't do this, for what it's worth.I suspect Apple may be applying the same heuristic here that it uses for Bluetooth ear buds. If you didn't want to hear music you wouldn't have connected them, right?
(DIR) Post #AoiSh6smZfgGeegvnE by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-12-04T22:36:31Z
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@mattmcirvin @WesternInfidels @namelessblob have you tried turning off apple music in your apple id settings? I mention this because someone told me to try this and it worked for a similar issue. It sucks that it’s not more obvious still.
(DIR) Post #AoiYadfwqsNA3fzBhY by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2024-12-04T23:42:36Z
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@futurebird @WesternInfidels @namelessblob the iPhone isn't actually mine, I'm the Android guy, but I'll pass these suggestions along.
(DIR) Post #AoiiQlhf9KTnbLihDU by SeanGugler@mastodon.online
2024-12-05T01:32:54Z
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@futurebird "intentional media consumption" ... annoying and pretentious? Gosh; it's my default mode! I never gave it a second thought, to be honest.I suppose if I proselytized about it, that would be pretty annoying. Pretentious even. I've always been silently baffled by people happily working on their pc while some anime played in a corner window. Or lively family activity while a TV droned in the background. Why have it on if you're not even watching? You must have better filters than me :)