[HN Gopher] French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspape...
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French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspaper's voracious
dynamism
Author : crescit_eundo
Score : 82 points
Date : 2025-01-17 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| scandox wrote:
| 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.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| > ''sort of kidutainment geegaws''
|
| Or rather as special case learning tools that would gather
| dust, I suspect.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >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.
|
| So TikTok with subtitles (which are often not actually
| reflecting the sound)
| mmooss wrote:
| > as is often the case with serious literary folk talking about
| technology
|
| You should also see technology folk talking about serious
| literary folk - it's equally misconstrued and off track.
| aredox wrote:
| >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.
| dbtc wrote:
| They had opium, we have fentanyl.
|
| It's not all bad but it's more potent now by far.
| inciampati wrote:
| Poetry with a heavy dose of truth.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I still can't get over the fact that there were Dreyfusard and
| anti-Dreyfusard _bicycle racing newspapers._
|
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_V%C3%A9lo
|
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Auto
|
| The anti-Dreyfusards won, put the Dreyfusards out of business
| by starting the Tour de France, and eventually went on to
| support Vichy.
|
| edit: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/tour_de_france/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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
|
| Sure, but this is just as true of the earliest printed works in
| the 16th and 17th centuries. So this really is a fallacious
| argument unless you also think that we should be dispensing
| with freedom of the press in general.
| gunian wrote:
| Any idea where I could get my hands on such records? Lately my
| voracious reading appetite has been encouraging me to seek out
| first hand accounts
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| >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.
| yapyap wrote:
| 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.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| There's a reason Hearst was rich enough to build a castle.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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?
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The internet and its associated gadgets stir reactions
| remarkably like those once directed at the press. In some
| quarters, futurist technophilia; more commonly, alarm at the
| social, political and cultural impact of these innovations,
| combined with neurotic dependence upon them.
|
| Note that the article is _not_ taking the simplistic position
| that, because 19th century French writers decried the emergence
| of the newspaper, and 21st century contemporary thinkers decry
| the dominance of social media, that the latter should be
| dismissed. It 's more nuanced than that, and it's really mostly
| an accounting of how those Modernists thought about newspapers,
| with a little bit of "let's consider a modern example..." at the
| end.
|
| One thing I'd like to point out, though, is that very common
| argument by which one waves away concerns about social media
| today because, in the past, Socrates said reading is bad, and
| Mallarme said newspapers are bad, is really a canard for two
| reasons.
|
| First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers,
| it's a different thing altogether, and in any case what happened
| in the past does not strictly determine a new case in the present
| or the future.
|
| Second, because I'm fairly certain Mallarme and Proust and
| Baudelaire would probably look at the world newspapers created,
| and say "I was right about newspapers all along". It did create
| yellow journalism, it did create tabloids, it did redefine truth,
| and recalibrate leisure, and it did create doomscrolling, and
| make people think in different--and not necessarily better--ways.
| Technology changes the world, and people adapt to it. After the
| fact of that change, the world normalizes, and new generations
| can't conceive of any prior alternative way of being. But, that
| does not mean the change was an improvement.
|
| As a consequence, it may be categorically incorrect for us to
| even try to evaluate these historical positions from our modern
| perch. Maybe _all_ we can do is listen to what people living
| through that change said, and take it as read, pun intended.
| pembrook wrote:
| To me this comment reads like a lot of bending over backwards
| to try to the justify a gut feeling of "yea but for sure this
| time is different right??"
|
| Tech elites on HN worrying about the moral fortitude of the
| unwashed masses in the face of the technological changes they
| themselves have brought about...it's all a bit too "self-
| important loathing" imo.
|
| Everything's fine and going to be fine.
| immibis wrote:
| Everything's not fine, hasn't been fine for at least a
| decade, and it's not at all certain that everything is going
| to be fine.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Everything has never and will never be completely fine.
| Things are better today than ever and continue to improve.
| Get offline and look around the real world for a while.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Things are certainly better overall, but that improvement
| is not universal, and not evenly distributed. Clearly.
| Otherwise, we would simply say "everything is as good as
| it can practically be," which is something few people are
| doing. One of the ways in which the world is imperfect is
| that our media--and our relationship to that media--could
| be better. Anything in that to disagree with?
| immibis wrote:
| By most metrics, things were better about a decade ago.
| We're on a downward trajectory now. Except by GDP.
| reissbaker wrote:
| What metrics do you think were better in 2015?
| tptacek wrote:
| They were right to be alarmed, weren't they? (As an analytical
| statement, not a prescriptive one.)
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