It’s self propagating. People have always done stupid and/or shameless things but now they can film it, share it, and get widespread attention from it.
We can monetize their stupidity. Before we had actors/clowns acting silly but otherwise nothing to dramatic. Then America's funniest home videos showed that you don't need much just like 30 seconds... follow the trend to Jackass/Viva la Bam/Dudesons..etc and now we're caught up to stupid tiktok trends where most of the drama is staged. I'm sure some of americas funniest home videos were too but i'd wager most were just funny moments that just happened to be caught.
If this guy pulled it off he gets clout for doing it if he fails he gets attention for failing. Any attention is good attention until the world turns on you (Ed Sheeran) even then you write a book about " how the world turned on me in 7 days" and shill a cryto coin while your in the limelight.
think about it we really did monetize stupid to the point where its a profession... look at "A simple life" or any reality TV.. we want people we can point at and say " well i'm smarter then them" .
"I'm smarter THAN them" , I believe :) Sorry, just giving you a hard time. Sadly, I think you're right, lots of stuff seems like a bit of a race to the bottom.
As kids we watched CKY/Jackass and made our own videos. Which led us to do really dumb stuff we probably wouldn't have done.
At least back then it was stuck on VHS tapes. 1 of our friends dads saw the tale and immediately broke it and threw it away. Then took my friends cam recorder till we stopped. As kids we were mad but as an adult I realized he was just destroying evidence so none of the things we did could be used in a lawsuit.
Seriously this isn't a new phenomenon. People have always done stupid shit, hell circuses were just people traveling around doing stupid shit for money. Yes those people trained hard to do it and (usually) not die doing it, but that doesn't change the reality of them doing dangerous or even stupid stunts.
This has always been a thing, we've just given everyone the capability to record themselves doing their stupid actions and we've also commercialized it because that's what capitalism is about, even stupidity was just another untapped market.
But it still existed prior to the advent of "smart" phones. The phone merely changed the way you interact with it. My point stands. Social media is a blight.
Changing how accessible/available a network that's sole content is driven by users effectively changes the network. I was on Myspace in 2003 and thefacebook in 2005. It was very different.
I was right there with ya, bud. Graduated HS in '06. I've watched the whole movie too.
Again, the phone did not create social media. It merely changed the way you interact with it. Let's not act like it wasn't already becoming abhorrent before the advent of the iPhone.
Your argument is basically "Well sure cancer is bad, but the CHEMO killed them."
Social media is a disease. The phones just serve to amplify it.
Yea I fully disagree with the "it was already happening" angle. Social media has increased it. That's how humans work. A lot of us are just dumb monkeys who will follow trends and they'd never have done it if they hadn't seen someone else do it. That's why things go viral in the first place.
Tiny percentage. Though id warrant if we ever actually made it to a post scarcity society it would be a larger percentage, as "fame," of any type would be the only currency of the land.
In 1993, 9 years before the iPhone was released and ~19 years before TikTik became a reality, Touchstone pictures had to remove a scene from the movie The Program where the main characters laid in the middle of a busy highway to play a game of "chicken" because so many people were recreating the scene in real life.
It's because in the post-social media world, attention regardless of good or bad is now rewarded with money. In the past, if you were a dumbass in public, you'd get your ass kicked and ostracized.
You say that as if the capacity to film ourselves doing stupid shit isn't actively encouraging people to behave even more stupid than they otherwise would to get internet clout.
No, sorry, nobody was doing this type of stupid shit before you could film it and post it on social media. Maybe a 13 year old kid, but not a grown ass adult in their early 30s.
It's more than this. People have been able to film themselves for a decent while now. The real thing that's changed is that people can go viral by recording themselves doing random shit. In other words, it's the influence of social media that makes people do nonsensical shit for no reason.
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u/WorkingInAColdMind 4h ago
Have we just completely bred self control out of our species?