Exactly this. I’m still figuring out how to support the people I want without going broke myself. My current idea is to alternate subscriptions to various people, but I can already see it is going to be a lot of work. This is really what traditional journals did well, and why I probably should gravitate again towards donating to those as well.
But traditional media on Internet also add up. So again an alternating strategy? Maybe this issue deserves a separate thread?
When this topic comes up, I routinely take a look at what’s being advertised to me, right now, online, in hopes that all of their time and effort and money will lead to — if not something personalized — at least stuff that makes sense.
As I type this, I’m getting an ad about relieving neuropathy, as well as a completely different one explaining that “your kids deserve to be treated by experts in pediatric orthopaedics” from a scoliosis clinic in Florida. I don’t have, and have never had, neuropathy; I likewise have no kids in need of that treatment, sure as I don’t live in Florida.
I have been assured that my online activity info is being tracked and sold to marketers and used to customize ads, something something algorithms, something something multi-billion-dollar industry. But the closest they’re missing it is with an ad telling me to get tickets to see Cirque du Soleil in Nevada: not because I have any interest in going to that state and doing so — though I of course don’t — but because you could at least tell me an unconvincing story about how oh, you’re not a reliable judge of your own preferences, and this targeted ad will turn out to have been a good idea in the end; just you wait and see, you unsophisticated simpleton who doesn’t realize that they know your tastes despite, uh, all evidence to the contrary.
But the medical stuff? Is there some point, any point, where I can say, hey, wait a minute; is it possible that they don’t have a clue?
You could have spent that time reading them in 1910 also. We don’t see the redundancy from yesterday today since no one remembers those books. I’ve read a lot of '30s bad science fiction, and I assure you much of it was just as derivative as stuff today.
Don’t feel too bad. Here is a Statista chart of print book sales over time. Now sure, there is a long tail for self-published books where most hardly sell any copies. I’m in a writers’ group and most of the people who self publish lose money. While there are more outlets to push a book than ever, there are a lot more books to push (4 million published a year now.) And you are excluded from places like libraries. There is a site that lets you look up which libraries (a small subset of existing libraries) your book is in, and my wife has sold thousands of her traditionally published books to them. Not enough to make us rich, but she has made back her advance for some of them.
Back then if you were posting from work it tended to keep the level of flame down. And there were fewer people making money by stirring things up.
There have been flops all through the history of movies. Some of which are considered as classics now. Heaven’s Gate was from well before streaming. Duck Soup was a flop, IIRC. No one can guess the market.
I’m not really into them, but I’ll check the Times bestseller lists tomorrow. My grandson who is 8 likes several series, some of which I’ve even heard of.
I’m 20 years older than you, and remember when we were lucky to have a whole 7 stations (so many because I lived in NY) and when once you saw a movie you were done unless you paid to see it again. The streaming problems today seems to come from content providers feeling bad about selling cheap to Netflix, and convinced that if they establish a service with their content (which everyone loves, of course) people will flock to it. People who want content don’t want all that content, and are going to unsubscribe once they see the big hit, unless they never subscribe at all. They look at their credit card bills, notice they haven’t watched birdwatchers TV in months, and cancel. Plus they discovered paying big bucks for new content to distinguish themselves usually doesn’t work.
Like I said, there are only so many hours in the day, and being online means you aren’t watching TV. (Or reading books.)
That’s pretty sad. I hate to see a useful institution (entity?) die or at least dwindle like that, owing to its model not perfectly aligning with degraded modern incentive systems (in this case, greedy dumb newspaper conglomerates being cheap).
Thanks for your post! Yes, I don’t see the small stuff going away entirely on the net. I think blogs are a case in point. Genuinely big until around 2015. People could monetize them with affiliate links. Then even successful people, like Andrew Sullivan, seemed to get tired of them. I think this partly goes back to my OP point about the initial thrill of self-expression and reaching an audience attenuating, along with the money drying up. Now we have substack, another monetization model, and blogs are back a bit. We’ll see how it shakes out. But I predict that, 100 years from now, people will still be registering domain names and throwing little stuff up online (barring some sort of law or regulation that prevents that it makes it too burdensome to do).
I read a few years back somewhere that Big Data, which includes online stuff but also Walmart collecting all your shopping data in order to tweak inventory, etc., has largely failed to pay back its investment. I guess a few players, such as Google and Facebook, have managed to make money from tracking and personalizing, but my experience matches yours, and it seems like a failure to me. Even Amazon, which has free access to all of my purchase history there and presumably relevant data from hundreds of millions of customers, rarely seems to suggest anything relevant to me, other than products similar to ones I am looking at in real time, which would not seem to require much in the way of sophisticated analysis.
As another example, YouTube has updated its algorithm recently in order to… totally suck, apparently. It used to be better and actually suggest at least a variety of things to watch next. Now it seems to suggest either the same channel I just watched or exactly the same topic on another channel. And then when I watch something totally different, it floods me with that, too. If that’s Big Data in action, it seems pretty dumb. But maybe that maximizes YouTube’s $$$, somehow.
I think what’s different from 1910 is that, to use your example, we have now a large catalog of sci-fi novels and short stories, to the point where even good stuff is being forgotten (e.g., Robert Shekley!).
Multiply that across all genres and media, and it’s really a lot. I’ve been going through the Billboard Hot 100 for various years in the past. Did 1979, 1970, and then jumped to 1984 - 1987 (currently in January 1987). There is an impressive amount of music from any of these years that is still played and enjoyed, and perhaps an even more impressive amount of tracks that are great but forgotten. Including #1 hits! (Why is “Pop Muzik” by M, a #1 hit in 1979, not remembered more? It’s great!).
And the amount of music available in 1910 was extremely limited, of course. The weight of music canon on the new is getting heavier and heavier: old music sales accounted for 70% of the market as of 2022.
Congrats to your wife. That is a substantial success in this day and age. And would have been in the past as well.
I think that flaming as a novel and interesting form of self-expression has died down a lot, but you are right, the rise of professional trolls and disinformation merchants has radically changed online ecosystems.
I think it’s objectively worse now. Yes, there were big, famous flops. Ishtar (1987) was another major one. But now, even though studios barely create new IPs and are relying on the (they hope) lower-risk sequels/prequels/reboots/etc., they are still creating staggering flops. 2024 has been full of them.
I’m not into them either, but I will tend to hear of things that are big enough. I don’t even know if it’s possible to create something as big as Harry Potter at this point.
Indy was an early cable market, and we got it in 1977 (!) when I was six. Even so, I definitely had that 70s kid experience of not being able to find anything to watch on TV in the middle of the day and having to settle for “Soul Train” (a show I appreciate now!) or “Love American Style” (haven’t seen it in awhile–could have some camp value?).
I agree with this and your overall take on what’s going on with streaming.
Well of course there is more new stuff because there are more people producing it, and more old stuff as time goes on. But when I listen to the classical music station I hear lots of stuff from the 18th and 19th centuries from composers I’ve never heard of. It is true that there is a lot of old music - I listen to the Sirius '60s channel - but my mother used to listen to old stuff on WOR back when I was a kid. The amount of old music increases more or less linearly, while the amount of new stuff increases exponentially. That there are a lot more categories today might disguise that.
I have a lot of Sheckley books, and most of the sf magazines and books published in the '50s and '60s. Most of it is forgotten, but justifiably so, since most of it is dreck. (Not Sheckley, though Damon Knight disagreed with me.)
When I was MIT SF Society librarian, 55 years ago, we bought everything that was new. I’m pretty sure they don’t anymore, since they’d get deluged by new books. Back then there was the Hugo, the Nebula, and I think an award from the World Fantasy Society. Now, judging from reading Locus and author interviews in Clarkesworld, there are dozens of awards.
Franchises are nothing new. There were tons of Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Thin Man movies. Charlie Chan movies. I can go on. True that series were not box office smashes back then. With costs out of control everyone wants to be safe with known content. To make 20 movies out of ideas that might be worth five means you make things over complicated and show stuff no one cares about, and because you can’t make a single movie explaining the backstory you assume viewers care as much as the filmmakers and their biggest fans. My first real example of this was Attack of the Clones, where I was confused because I hadn’t read all the EU novels or watched Clone Wars. The sequels were even worse. Maybe Star Trek did the same thing with Wrath of Khan, but that story I knew at least. No wonder Marvel movies are beginning to flop when they no longer make sense unless you spend your entire life on Disney+.
The root cause is that most people are not innovators but followers. It’s easier to remake Spiderman for the fifth time than to come up with a new plot. Same reason there are so many AI companies now, and AI is being advertised for uses which make no sense. Minicomputer companies crashed, PC companies crashed, most early internet companies crashed. So, of course movie franchises are going to crash.
Because I like the original, here’s Sturgeon’s revelation from the September 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction.
And on that hangs Sturgeon’s revelation. It came to him that s f is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also – Eureka! – ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things – cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like.
The weird emphasis is from the original.
It’s also the review column that said of Charles Long’s The Infinite Brain: “Buy it… for a paperweight.” Ah, those were the days.
It’s “of course,” I agree, but that’s kind of the point that I don’t think has yet been accepted across society: that canon is going to crush new creation. In your example of classical music, that’s definitely the case: there is enough good Beethoven, etc., that we don’t really have time to explore it all. Heck, we will hear the Fifth performed a hundred times for every performance of the Eighth.
To bring it back to the OP topic, this kind of redundancy also weighs heavily on online content. E.g., I’ve watched men’s fashion tip channels a bit, but there are only so many tips on how not to dress too young when you’re over 40. I see the same tips being repackaged again and again by the same channel. I think that’s why there are so many channels doing reviews of new content or talking about politics, etc.: even if a movie sucks or the particular political news isn’t all that important, at least it’s current. (But there are also a lot of channels that do truly original stuff, and I don’t want to downplay that either. But I think they really have to work at it.)
I think that is because you have a highly educated audience that is open to variety.
I ran into a list of 18th century symphonies at some point, and I was astounded, as it included something like 16,000 entries. Only a tiny fraction of that could have been by famous composers. It really shows one how much time has filtered things. (In the case of classical music, however, I think the filter has mostly been just, but there are some underrated composers. I would nominate Wanhal and CPE Bach from the 18th century…)
Absolutely.
Not to hijack, but what did Knight say about him?
Yeah, and the sad fact is that most of the “great” sci-fi writers were not really great writers. The same thing applies to most popular writers in history. E.g., I think Dune has some really great ideas, characters, scenes, etc., but dayum, Herbert’s writing. Uneven at best. Oh, and are we really so out of ideas and IPs at this point that they had to remake Dune?! I guess Foundation will be next, lol.
That must have been interesting!
Oh yes, and these were on TV in the 70s, lol. My point is less that franchises, remakes, and sequels are big now; it’s more that the major studios have virtually given up on trying to develop new IPs.
Yeah, the incentive/monetization model for the studios has shifted. People call them unoriginal because they don’t do new IPs or ideas, but it probably really is the case that it’s only financially feasible to make expensive blockbusters any more, which requires a low-risk proposal and international success with all that entails.
Yes, and they have run out of ideas, and people have gotten sick of superhero movies. Just because the studios can’t come up with something new doesn’t mean that people don’t want and expect something new.
Yes, companies pile onto the “thing that works” until it doesn’t. I think what’s different in the tech space now, however, is that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, but capitalism demands growth, so these big-ass companies are desperately flailing about for something that will sell.
Interesting!
I do think he’s right more or less about creative endeavors, since creators must create something new and different in order to be noticed at all, but I think he’s not accurate about, say, cheeses and hairstyles. Those have to be at least good enough to survive in the market over the long term. There are inferior examples of both, but it’s not 90%. If 90% of cars were truly “crud,” we would not be able to drive, etc.
I just grabbed my copy to read this. Sturgeon also says that the reason people attack sf is that it has “science” on the label. Which is interesting just before Sputnik.
I do love his mini-reviews, one of which you quoted. I also liked the comment on the first Leinster book: “Leinster’s heroes’ infinite resource, inevitable invincibility, infuriate.” Those were indeed the days. (I recently reread In Search of Wonder. Brilliant put downs.) Today it seems every book reviewed is a keeper. Perhaps with so much out there, and so little space to review in the prozines, they don’t want to waste space on losers.
I think you’re right. A monthly column reviewing six or eight books could literally capture the entire supply of hardback sf in 1957, there being virtually no new paperback sf. Impossible today.
Just a historical note. The gimmick of reviewing a bunch of books in a grid, using short, snappy summaries, had long been the way the Saturday Review did its weekly listing of mystery novels. That mysteries needed a weekly listing shows how dominant they were over sf in the post-war era. Nor did the magazine cover paperbacks, and there were lines of new mystery paperbacks all through the 40s and 50s, so many titles never got reviewed at all.
I agree with this. Some people seem not to have an original thought in their heads. (JJ Abrams, I’m talking to you.) I stumbled on a video of someone watching 2001 for the first time, which was kind of fun. Then YouTube suggested about four more on exactly the same topic, and many more about watching other movies for the first time. Really…
They do play CPE Bach. Of course what a radio station plays depends on what pieces orchestras record which depends on what they think will sell. While it might be cheaper to put out music these days, I don’t think it is cheaper to get a big enough orchestra together to do obscure symphonies.
p. 129, in a positive review of a story by him “this, I think, is the first Sheckley story with people in it.”
On p. 237, in a review of Citizens in Space - At worst, the stupidity of Sheckleymen is so astonishing, it completely overshadows the marvels the author is expecting you to gawp at." I rather like Sheckley more than Knight does, but I read him in high school where it was all new and I liked the amusement value more than logic or characterization. I’d be nervous about rereading them.
BTW, I agree with you about Dune. I read the first serial but couldn’t stomach any more. Richard Lupoff, as Ova Hamlet in Fantastic or Amazing, had a great parody spending a few pages about Lady Jessica and Duncan Idaho mentally analyzing the importance of an eye twitch or a burp or something. As for remaking the movie, this was one case where the remake was far superior to the first movie. I could only imagine how confused someone not having read the book recently would be.
True, true. The problem is that not every clown can come up with something new, and new things are risky. An exec who approves a new movie in a franchise or a movie based on a best seller or TV show can’t get in trouble if it bombs not too badly. Someone greenlighting something original can. Not just Hollywood - half or more of new musicals are based on existing properties. Original stuff like Hamilton or the Book of Mormon are still fairly rare.
Interesting. We got the Saturday Review for a while, but decades after that. I think some of the reason might be that mysteries were better respected back then. But there were some masters writing them.
I often think the web needs something like the Nielsen ratings. Put a fixed fee on everyones ISP bill, then distribute that to websites based on the number of clicks they’re estimated to get.
One thing I think gets missed his how much more time we spend online than in previous years (or even decades). It used to be dial up and you’d get online for only a short period.
Even with broadband, having a desktop still limited how long you spent online. Laptops and then tablets changed that.
There didnt need to be as much good content online to fill the time available. Now I check my tablet every 15 minutes and I’m disappointed if theres not a new post to read.
How does that work? All of old music was once new music, and no new music resists turning into old music. So if new music increases exponentially, old music cannot increase linearly.
No, it was the smartphone which really increased the amount of time most people spend online [although some of us only use the smartphone very occasionally as we find them too small thus unpleasant to use.]
And, ironically, I think the smartphone contributed greatly to the decay on the internet. When people were primarily accessing it from their computers, everything was more or less connected and you could organically bounce around and share information or things you found. These days, so much of it is siloed off into apps and exclusive. Maybe you can share content elsewhere but it’s a pain. Even places that used to just be “websites” like Reddit constantly nag you to use their app instead or try to lock you out of content until you use it.
And, of course, there’s the whole impact phones had on social media and WHAT people are doing on the internet or chasing internet points. But, keeping more with the OP, I think the walling off of the internet into corporate chunks via discrete apps rather than connected browser sites played a big role in making it less of a place than it used to be.
That is an excellent point that belongs as one of the numbered points in the OP, most likely.
I think I have been a bit myopic about that, since I worked mainly as a translator (Japanese) and copywriter from 2004 to 2017, and I was constantly on my laptop. I never really got into typing and reading on my phone, although I will read some websites (that are usable) on my phone, and I play chess 95% on my phone and of course use other apps. Since 2017, I’ve worked mostly as an interpreter, but I’m not on my phone when I do that.
But yeah, the apps. People apparently watch TikTok on their phone all day long. Which seems to me like a devolution of video, watching it on a small screen like that.