Re:A weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages from the middle ...
by ratww on Friday July 22, 2022 @12:34PM
(#32193926)
Oh, don't get me wrong: I really like useful information like the one in the CGP Grey video you mentioned, and also things like regional/cultural information that is part of "shared culture". Same for things like TV shows or music or old kids shows... Those really don't bother me. Shared culture is important!
But the things I'm complaining about don't really become part of "shared culture". They're more like temporary "memes" that people use to show off they're interesting. Which is perfectly fine, we all do it! But the issue for me is that those little trivia tidbits that people are using are repeated so often that they start to irk and people look deeply uninteresting. :(
For instance, most of my friend group watched CGP Grey for a while, and we don't debate how to choose a movie or restaurant anymore, we just choose one quickly via either approval or veto voting. Or online someone mentioned XKCD 927 and then we can discuss the finer points of the new standard instead of just how it's going to replace all the others (for instance, instead of saying Matrix is just the chat protocol to unite everything else, talk about how it's an eventually consistent graph replication protocol and how that differs from XMPP's point-to-point system).
It feels like this shared culture and background can serve the same purpose as like shared education in math, literature, and history - to provide ground knowledge and references as a jumping off point to discuss more in depth, or with more nuance.