Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s. He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could travel to cities to meet audiences where they were.

Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it move even further to meet people in their own homes.

These current patterns you are seeing are an extension of this, the relationship between art and viewer has inverted, art is now expected to come to us, the focus has moved to within ourselves.

Marshall McLuhan also expanded on this and the idea of technology as extensions of us with his work "Understanding Media: The Extension of Man" if you'd like to read more.

Do you have a reference for where Benjamin wrote about this? I found this excerpt from "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it."

But wasn't sure if this was exactly what you were referencing, or some other piece.

Yes, thats the piece I was referencing. There are some other relevant sections too:

"a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” "

"technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room"

The whole essay is great, I'd really recommend reading it and Benjamin's other works.

Excellent, thanks! I've been meaning to read it, this is a helpful nudge to get around to it.

Late response, but: there are some interesting symmetries and contrasts in various informational concepts.

One is what you and Benjamin are highlighting: the distinction between message traveling to audience and audience traveling to message.

Generally a forum or theatre are both examples where an audience assembles to receive or view a message. Similarly for museums or in situ* attractions. It's possible to appreciate the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon in person only by visiting those places. Flagship performance venues such as La Scala, the Bayreuth Festival, Lincoln Center, or New York's Broadway also attract audiences from around the world.

A contrast is tours in which some object or performer(s) travel a circuit over which two or more audiences are assembled and performances take place. There's some localised travel, but in large part it is the message which travels to the audience. Classic film-based cinema scales this up further, with physical film spools touring through projection rooms, traditionally beginning in larger and wealthier markets before hitting secondary and rural ones (there was a time when films might open in New York and Los Angeles weeks, or months, before even large Midwest cities such as Chicago). Digital distribution has made simultaneous openings much more common.

Broadcast, cable, and Internet transmissions take this concept even further where a performance is delivered directly to the home, business, desk, or hands of the audience via radio, television, desktop computer, or mobile phone. And of course books and printed materials afforded a similar service centuries earlier (though the true fall in prices and rise in volume began only in the 19th century, and in many ways was a 20th century phenomenon).

Generalising:

- Networks distribute messages.

- Spaces (or venues) assemble audiences.

There are hybrid forms as well:

- Media Channels combine distribution with an assembled audience.

- Tours visit a series of audience across a travel path.

- Archives gather records to spaces which readers can visit and access large quantities of information at little marginal cost (effort, time, distance, energy).

<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/3aa6e840ac7a0139294f00...>

There's another symmetry I've noticed between records and signals generally:

- Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time subject to noise to a receiver potentially creating a new record.

- Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space subject to decay to a reader potentially creating a new signal.

Interesting. You describe something I've noticed myself, but haven't thought about in terms of the push / pull dynamics of tech products.

> How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

As you touched on your yourself this was probably the default before the last couple of decades. There was a short period around 2010 where people (especially the youth) were quite divergent in interests and political views.

Today it seems people increasingly have shared opinions and interests. This is is a shift that's been quite alien to me since I grew up during the early internet when it was the norm for people to play different games, watch different films and listen to different music. There was no social media network effects and little to no recommendation algorithms or ads online.

Today this seems to have changed. Try finding a Gen Z who doesn't have an iPhone and isn't wear a pair of Nikes, for example. They are the result of the trend you describe, I believe. They like things not because they sought them out neutral platforms but because these things were pushed on them either by the network effects of social media or the recommendation algorithms and ads that litter the internet today.

A similar concept is whether something is a "tool" or not.

Tools are things that you use to accomplish tasks. They behave predictably, and you can become skilled in using it more effectively.

Non-tools are things that try to adapt to you. They're optimized for first-time users, or to create an "experience". You cannot go fast with them, even with familiarity. They don't act in your best interests.

A hammer is a tool. Excel is a tool. Google search used to be a tool, but it's been more non-tool for the better part of a decade.

Sometimes people want non-tools. It varies with person and task. But in general, long-term users tend to prefer tool-like uses.

But a tool for the most part is open source, a screw driver is a screw driver, if you turn a screwdriver to the right it pushes a screw into the wood. It doesn't take notes of the type of wood you are using and then strongly suggest that you buy walnut from Home Depot.

Content you go to has to be good enough to justify your effort. Or advertised to make it good enough.

Content they feed you just has to be enough to keep you from leaving.

The first category is what every "channel" invests in but hates to do so. It's expensive, the creators get expensive, and diva-ish. The second category is what all the execs love to successfully get away with making.

Comic book movies are perfect second-category content.

It's strange that TV / Streaming seems to produce better content high points than movies these days, considering you have to physically go to the initial screening of movies.

I miss pointcast, back in the day when T-1 lines were crazy, that downloaded full web sites of your favorite sites for you to look at later. Similarly, I miss Google Reader. I used feedly for a few years after readers' demise, and it worked okay, but many sites have gone to a super small summary in the rss feed, and you have to go click the link to read the article, so they can show you ads...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast

There are some places where I still experience "Things Come to Us". The open library on the internet archive is one. Worldcat is another although I still have to reserve/pick up the items. Using RSS and w3m to read news is another. You can use something like UserLand to run w3m on a phone, and the terminal program is pretty slick.

I've been reading older books on computing on open library, like "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" written in 1984 by Sherry Turkle and it's fascinating to see the questions people were asking back them. My favorite quote from that so far is this:

"That question is not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?"

Excellently written. A nitpick on your final point:

> Phones are an extension of our organ senses now. How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

This may be looking at it backwards. Rampant smartphone addiction and overuse begins to shape all things in a "medium is the message" type of effect. The less need there is to physically "Go to the Thing" - whether the thing is the television room, office, movie theater, mailbox, rental store, newsstand, grocer, etc - the more natural it becomes to sit in place and let Things Come to You. If we accept everyone using their phone all the time as "the way things are now", the vicious cycle will continue.

So you're saying we're allowing ourselves to be victimized by it via laziness ?

That's certainly true, if that is what you mean.

I guess the part I didn't speak about was: some people value independent thought more than others, and I think for those that do, the Things Come to You paradigm is even more frustrating.

My concern is that children are growing up in the Come to You dynamic. Flip side: they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

Laziness is poor framing. Can the masses be "lazy" or is it pointless moralizing in the face of unfettered propaganda and behaviour manipulation?

That's a pretty interesting question, the tough as nails salesman closing deals everyday would consider nearly the entire population is lazy as all heck, whereas the hermit fisherman would consider the opposite, that nearly all are needlessly agitated.

Placing the bar at the 50th percentile isn't very inspiring for the passing reader though.

Is this not the nature of all social problems?

If you have X problem, that is your problem.

If Y% of population has X problem, as X grows large enough, eventually everybody is affected by the side effects of said problem.

Yes but roughly half the population will always be below average in terms of laziness, assuming it's normally distributed. So saying that is just a tautology.

>they can generate content and release it in the wild, something that couldn't be done even in the 90's prior to IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

In the mid-90s I was creating content and releasing it to the wild on my own website that was hosted for free on one of the myriad free website hosting platforms back then. Frankly, the website sucked, but it was my content.

I've watched Nirvana perform on local public access TV (ironically on Youtube) in 1989, so some level of public distribution was possible.

Similarly 50 Cent sold mixtapes of his music out of his car trunk to get the word out in the pre-Soundcloud era.

In the mid-00s, Kevin Hart (comedian) would maintain his own email lists when he toured, and would send out email blasts when he returned to those towns College bands used to do this as well, especially as email was adopted earlier there.

Maps. We had FPS maps.

Good points, and I've made/discussed/seen these elsewhere as well, but one thing to add explicitly: it is still possible to get 'you go to stuff'. I don't have the impression I changed how I do that. But: it does seem to get harder and harder and I'm actually not sure it will remain doable in the future (except perhaps by a small subset of hacker-ish people) because it gets indeed not pushed at all.

Examples are things like LineageOS on your phone and/or not actevily using it as an extension but as a tool, illegally downloading content (still thrives), it actually seems a lot easier these days to download music from lesser known to virtually unknown bands (even if it's just via YouTube) and I still find this like I used to i.e. mainly by going to shows or looking at who's playing and finding related bands like that, choosing anything but Google/Bing/... as principal search provider and using multiple search engines, ...

So, I'm personally not heavily affected by that steering but I do indeed fear that it might become a lot harder in the future. On the other hand we shouldn't forget that for a lot of humanity out there the previous decades they just got their information from 1 or 2 TV channels, radio, cinema, and a newspaper. If they wouldn't actively seek value they'd be basically in almost the same boat. Except that today's boat is a lot more pushy.

Some of this is knowing where to look. If you want medicine interactions, examine.com has everything there is to know about the published scientific data on dietary supplements, and the FDA itself publishes all of the drug inserts for actual pharmaceuticals with every know interaction and side effect discovered during clinical testing. Great video content still exists, too. I recently watched most of the Kurosawa back catalog recently, which I should have done years ago, but now most of it is on HBO Max. Every studio having its own streaming platform now at least means virtually every great film ever filmed is at your fingertips now, but you have to put up with the reality that you still need to explicitly look for it. They're never going to put this stuff in the trending recommendations or whatever.

It's like the world needs librarians again and maybe all the nerds who used to staff video and record stores, poorly paid but passionate purveyors of information who had no incentive to sell you anything because they were going to get the same shit wage no matter what. Except I guess we need to figure out a way to also pay them.

Maybe the key is bypassing what we (rightly or wrongly) view as 'Guardians' like the Googles of the world

> How will a world in which Things Come to Us and We Dont Go to Things anymore affect us cognitively long-term?

Goodbye serendipity.

Probably goodbye creativity.

FWIW, I’ve always seen it best described as push vs. pull. You’ve expanded the idea a bit but I think it’s still a good distinction and useful for what you’re getting at.

Overall I think this is related to a personal choice to consume or create. Of course with DVDs/streaming or social media, a lot of it is naturally going to be consumption no matter what. But the medium kind of steers you towards one or the other. Social media seemed like a way for you to express yourself, to create and share, but the algorithms nudged everyone into endless consumption scrolling. Creativity is only rewarded if it helps the money-making machines.

I don't want to push a value judgement upon creativity vs consumption, but I do think people should take it upon themselves to look critically at their own values, and what they want to spend their life doing - particularly how much of a balance they want between bringing something into this world vs. taking what they can get from it.

In creative pursuits, you want to "go" to the stuff that will be a tool or enabler of what you aspire to do. (And sure, you'll want some inspiration to "come to you".) You have to decide for yourself if you value "the machine" bringing everything to you more than you might value some individual pursuit.

> Overall I think this is related to a personal choice to consume or create.

Or maybe "consume" vs. "create/curate", the former being passive and the latter being proactive to different degrees.

>Google search. Before, it was a resource for you to customize and find what you wanted: information about medicine, a product, or a store. Now, it Comes To You. You search for thing X, you end up in a rabbit hole of Y and Z topics or things, and a lot of things seem algorithmically generated or manufactured to steer you rather than help you.

This is because "recommendations" are a big business. For example YouTube generates billions of views from recommended videos and God knows how much revenue. But I think recommendation algorithms are counterproductive from the business point of view because you will sell less ads if your platform content creators figured out how to get recommended by recommendation algorithms.

On the other hand recommendations are good for users because they will hopefully discover new content that they like. Platforms just need to be more flexible and offer their users tools to tweak recommendation algorithms according to their preferences.

There was an early art collective called the videofreex that defined what you’re talking about in terms of channel direction. Basically they defined media in the 1980s as being one-way channels where there was no response from the audience whatsoever, and they saw this as a form of control that strengthened class divides. They were excited about creating a two-way channel communication network because they thought it would break down the social hierarchy.

I think what you’re talking about is sort of like the recreation of the one-way channel within a two-way channel. Technically we can respond, but the amount of power our voice has has been lessened dramatically over the years.

I talked to one of the members of the videofreex recently (which is how I know about them), and his attitude was the classic “bittersweet nostalgia for my overly idealistic youth” attitude. He still thought he had a point, but he also felt like he underestimated A) the amount of problems that would come from disinformation and B) the amount of control that the old powers would still retain. I think he saw the structure of the media as reinforcing the social hierarchy, but now it’s looking like the structure of the social hierarchy was what was reinforcing the structure of the media… or maybe just a little feedback loop between the two… anyway the point I’m making is that just cause the media changed doesn’t mean the social hierarchy has.

> the amount of problems that would come from disinformation

When we used to say disinformation I imagined deep webs of false references, faking critical data.

Now I can lookup most "fake news" and find the truth of it, generally a too-broad take on quoting someone, within minutes. It's just that for partisan reasons people don't look, and when they have it pointed out they tend to say "yeah, that might be wrong but it's still mostly right in spirit" and keep on going.

It seems like hyper-partisanship or tribalism instead of being primarily based on bad data because the data so rarely comes into question.

The article touches upon this. You can phrase it as social media becoming just "media" again. A small group of heavy posters is responsible for the content backed by an algorithm that broadcasts it.

I think the cognitive effects are already visible. We become lazy, addicted, complacent, distracted and anxious.

Facebook's VR bet was exactly this.

Experiences come to you instead of you going to experiences.

How? You have to deliberately search for and buy stuff in their app store.