It’s an easy train of thought to slip in to.  Our TV programming is full of loud, idiotic morons big noting themselves, fighting in public and proudly confessing to or performing acts that some of us wouldn’t even dream of mentioning.  E-mail has meant that our society has become the most prolific letter writers since the Victorian era, however we do not have the eloquence to match.  However it, along with mobile telephony and other digital media, has also been used to bully, incite hatred and humiliate.  Even IRL, I feel like people are getting pushier and ruder.  I couldn’t believe that last week, catching the train for the first time in ages, how my ears were constantly assaulted by the noise of people’s iPods.  Quite frankly I’m not going to worry about the sound making people deaf, I wish it would so they stop using the bloody things in public.  One young fellow standing quite near me was listening to some fairly offensive death metal.  I had to address him twice before he took his ear phones out and obliged me by turning his music down so I could just hear a blearing sound rather than every single lyric and guitar chord.  I hate being a Nazi like that, but I also don’t like tolerating other people being rude!

It is easy to despair at our future, which inevitably seems to be a worse state rather than a more advanced one, but I think perhaps there is a simpler explanation.

The cultural texts that we have from our past were produced by a small group of people.  Depending on how far you want to go back we have had eras where only the clergy, the aristocracy and men were educated enough to read and write.  They were the ones who recorded our history and also fed popular discourse through plays, songs, stories and artwork.  It was the most cultivated and learned people who were producing these things.  Even as recently as 150 years ago, the majority of texts were still produced by the well educated and relatively well breed (I’ll use this term loosely to include the middle class).  The people with the money were the gatekeepers and things were tailored to their tastes rather than that of the crass, uncouth, unwashed masses.  And whilst people like Charles Dickens would have written about the lower classes, they certainly wouldn’t have been given a voice for themselves.

Technology has changed this.  Photography meant that every one could have portraits and family pictures, where previously they had to be painted and were restricted to the wealthy.  And now we have digital photography and are not restricted by what we put on precious film and development costs, people will take photos of virtually anything or anyone doing everything.  Mass media has become cheaper and cheaper, meaning that newspapers have expanded to include items of human interest and trivial matters and magazines are no longer restricted to just in depth articles but also include the most trivial matters and are full of pictures rather than text.  And we have one of the highest literacy rates ever, meaning that any one no matter how eloquent or cultured, can pick up a pen or sit down at a computer and write their story, what’s happening in their lives or whatever thoughts are running through their head no matter how trivial, illogical or dangerous.  We have democratised the ability to create cultural texts and now almost every one produces them.  As a result we have gone from having only the most refined, beautiful or intelligent discourse to having every sort of discourse preserved.  We live in one of the most documented eras ever.

Also the people who are able to consume media and texts has changed.  In Australia there are 1.5 televisions per household.  In fact a house without a television is less likely to be a deprived one as home to a family with at least one person who is so despairing of the content that they have chosen to not have it in their home.  Every one has a radio, CD’s, goes to the moves, reads the news, magazines and websites.  Every one consumes media no matter what their social status.  This is a sharp contrast to eras when books and newspapers were only available to the middle class, gentry and aristocracy.  Where only the relatively wealthy viewed and collected artwork and whilst there may have been some popular theatre and even music, the type of place you went to see it and the frequency you accessed it was directly related to your status in life.

All in all I have come to the conclusion that the decline in quality of content of popular texts is not actually a reflection on a decline in society.  Whilst our communities seem to be filled with more and more pushy and rude people than ever before, I’m hard pressed to say that it is an increase disproportionate to the rest of the population.  I think all we have seen is a change in the power of who produces and publishes the texts that we come across every day and who consumes them.  It now reflects and is accessed by all of society and unfortunately there are more dregs than good elixir in it.  I suspect that this has always been the case, but in the past, without technology we have been more successful at silencing the voices of those who are counter-cultural, crass, rude, offensive, uneducated, illogical or dangerous.  We didn’t educate those sorts of people and it was too expensive for them to produce or purchase texts of any sort.

At the end of the day there are still good quality, intelligent, entertaining texts out there.  They can be submerged by a deluge of rubbish, but they are still there.  I think that society has not become worse, so much as the worst parts become louder.  But I will also finish by saying that I am always disappointed by people who are capable of producing and understanding quality, giving in and producing and immersing themselves in morass.  Especially if it's in the mistaken belief that there is nothing else out there or that they will not otherwise be understood.