The good: The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures.
The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community.
The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So culture as a whole has been biased towards pessimistic rituals and values.
> The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting
Upsetting some people has been part of art at least since the épater le bourgeois attitude of early twentieth-century modernism. One of the reasons that culture feels stagnant, is that the attention economy optimizes only such such upsetting that is conducive to maximizing engagement and selling advertising. This has resulted in a lot of stoking of outrage about the social and political contexts around art, while there is much less discussion of anything upsetting in the actual content of the art (the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that a music uses, the linguistic resources used in fiction or drama, etc.)
at least where it's active, i find meetup.com to be a good antidote to the "local" part of the situation. Meetup, in person, about the things that interest you :)
That's a good point of positivity and I welcome it :)
It's good in that way, but it's in the process of being enshittified.